Exactly how I feel. I can appreciate the frustration radio personalities, who are delivering content to a known audience, are feeling. To their audience, they are committing no such “indecencies” and those that do construe that content as such must have the capacity to take steps, in a private way, to avoid that content. Meaning change the channel, you uptight parental knobs.
Something similar, actually more vocal in a political way, happened to the industry I work in. Joe Lieberman took it upon himself to wage war on the games industry in the era of Mortal Kombat, and we got stuck with a ratings board. That was the first time I ever felt I had an opinion on something that became a political issue. Lieberman will always be on the outs with me in any national scenario because of that stance.
To have people tell you that your project, aimed squarely and carefully at a particular audience, is to have a label placed on it that effects your sales or distribution to an intended audience, is an amazingly frustrating thing. Because one person’s vocal opinion, whether it is truly the voice speaking for the community majority, can cause a ton of problems for everything you do.
I did a game for Disney based on Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Our game, on PS1, shortly before it went gold master, got flagged as “Teen” by the ESRB for one tiny thing, right at the end of the game – Rourke (the villain) pushes Helga (the kinda-sorta villain) off an airship in a cinematic between two stages of the boss fight. Mind you, you see her get pushed over, but you don’t hear her die, you don’t see her die, it’s all implied. The same event happens in the movie. Though the movie hadn’t been rated yet, it was assumed it would be PG, and that’s what it ended up being. By direct comparison, our game was essentially PG-13. Due to one person’s random opinion, enforced as the will of everyone, for the greater good of the community, meant that we had to change the tone and intent of that event, rescript our cutscene, and add a big gaping “WTF?” to the end of the game to get our “E” rating back. If we didn’t, we’d be unable to sell into places like Walmart. Would anyone playing the game find that event offensive? Probably not. If someone did? Then it’s the parent’s responsibility to provide insight or guidance for the child who’s questioning that event. What we were doing was appropriate to the two characters as portrayed through the rest of the game, and the overall tone of the action of the game as well.
How annoying.
I guess my rant is that the FCC needs to get off their ass and find a more reasonable and less subjective way to allow self-governance of things like radio. Actually, it needs to be decommissioned entirely, since it requires revenue to exist at all. The fact that we all can’t expand our boundaries through expression due to political institutions, affected by a vocal minority, and motivated by fines, is shocking. Like Grampa Munster says, "F*** the FCC."
