In GNOME Software we show lots of applications ranging from games aimed at pre-schoolers to applications explicitly designed to download, well, porn. A concept that is fairly well understood by parents is age ratings, and there are well known and trusted ratings bodies such as the ESRB and PEGI, as well as other country-specific schemes. Parents can use the ratings to control what kind of content is available to install, and vendors can use the ratings as a legal (or common-sense) control who gets to purchase what.

The ratings systems between countries are varied, varying from descriptions such as “M” which will be familiar for US users, “R” for Australian users to the slightly more obvious “18+” rating for European users. The differing ratings authorities define what is allowed in each category in slightly different way, some allowing mild profanity for a “7+” rating, and others none at all. Some countries consider drug taking in a video game to be no more dangerous as to mild cursing, other countries consider this on the same level as sexual violence.

So, we’re sunk, right? Nearly. There exists a group called “International Age Rating Coalition” which allows developers to register (sometimes for free), answer a simple questionnaire and out pops the ratings they should use for various countries. The IARC is made up of the regulatory bodies all over the planet, and so you can use the actual trademarked age rating images for your product. ish.

If you want to build a a software center, say GNOME Software for example, you have to pay a license fee. A $100,000 annual fee, plus extra per application shown in the software center. This is prohibitive for us, and would mean we couldn’t have the same functionality in other software center interfaces.

We could easily provide in the AppData files details about the application/game. This can be combined with a rule engine specific to the country of viewing, which would pop out a rating. I think the ESRB would be hard pushed to trademark “M” as an age rating, although I completely agree they have correctly and sensibly trademarked the stylized logo for the PG rating, along with the “ESRB” name itself. I don’t think this should stop us using an “PG” or “M” rating in the software center as long as we avoid these trademarks and copyrights.

I’m happy to work on a new system to both generate the AppData upstream information from a questionaire, and the rule engines that processes these rules and pops out a rating. The question then becomes, is this useful? Is this something that people would actually want? Comments welcome.

p.s. OARS: “Open Age Rating System”, name is work in process.