In the United States and many other countries, media such as movies and television are assigned intensity ratings that are meant to give audiences expectations around potentially objectionable content. Today, these ratings are age-based; for example, for movies, we have the ratings G, PG, PG-13, and R (for movies that are traditionally allowed to be exhibited in theaters), and each of these ratings corresponds to an age that someone should be in order to watch content with that rating. However, I argue that this rating system based on age is actually not effective, and I argue instead that an alternative approach based on just content descriptors (like TV ratings in the US but without the age identifier) is better.
In general, media can contain many types of objectionable content, and someone might find a particular type to be fine for them but another type to be something they would prefer not to watch, regardless of their age. For example, consider someone who is fine with hearing copious amounts of swearing but does not want to see gore. Today, both kinds of content could be rated R, so it is hard off the bat for them to tell whether that is something they would want to watch. Or maybe they would decide it’s fine since most of the movies they see tend to be rated R, and then receive a rude shock when they are exposed to a large amount of gore.
Even if we consider that ratings typically say something like “rated R for such and such reasons,” so that people could look up the reasons and then decide whether the movie is for them, usually this takes extra steps to discover, and there are many places where ratings are displayed without these reasons. For example, this is the case in a service like Google Play (as far as I am aware.)
Anyway, that ultimately seems unnecessary when we could just define our rating system based on content descriptors in the first place. We actually already have descriptors for TV ratings in the US, like “V” for violence and “L” for language. (For example, a TV show could be rated TV-14, and then descriptors like VL would be displayed in the same box that indicates the rating.) Today, we display these descriptors along with an age rating, but we actually don’t lose any information by removing the age. The typical reasoning for including the age is that the “intensity level” of a certain kind of objectionable content is dependent on the age (so that for example TV-PG violence is less intense than TV-MA violence), but this can be easily and more accurately replaced by +/- gradations. For example, V- could refer to mild fantasy violence, V could refer to the violence typical of non-gory action movies (like most Marvel movies), and V+ could refer to gore.
Also, I would argue that today our ratings systems tend to treat different kinds of objectionable content very differently; for example, we seem to be more permissive with violence than with language, in terms of assigning lower ratings to movies even if they have comparatively lots of violence. I have seen many movies that are “rated R for language” that to me feel less intense than many PG-13 action movies.
Thus, a better indication of what the content actually contains could be the specific descriptors (with gradations) and not the age-group rating. Furthermore, with a single letter designating each category of objectionable content, it wouldn’t be any harder to read off a rating like “VSL” or “V+L” than “PG-13.” In general, a descriptor-based intensity rating system would allow people to make better choices about what content they want to consume.
