We sit down with Jimmy Maher, author of The Digital Antiquarian, to examine his recent four part series: The Ratings Game. This series takes a look at how games came to have age ratings, why it was inevitable and necessary, and the fascinating butterfly effects that came because of it. Maher draws a very clear throughline from a United States Senate hearing controversy over violence in video games in 1993 directly through the inaugural E3 show in 1995. And, spurred by the curiosity of his wife, he even wades through fistfuls of scientific studies on the effects of violence in video games. Do they cause harm to our children?

See more from Jimmy Maher:

The Digital Antiquarian: filfre.net

Patreon: /DigitalAntiquarian

Twitter: @DigiAntiquarian

The Analog Antiquarian:https://analog-antiquarian.net/

The Video Game History Hour music is Blippy Trance by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/