While video game retailers have made "significant progress" in limiting the sale of M-rated games to children, movies and music retailers have only made modest progress, according to a report released today by the Federal Trade Commission.

In its latest report to congress, the fifth and most comprehensive study since 2000, the FTC said that while the entertainment industry generally comply with their own standards, the movie, music and gaming industries continue to market adult content to a teen market.

"Self-regulation, long a critical underpinning of U.S. advertising, is weakened if industry markets products in ways inconsistent with their ratings and parental advisories," said FTC Chairman Deborah Platt Majoras. "This latest FTC report shows improvement, but also indicates that the entertainment industry has more work to do."

The most substantiated part of the report comes from an FTC mystery shipper program where unaccompanied children, 13 to 16 years old, tried to make purchases from retailers.

Video games showed the greatest improvement, dropping from 69 percent being able to make the purchase in 2003 to 42 percent in 2006. That's just three percent more than the number of underage children able to get into R-rated movies.

While the mystery shopper study makes for an ugly chart and shoots copious holes in the whole "movie theaters do a substantially better job than video game stores" argument, there's also some interesting grist in the rest of the report.

The study found that while ads for M-rated video games on television shows that are popular with teens are dropping, the same can't be said for internet advertising.

I didn't know this, but the ESRB prohibits ads for M-rated games on web sites where the under-17 audience is 45 or greater and the FTC thinks that the board is not adequately enforcing that rule.

The board is, however, doing a good job of informing gamers and parents about the rating system with 87 percent of parents surveyed saying they are aware of the ESRB system, more than 70 percent use it and three-quarters of the parents surveyed understand the content descriptors and use them.

Many of the parents surveyed did say they wish the system could do more to inform them about the level of violence in games. What do they expect? A frag count?

The FTC did a little digging into the emerging trend of companies using sites like MySpace or YouTube to advertise their goods. They point out that typically when this is done, the page doesn't include any prominent rating information. I guess that would sort of kill the cool of a page wouldn't it?

The report also notes that mobile games often don't try to get ESRB ratings, which is a bad thing, in my opinion.

While the 140-page report wraps up by saying that the Commission continues to support industry self-regulation (sorry Clinton) due to "important First Amendment considerations", it does call for some changes.

For gaming, the FTC calls, again, for the content descriptors of a game to be listed on the front of a title. Sounds like that while possible, that could get really messy. And I don't see DVDs doing that.

This is as important a document as the video game industry can get. Not only does it show that the industry is making vast improvements in the field of education and restricting content to minors, it shows that the video game industry is on the cusp of doing a better job than the oft-cited movie industry.

Good job ESRB. Brian Crecente

The report [FTC]