What They Play

» see whattheyplay.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

The ESRB sticker on an American game box was never a thing I had to think about. Games arrived in Turkey through channels where the box was often not the point at all, and no Turkish parent I can think of was consulting a letter grade issued by a trade body in New York. What They Play was built entirely for the parent who stands in a store holding a case with an M on it and has no idea what that means, which is a specific person in a specific country, and the site lived and died serving them.

Ira Becker and John Davison built it. Both came out of Ziff Davis, Becker as executive vice president of the Game Group and Davison as a senior vice president there and before that a writer at 1UP.com, and they left in August 2007 to do this. They raised over three million dollars, incorporated as What They Like, Inc., and launched What They Play in beta on 12 November 2007.

The format was a database you could sort by console or by ESRB rating, with a small editorial staff of seven who played the games and wrote up what was in them. Parents could leave comments and submit their own age-appropriateness rating on a scale from one to seventeen, which is a much finer instrument than a single letter on a box. It got a New York Times write-up in January 2008 and a USA Today one in February, which for a three-month-old site aimed at parents is about as good as the launch gets.

IGN bought it on 24 September 2009. IGN was a News Corporation property at the time, which is why some records list the buyer as News Corp and others as IGN, and both are right. What happened after the acquisition is the ordinary thing. The Twitter account stopped posting in February 2011 and the headlines on the last archived live page are from March of that year, under a footer still claiming 2007 to 2010.

~ the record ~

~ the 1 to 17 scale ~

The ESRB gives you a letter and a list of content descriptors, and the letter has to cover every family. What They Play's user rating asked parents to name the youngest age at which they would let a child play a given game, and the answer came back as a number between one and seventeen.

That is a more useful output than a letter, because it admits the thing the letter cannot, which is that one family's eleven is another family's fifteen. A ratings board has to publish one answer, where a site with a comment box can publish the spread of them. The scale topped out at seventeen, which is the age the ESRB's own M rating starts at.

~ seven people playing games ~

Seven editors covering the output of an entire industry is not enough people, and the last months show the strain. The last live homepage, captured on 29 August 2011, is a fair sample of what they were doing: a piece on the iPhone as an introduction to gaming and education, an explainer called "Fight Night Champion: 5 Things Parents Should Know", a swap recommendation offering Trinity: Souls of Zill O'll in place of Dragon Age II for a parent who wanted the fantasy without the M rating, and a feature on violence in video games.

There is also a link on that page headed "Taking Teaching into World of Warcraft", and another about Wal-Mart offering store credit for old Nintendo DS trade-ins. That is the page as it stood on the last day it answered.

~ the redirect ~

The Internet Archive holds the exact transition. whattheyplay.com answers 200 with about eleven kilobytes on 29 August 2011. On 2 September it answers 301, and following that redirect lands on ign.com. Every later capture, through 2011 and into 2012, is the same 301. There is no farewell post anywhere in the archive, and no explanation.

Acquired sites usually end exactly here. The buyer wants the audience and the people, and the property stays up only as long as somebody inside is still arguing for it. Davison and Becker had raised more than three million dollars to ask American parents what age a game was for, and the surviving artifact of the whole exercise is a redirect.

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