Reminds me of the Comics Code Authority.  The following is taken from a rather read from over on Gamasutra:

"Comic books combined the strengths of the written word with a more visual approach of having artwork accompany the story. This proved to be very popular, especially with children.

However, in the United States there was a "moral panic" about the corrupting influences of comic books on children, as there often is with many "new" media. The government threatened to enact laws to censor comic books, for the of the children. (Does that sound familiar to game developers?) The industry reacted by enacting their own regulations, the Comics Code Authority (CCA).

The Comics Code Authority heavily restricted the content that comics could contain. For example, the words "horror" and "terror" were not allowed in the titles of comics. Werewolves, vampires, zombies, and similar creatures of the night were forbidden.

The de facto result was that mostly superhero comics were allowed to continue, since they usually showed perfect heroes vanquishing lowly criminal scum and always winning, as required by the CCA.

Unfortunately, this caused tremendous long-term harm to the comics industry. For most of the history of the medium, comics with simplistic stories dominated and the work approved by the CCA and prevented the development of most other types of comics. In one notorious example, the CCA objected to the depiction of a black man as an astronaut in a comic; the removal of this character would have undermined the message of the racial intolerance presented in the story.

Storytelling was stunted in this medium, and today Japan and Europe have a much more vibrant comic book industry and culture than the United States does. The popularity of a wide variety of translated manga books in the face of home-grown U.S. comic books shows what could have been without the censorship.

These two examples show the importance of legitimacy to our medium of computer games. Without legitimacy, particularly cultural legitimacy, we can fall prey to the problems that plagued comics instead of growing to a respected medium like cinema."

A example of where this road can take the industry.  Thank ness most countries don't operate their rating systems such as this.