Where Politics And Video Games Collide

There's a solution here. Answer me this: Does a reviewer actually have to play the game to see it all? No.
Let's take a look at Grand Theft Auto. A big game, takes over ten hours to beat, probably closer to thirty if you want to get 100%. Hidden packages, jumps, Kill Frenzies, etc. make seeing 'the whole game' a very worthy endevor.
So, we create a film. What does this film contain? A flyby of the city, showing any points of interest, some footage of how combat works with each different weapon, and the cut-scenes for each mission. There, you've seen everything in the game. You haven't played a single bit, but you know what combat looks like, and you've seen every bit of scripted action in the game, so what's left?
Oblivion and MMO's are a bit more difficult, simply due to being on an even bigger scale. So what does the ESRB do? They ask the video game companies to send the footage that best represents the game. They *gasp* trust them (although I'm sure there'd be some hefty reprecussions for, say, not showing the presence of Fatalities in a Mortal Kombat Game). This is self-regulation, after all.
On that note, can the government force the ESRB to do anything? This is completely self-imposed by the industry. The government has no right to tell them how to do their jobs. To put it on my level, it would be like the government telling me that I had to make a version of my program for Macs (Maybe not a good example, as I work for a state university and my program does run on a Mac, but you get my point. ^_^)