Patricia Vance

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Pat Vance

Patricia (Pat) Vance was appointed the third president of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) in November 2002, replacing interim president, Marc Szafran, and founding president Arthur Pober.

Pat is responsible for overseeing and enforcing the computer and video game industry's self-regulatory practices. This includes ensuring that video game consumers and parents have effective tools with which to make educated purchase decisions.

Upon taking the helm of the ESRB, Pat oversaw a re-tooling of the organization which kept it from remaining in the crosshairs of anti-games legislators, that is, until the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas debacle, where the publisher of the game failed to submit sexually-explicit "locked-out" or non-playable content programmed into the product. The ESRB, funded through fees for rating services by publishers, launched its own investigation and within 30 days, revoked the game's original Mature rating, assigning the game an Adults Only rating. Retailers were notified directly by the ESRB, Take2 and the retailers' trade association, the IEMA, many of whom themselves were away at an annual trade show, the Executive Summit. The incident became a flashpoint around which critics of the industry and the ratings board rallied and legislators across the country introduced legislation attempting to regulate how games are sold and rated.

Before joining the ESRB, Ms. Vance spent 18 years at Disney/ABC, with responsibility for leveraging ABC properties in the development and management of a broad range of new media and market initiatives. These initiatives included the Internet (ABC.com [1], ABCNEWS.com [2], Oscar.com, Oprah.com), interactive entertainment and educational software publishing (Creative Wonders, ABC Interactive, OT Sports, ABC News Interactive), direct response videocassette marketing, in-flight entertainment, home video and cable television.

Prior to ABC, Ms. Vance was responsible for planning movie acquisitions for The Movie Channel. She has also held senior management positions with The Princeton Review as Executive Vice President & General Manager of Admissions Services, and before that as President and CEO of HalfthePlanet.com, an online resource network for people with disabilities.