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Violent Video Game Protection Act

Posted by timothy on from the quixotic-but-deforming dept.

KidIcarus writes: "Four lawmakers in Georgia have submitted a bill that would make it a criminal offense to sell or make violent video games available to minors. Full text of the bill here. Seems that politicians still don't have a clue, despite indications that video games don't cause violence." This may remind you of the (since overturned) law segregating certain video games from others in Indianapolis.

1 of 316 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Discriminatory by leviramsey · · Score: 2, Informative
    You'll note with a bit of research that there is no "law" that makes the movie industry rate movies, or makes movie theaters allow access based on age. It is instead a voluntary industry standard. Perhaps if they had not instituted this standard, their would be laws regarding who may view a particular film, based on it's charecteristics. As of this moment though, I have no knowledge of such a law

    In the 1960s, communities began establishing their own film censorship offices. The MPAA took a look at this trend and saw disaster: if a film was banned in some places, re-edited in others, and shown uncut elsewhere, marketing would be a nightmare. So they essentially designed the rating system to head this off. Each studio agreed not to release unrated movies (theatrically... they never extended this to videos) and that such rating must appear in all promotional material (which itself must be approved by the MPAA).

    They succeeded in holding off censorship. The last of the film censorship offices closed in 1991, in Dallas.

    I'm not sure how many Slashdot readers are aware of how the ratings are assigned. The MPAA has a pool of volunteer reviewers. The only requirement is that you be a parent of a child under 17. From this pool, reviewers are chosen randomly to watch the film and afterwards give their rating. These are tallied and (I believe) the median rating is what's assigned to the film. If the distributor dislikes the rating, they can resubmit it until they get a rating they like.

    I guess the main thing is, if you're a parent in SoCal who hates the rating system, you do have an option: you can go to the MPAA and try (I'm not sure how you get into the pool... the MPAA web site is down) to get in the pool. You'll also get to see uncut movies before they're released...