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Planned California Bill Targets Video Game Sales
joeflies writes "'California Assemblyman Leland Yee, D-San Francisco, plans to introduce legislation making it illegal for minors to buy the most violent video games and requiring game dealers to separate youth games from adult offerings.' Story
here from the Sacramento Bee."
Accept what? That some stores choose to have kids vs. everyone else sections? That some places choose to limit what kids can purchase? Right now, there is no law saying that retailers have to do age discrimination (for R-ratings) when selling movies and music, and many retailers choose to do that for games as well.
But they DO check with Movies.. Any one ever bought a rated R movie at Wal-Mart? They check ID and won't sell it to you unless you are 18.. This law is basically comes from the fact that parents do not take responsibility for their children.. There are way to many 8 year olds playing Counter-Strike and other Teen games.
in a manner of speaking, the united states was originally founded by puritans. their ideological mindset has somehow lasted through (i would guess) ongoing belief-acceptance through the generations.
SO you think anyone should just come in and be able to buy GTA 3? or that new Manhunt game? I think not. I also think they shouldn't be able to buy any R rated movies. I'm all for freedom, of Adults, but when Children are invovled we need to be cautious and it's better to error onthe side of caution.
Wrong person to bust. The person who sold it to him would be the person who would get the citation.
I think most video game stores do this already or at least pay lip service to doing it. Unless you have cops staking out video game stores and asking the cashiers if they let anyone under 18 buy an M rated game it's not going to do a whole lot. And video games only cause a slight increase in violent tendencies if any, certainly not enough to demonize them so.
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true, but its all useless if the store doesn't enforce them.
You have a son, do you think when he is 13 you'll be in totla control of his every movement?
At least with some proper enforce ment, you know it will be more difficult for him to get his hands on some game you don't want him to have.
I would argue that man kids get them becase they go some gift certificate from a well meaning relative.
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Movie ratings are only voluntary in theory, not in practice. When was the last time you saw an unrated movie at a major chain? Sure the indie theaters will show them but many towns don't even have those. If you want to make money on your movie, you have to rate it, no way around it. And you also need to have an R rating or "better", because the chains won't show NC-17.
Is this censorship? Sure. Do I think it's wrong? I'm really not sure, but I do know that saying its voluntary is stretching the truth. I wouldn't want my kids playing GTA. I'd like to be able to tell, without spending hours playing a game, that it's right for my children, so the warning labels and ratings do serve a valuable purpose. I don't like the fact that Walmart and other stores refuse to carry any CD with explicit lyrics, and I don't like the fact that movie theaters only carry R, PG, PG-13, and G movies. However I know they are private businesses and I wouldn't want the governmenet telling me what products I had to stock on my shelves.
It's hard not to tell that the videogame retail industry is becoming more and more consolidated, and this means that chains like Gamestop are getting to be bigger and bigger targets. This means they will likely take Walmart-esque stances and pretty soon you will have to get your mature games from websites, which means lower sales and that of course means lower investment in adult-themed games.
This is not the greatest sig in the world, this is just a tribute.
At first I was going to label this post, "More right-wing brain damage", but this particular brand of idiocy seems to cross party lines.
I remember being a teenager when all the "Dungeons & Dragons makes people kill people" stupidity was all the political rage. My mom fell victim to it for a while, until I persuader her to sit in on a few sessions with me and my friends. Her eyes were opened, that much is sure. She finally realized how insane the mass media, parents' groups, and politicians were by blaming an intellectual exercise for some kids' twisted world perceptions.
It's now 20 years later, and the entire process is repeating itself. Different names, different games, same complete lack of comprehension and neural activity.
Read my lips: the kids doing these things want to do these things because these things are ingrained into these kids' personalities, not because of some stupid imagined connection with video games. These kids (and their willing adult accomplices in psuedo-scientific psychological fields and media) use what they think is the most likely excuse to deflect blame from themselves: violent video games made me do it.
Think back to your own childhood (and for many of us, our current adulthood where our jobs are concerned). When you got caught by your parents doing something you knew was bad, didn't you brainstorm for some excuse you thought your parents would buy to let you off the hook? Of course you did. It's exactly what these kids are doing now. Why do so many people think this is so different from the past?
If they couldn't blame video games today, they would blame it on movies again. When they can't blame it on movies, they blame it on the parents (which at least has a kernel of truth in some, but not many, cases).
This artificial distinction between childhood and adulthood provides a false sense of control and understanding for too many people. To say that a teenager's mind isn't developed enough to understand death and that killing people is wrong represents a dangerous plateau of irresponsibility.
Again, I only have to think back to when I was a teenager. I knew right and wrong fully well back then, and this stupendously moronic notion that I was too young to understand the consequences of my actions was implicit permission for me to break all those rules I was being made to follow.
I got punished for the small things like shoplifting candy bars, but I was completely off the hook for big things (I won't go into the details, except to say I never crossed the line into hurting people) because adults were so easy to manipulate into blaming everything but the real problem: my bad attitude and lack of respect.
The real irony here is that Dungeons & Dragons was the key to igniting my creative desires, and changed my direction from thief and vandal to productive member of society. Had these stupid laws been in place then, taking my focus away from insighful creativity, I would likely have ended up becoming a criminal instead of writing software.
How poetic that my career ended up with me writing software to help manage the criminal justice system.
Of course, Dungeons & Dragons wasn't any more responsible for my positive behavior than Grand Theft Auto 3/Vice City are for shooting sprees. It was merely the lense through which my personality was focused. My creative desires and motivations were already there. D&D just helped expose them. It also introduced me to mythology and religious history, two things in which I would otherwise never have shown an interest (and one of which I still think is absurd).
People proposing these laws almost show almost as much intellectual damage as the people committing the crimes.