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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."
And what about those of use who will still be minors when we're away to college? Will they accept a parent over the phone saying that their child can buy UT 2007?
Omnes stulti sunt.
I have to admit, I think this is a good idea in theory. We'll see if it passes, and if so how it's executed. I have to say, renting vids from blockbuster, it's a bit.... well, wrong to have Manhunt RIGHT next to the cat in the hat, or Piglet's game... (for younger kids who can read)
In all seriousness, this is already a policy at a lot of stores (like Target, probably Wal-mart too), and making it a law wouldn't be much different than rating movies. Kids who really want games will no doubt be able to get them, but at least adults will have a forum in which to enjoy more mature entertainment, as opposed to the alternative, which would probably be banning violent games.
Head down, go to sleep to the rhythm of the war drums...
Columbine High School shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold enjoyed playing "Doom" -- one of the most popular first-person shooter games of all time, psychologists Craig Anderson of the University of Missouri-Columbia and Karen Dill of Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory, N.C., wrote in an article in the April 2000 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Their study argues that playing violent games is directly related to violent behavior.
Maybe I missed something, but if its so popular wouldn't a lot of people played it? So i mean you could say anyone played Doom...
Well, why not? They do that for porn anyway.
But they don't do it for R-rated movies, and with spectacularly few exceptions even the worst video games go no further than an R-rated movie.
This legislation addresses a problem that doesn't exist, except in the minds of the "Won't somebody please think of the children?!" types.
Mr Yee is simply playing off his electorate's bizarre image of video game stores as vile dens where the employees push GTA on unsuspecting 5 year olds.
What I found most distrubing was this quote from the Bee:
I'm not really anti-violence, but personally I'd much rather the kids saw sexual imagery than ultra-violent imagery. Where did we get this weird idea that sex is so horrible that you shouldn't see a nipple until you're 18, but if you're over 13 its perfectly fine to see someone's head blown to bits?"Mission Accomplished" -- George W. Bush May 1, 2003
Now this is interesting... I am running against Leland Yee in the 2004 election. Campaign Web site isn't up yet, since I'm not officially on the ballot yet (though the filing fee has been paid), but if you are interested in helping me fight "for the children" anti-freedom legislation like this, write me at maden04@maden.org.
mmm.. I tend to think anyone that shoots at passing cars needs a good 10-20 years in a jail, a mental institute, or a military academy.
Their parents need to be held responsible as well.
when i first read this i wondered why this was posted on slashdot, it didn't seem like anything worthy of regurgitating, but hey, i guess in the UK it isn't, because there already is a rating for games, where GTA is rated 18, meaning you gotta be at least 18 to purchase it.
it's only surprising that california didn't have such legislation until now.
well, that's a much better situation than australia, and many other countries, where GTA is banned altogether.
that said, i don't see a reason why i would miss such games. i enjoyed GTA III, and as for GTA vice city, which i own, i've only played it for 10 minutes and then switched it off... lately i've discovered nintendo, and i discovered the amount of fun you can have while unintentionally remaining on the innocent and cute side of life.
Kudos to nintendo, i'd totally turst them with my kids.
Most (all?) stores have this policy anyway. Why shouldn't it be a matter of law?
Because, as a law, it'll harm people.
Do we really need cops running kids into video game stores to try to trick the cashier into violating the laws? Do we really need 16-year old cashiers getting fined for making a mistake or failing to subtract correctly to determine an age from a birthdate?
Do we really need another example to show young people why they shouldn't have any respect for the law?
This law would be a big burden to stores and their workers. It's unnecessary. It'll have no positive effects.
Fewer laws, not more.
One distinction does need to be made, however. It should be noted that Video Games allow the player to act out and decide how to wreak their havock. They are in fact acting out, in some way shape or form, their own fantasies. Movies do little more than show us alternatives and possibilities.
While I'm not making a judgement call stating that video games are somehow worse than movies, it is something to keep in mind.
-dave
http://millionnumbers.com/ - own the number of your dreams
"It's a scam to get game companies to give us donations, you know just like we did with MicroSoft. Oh did I say that? No, it's all about saving our kids from the hellhouse of violence and sex."
Brings to mind the line from Apocolypse Now, "They train young men to drop fire on people but their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplane, because its obsene."
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
It doesn't matter. Keeping porn/violence/etc away should be the parent's job, not the government's. If the government can do this to minors, what prevents the government from censoring content from adults simply because certain politicians fear nudity or violence, or even for more political reasons? No, if the parent is so inclined, THEY should take it away. It is their rights (whether you agree with how they parent or not). It is NOT the government's right to censor people. The government should not be doing it for video games, the government should not be doing it for porn. Like I said above, what stops them from censoring it from everyone? Oh, that's right, it's not that easy for minors to sue-- and the courts don't give a crap, anyway. If Joe Smoe doesn't give a damn whether his son sees pixilated polygons that resemble aliens emit a green liquid when zapped with an ElectroGun, he will still have to get off his lazy ass because the government says he has to buy it for his son. I've been in the same situation: When I was younger I had to have my dad buy the game for me due to the policies of certain stores even though he wanted me to buy it while he shopped elsewhere. It's ridiculous. I don't care if the child will try to sneak in the games/porn if they can buy it themselves even though their parents don't allow it. That's the parents' problem. Just another moralist do-gooder wanting to take away our rights to appease their foolish emotional desires. Bah. I know someone will bring up child pornography... but in that case, someone is harmed. Now, if it was some 16-year old slut flashing herself over a webcam, I personally wouldn't call that child porn... that's another debate though.
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Never criticize religion on Slashdot. You will be modded down for "Troll" no matter how factual it is.
Probably for the same reason that two 15 year olds shoot up a school and folk appear on slashdot within a nanosecond explaining how gun control would not possibly have prevented the event.
Very little political debate in the US seems to ever be influenced by science, it is mostly predjudice and emotion.
Mind you, things are not necessarily that much better in science. Remember that AIDS/Polio vaccine connection that came up about ten years ago. Instead of checking a pretty strong prima facie case the establishment tried to quiet the issue - litterally in this case with a threat of libel proceedings. Thats not science.
Last year the stories had finaly percolated back to Nigeria and suddenly people were refusing the vaccine. Bad news when polio is inches from being erradicated. Betcha wondering why it took so long for the vaccine to make its way back to the people who were used as guinea pigs for testing, oh, well guess not.
So finally the science establishment gets panicky and does the tests that should have been done when the controversy started. They checked the remaining vials of vaccine from the tests to see if they could identify HIV DNA or money DNA. Turns out that the monkeys used to incubate the vaccine were a type that do not have a HIV strain and there was no HIV virus detected.
So the establishment got it right all along? Well not really, why didn't they insist on doing the test when the story first broke? The only logical reason to resist would be if you feared the result.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
Americans limit Sex in the media while the Europeans limit violence.
After World War II, the Europeans sought to limit imagery of violence for their own reasons (War, genocide and all that.) while the Americans, being based on a Puritanical roots wanted to limit imagery of Sex. So if you can't have one, you have the other. The Europeans see Sex, and the Americans see Violence and neither see the other. Kind of lame, I would rather see sex on TV than violence.
Linux O Muerte!
Back in the 1980's, some dumbass driving a particular brand of car in the United States put her foot on the gas pedal instead of the brake pedal and lived to sue a major car company. Hundreds of other dumbasses, knowing a good thing when they see it, also sued the major car company. The media latched onto those reports, and dubbed the incidents "SUAs" or "Sudden Unintended Accelerations." A particular brand of car mentioned in the media report had NO mentions of the defect before the report aired - within a month, it had hundreds of mentions. An investigation was launched by various government agencies - they somehow found it impossible to replicate, being physically impossible, and released a report blaming "pedal misapplication." To this day a cabal of conspiracy theorists believe that the auto industry and the government are covering this problem up. SUAs my ass - more like "Sudden Unintelligence Accidents."
How does this relate to the current story? Well, it goes to show how much personal responsibility goes in today's society. The government can't tell people that they'd have to be imbeciles to buy their three-year-olds copies of GTA, so naturally they have to "look out for the public." Naturally, the media, knowing a good thing when it sees it, runs stories every time some dumbass with a copy of FF7 burns down a 7-11 or some goth with doom shoots up a high school in Hell's Asshole, Suburbia.
How do we stop this influx of idiocy?
A. Vote. Too many old people do it and not enough young people do. The reason that medicare and social security are going to bankrupt this country is that the politicos are too afraid of pissing off the old people and losing their votes to make any substantial changes to those horrible, horrible systems. At the very least, vote out of office everyone that supports stupid bullshit laws that'd regulate video games. Perhaps you don't support any candidate - but you can still use your vote as a weapon against the particularly dumbassed ones.
B. Get your news from the internet. Don't watch the news, ever, even idly. Read, or do something else with your time. Face it, wouldn't you rather you didn't know who Ashton Kutcher or Britney Spears or Madonna were, or who they were sleeping with? Every single fucking time I've been involved with something before it got media attention, I noticed grave factual inaccuracies and general dumbassedness - the media is a big fat pile of sad.
C. Take some personal responsibility. Now, remember, "responsibility" is a direct synonym for "blame." When you fuck up, take the blame. Don't tell yourself that you didn't do well in high school because "only 10% of people do well in that type of environment" - tell yourself that you screwed up because you suck at life.
D. Make the lives of idiots living hells. Don't suffer fools gladly. Be sure to use sarcasm to belittle them, and lower their "self-esteem." Hopefully, they'll fail to attract mates, and then eventually the suck will be bred out of humanity.
A story about self-esteem: At my HIGH school, there was recently a seminar called "Words can really hurt." On this, students were invited to get up to share their experiences of being picked on, which was supposedly supposed to get us to realize our HURTFUL WAYS. One child got up and told about how people would make fun of him for being diabetic. Now, this child had a fucking insulin pump attached to his body. He was so diabetic that he actually had a computer that would monitor his blood sugar in real time. But he LOVED candy. So, he'd go on these binges, eat a fuck-ton of candy, and compensate by pumping himself full of insulin. Naturally, every time we did this, we'd tell him "Jimmy, you're going to fucking die, you stupid diabetic!"
This is our future. Remember kiddies - even though voting gives you the illusion of control, and probably matters less to you each individual time than the amount of taxes you pay to register, you can't bitch about the government if you didn't even try to play by their rules.
This might be all little off topic, but...
What the hell is going on? I'm one of those 'bad' kids. I'm currently 18, living in a College town, planning to start school when I can save up the tuition ( sometime in fall. )
I've been smoking since I was 11 -- My parents told me not to. I did it anyway. It was my choice. No one elses. It's something I wish I'd never started, but it's not up to anyone else to tell me I can't smoke but my parents. They said they didn't want me to, but they knew I would do it anyway.
I also drink. Alot. On average, once a month or so I go out and get so drunk I can't play pool anymore for the fact that I have to ask every 5 seconds if I'm solids or stripes. Note that it is illegal for me to do that.
I may not be the perfect person, but I was raised by my grandparents for the most part, and for a long time most of my friends where senior citizens. I seem to have adopted their attitudes towards some things. I find it rediculous that I can't smoke at 17, but I can die for my country. At 18 I can smoke and die for my country and pay taxes, but I can't drink. And don't get me started on consentual sex between minors. When I was fifteen if I had sex with a 16 year old girl because of the laws in my state, I would have been guilty of statutory rape.
I'm all for government looking out for my interests, but government seems to have forgotten what my interests are. Parents have to be allowed to make decisions for their children as long as they aren't starving or beating them to death, scitisne?
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
I'm slightly torn about games, as there is, in fact, participation in anything that goes on. However, there is an extremely important difference between R rated movies and M rated video games (let's face it, how many video games really are analogous to X rated movies? Duke Nukem doesn't count). The difference is that movies, and especially at theatres are fully realistic and fully immersive. Even on the best currently available gaming machine, nobody could mistake the action onscreen for anything real.
Music is even one step further, as very little music is intended to be taken as any view of reality. Rather, much of it is artistic in one way or another (yes, in the eye of the beholder) and is not a specific view of something unacceptable in reality (ie shooting lots of people). Even in the cases of songs about such things, I would be very hesitant to say that they are an influence toward anything beyond stupid fanboyism.
OK, so you're not seriously maladjusted. So 90% of your friends and acquantences aren't either. But as you put it, you scare people when you play Carmageddon. Why? Because they worry without a particular reason? Or because they have a very good reason?
That reason doesn't have to be you, mind you. It doesn't really sound like it is. It could be that everyone knows some person that is not-so-together, personally. If you are still in high school or younger, how about answers to a few questions. If I wanted to find a poorly adjusted, memtally unstable child, who might just be influenced by a game to take a nailgun to somebody's head, could I find one at your school? Could I find one in some of the particular classes you take? Could I find 2? 5? 10?
How many out of the population of your school do you think might be pushed over the edge? How many are you SURE could be?
If I met you in the cafeteria (if you still have manditory on school lunch) or in the hall between classes, and said "Would you please point at the ones you think are unstable?", would your arm get tired?
Now of those kids, how many have pretty good parents, who are trying to help the kids with their problems, and how many have screwed up parents who helped create the problems?
Some people may even see you as part of the problem. You're a false positive of sorts. A normal person who gives off signals that may make it harder to spot the really dangerous kid.
The more paranoid ones don't just want to control what games you play, they want to stop you from wearing a black trenchcoat, or dyeing your hair blue, or wearing a Marilyn Manson tee-shirt. They may go as far as school uniforms, or even try to make you act like something out of 50's TV. They're willing to go that far to control you, because there are dangerous kids in every school, in every class, maybe in every group of 10, and it's easy to try anything that might work and a lot of things that won't.
As for me, I was in the US Army, during the time things changed. In a few years, we went from having to 'toughen' up many new recruits, convince them that there were times to use violence against an enemy, to having to teach more and more of them to hold back, or at least keep it focused on armed opponents.
Belive it or not, the army tries to weed out people who could shoot unarmed little kids and rape their older sisters. The numbers of people who wanted to go kill someone, just about anyone, increased several times over, and the numbers who cared that some orders were unlawful and should not be obeyed dropped. The generation that sounds like it is just a few years ahead of yours is genuinely different, and we don't know why (I'm assuming of course that you are not that much older than your brother). We don't know if it has peaked with them or if it's going to keep on getting worse.
Who is John Cabal?
Then adults wouldn't have to put up with watered down films and the under 18s would still have something to watch.
In this age of digital film it wouldn't be that hard to do, would it?
When I was a teenager, I'd go off and buy video games, of course back then, they were too crude to be violent. No one stopped me, I just came in and paid with cash. There was this one game, Technocop, it was pretty brutal. You'd kill bad guys and they would turn into a twitching jambalaya of green ooze and body parts. What makes anyone think that the greedy faces at Electronics Boutique, and all the other "shop-sized" games stores are gonna cut sales because they have their own conscience?
Unless you make it illegal to sell these games to minors, and then create sting operations (like selling alcohol or cigarettes to minors) to catch and fine the merchants, nobody's going to play fair, except a few Wal-Marts, which I've noticed do listen to the letters they receive from shoppers.
Making the game outright illegal in California would probably do a ton to the market as a whole. Some of those games companies are IN California, for starters. Losing the market within the 35 Million residents would be a strong message. Sony Entertainment might start putting shirts back on the women in EverQuest. GTA 5 might be more of a GOOD driving simulator, which, frankly, would be a boost for the streets of Los Angeles. I can just see the speed traps in Liberty City, and the good samaritan subduing your attempts to force your will upon a bystander. Traffic cameras capture your face, your short-lived violent killing/crime spree is brought to a swift end, when you get to play virtual prisoner, with 9 hours of interactive stories, brutality, harsh language, and realistic prosecution and parole hearings. There's even a few mini-games where you can stamp license plates, do the prison laundry, and peel potatoes before the time runs out.
To be fair, these ubernanny laws are difficult to enforce. In my city (no joke), the environmentally obsessed have succeeded in banning phosphorous fertilizers. Don't ask why, it's based on some cock-eyed theory regarding lake pollution. Anyway, the merchants are complying, but if you want to get the illegal fertilizer, you need only drive out of the metro area, and you can get hooked up with the good stuff. There's a guy on my street, he's gotta be using illegal fertilizer, his lawn is immaculate. I know he waters every day, which is also illegal. I even think he's got an unregistered well, so he doesn't have to pay the city water and sewer prices. He is breaking half a dozen laws, and the city can't do a thing about it because they made laws they can't enforce. I bet he even rakes his leaves into the street, the cad! He would be just the sort of guy who would get some twisted kick out of selling M-rated video games to kids at school, out of the trunk of his car from the parking lot across the street. Like a drug dealer almost.
Payton: "Hey, Hunter, where'd you get GTA Vice City? I thought that was illegal?"
Hunter: "From Mr. Johnson; Taighler told me all about him. He sells all the good M-stuff. I think he also sells C-class fireworks, ring pops, and Red Bull energy drink."
Payton: "Boy, that Taighler always is the first kid to get hooked up! Do you think Mr. Johnson sells porn?"
Hunter: "No way! Cameron asked him that once, and Mr. Johnson got all defensive and yelled at Cameron because he thought Cameron was city vice. You can go to jail for that, you know."