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."

Comments

Honestly..

[nat5an]

Well, honestly, I wouldn't want 8 year olds playing GTA or Manhunt anyways. I've been carded buying games before, and it never really bothered me (though it bothered the kids in front of me). Of course, one doubts whether this will really keep violent games out of the hands of young kids anyway.

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.

Different standards

[gaijin99]

My main objection here is that its applying different standards to movies and video games. Both have rating systems, generally the distributors of both make an effort to keep kids from getting stuff they aren't rated for yet. Yet we see no elected idiots pushing for laws forbidding movie theatres from showing children R rated movies.

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:

"The games that I don't let this 13-year-old have are the games that have sexual content," said Michael Hill, who was shopping with his wife and son at Sacramento's Downtown Plaza. "Those are what worry me, not the violent ones."

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?

Re:Different standards

[gaijin99]

Movies are rated voluntarily. The movie theaters do a pretty good job at keeping kids out of inappropriate movies and the stores do a pretty good job at not selling inappropriate movies to kids based on this voluntary system.

So too are video games rated voluntarialy. And, again, I see very little evidence that game stores are selling GTA to 5 year olds. Like the teatres, they card, and/or require an adult to buy the game. The problem here is that most parents have at least passing familiarity with the MPAA's rating system, but most aren't familiar with the game rating system. This is not the fault of game stores, and does not require legislation to fix.

My understanding is the rating for video games are only to inform parents and other consumers about the suitability of the games for certain audiences. I do not believe they are specificaly meant to limit sales to certain persons.

You are correct. However the MPAA rating system is also present as a system to inform parents, not to prevent sale to certian persons. The sellers take initiative and do the prevention themselves and it works just fine.

Again, my main point here is that the system (without legislation) works for movies, and is working for video games as well. There is no need for this legislation, its just pandering to the irrational fears of parents.

I do agree with you about the silliness of a parent being more scared of a breast, or even a penis or vagina, than of the graphic depiction of the violent taking of a human life.

Yup, its one of the most bizarre aspects of our culture. Sex is bad, violence is fine... Is it any wonder that the US has the highest murder rate of any first world nation?

Not a good idea

[Kohath]

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.

Re:Well why not?

[MankyD]

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.

Re:So what?

[benna]

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."

Re:Thats not going to change anything

[Zeinfeld]

But then wouldn't it lay blame directly on those "clueless parents" instead of on the "Video Game Industry" when their child does something moronic, like shoot at passing cars?

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.

This is how it is.

[Mullen]

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.

A parable

[veritron]

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.