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California Passes Violent Games Bill
TecnaDigit writes "Today, after sitting on the bill for nearly a month and constant political pressure, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed Assembly Bill 1179, the bill that would prohibit the sale and rentals of violent video games to minors. Again, the Entertainment Software Ratings Board and the Video Software Dealers Association (VSDA) are challenging the bill. According the the VSDA, the bill is faulty in that a game is decided whether or not it is 'violent' by juries, and different juries could have different opinions on what is defined as 'violent'." Commentary on GamerGod.
Let the parents decide what is too violent and what isn't and be done with the whole thing. If parents cared then we would not be in this whole entire mess.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Do we need legislation to set up ratings schemes? Once its rated, selling to minors is illegal already.
No matter how much law is enacted, they still won't be able to enforce the law with anything that approaches what people envision. Grandmothers and family members will still buy games and movies for kids when they shouldn't....
What a gigantic waste of time and money... pfft!
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
A man best known for starring in violent movies that mostly appeal to adolescents signs a bill prohibiting the sale of violent video games to adolescents.
Rob
Like, the parents perhaps...
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
They're complaining that juries give inconsistent results?
That a jury might rule one way one time, and another way the next?
These guys need to start submitting Slashdot stories. They're experts at old news.
Indeed. Although we routinely use juries to decide matters of actual life or death, using them to judge video-game violence is beyond their competence...
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
That's right, violent games make violent people, and Tiger Woods PGA Tour makes professional golfers.
google.slashdot
California, along with the rest of the U.S. already has a system like this in place. It's called the ESRB ratings system. M (mature)-rated games can only be sold to people 17 and older, and AO (adults only)-rated games can only be sold to 18 and older.
http://www.esrb.org/
Slow Down, Cowboy! It's been 60 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment.
I heard Schwarzenegger on the radio and he was saying that when he was an actor he felt that the ratings system kept kids from seeing violent content, and stating that games needed similar ratings.
Um? Hello? You mean like the ratings system they have now? The one that is more granular that the MPAA system? With movies I get a general "R" rating. WIth games I get a breakdown of what that "M" is for, similar to the TV ratings system.
So do the people who come up with this stuff simply not realize that there has been a game content rating system in place for YEARS now? If not, that's just woefully ignorant.
Does this bill only mention it being violent games that cannot be sold to minors? What about sexuality? If it doesn't mention sex - hooray! Finally a law that realizes that violence is worse than a normal human activity!
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
The problem is, that there is already judicial precedence on the issue.
The above is from http://fact.trib.com/1st.01.02supr.htmlAlso check here http://www.constitutioncenter.org/education/ForEdu cators/DiscussionStarters/BanningViolentVideoGames .shtml
and here http://culturalpolicy.uchicago.edu/conf2001/papers /walsh.html
So this is nothing new people. Ever since the ID brought us a world where we could literally kill and watch Nazi's die (even before that really). This has been an ongoing debate.
The one thing you MUST realize is that this is not a bill being pushed by the Right-Wing Conservative Nut Jobs (granted they aren't really all against it), this is being pushed by DEMOCRATS. You want to know who hates freedom of speech? Hillary Clinton, after the Columbine murders ordered the surgeon general to find a link between school shooting tragedies and Quake. He found no conclusive link, but that didn't stop her, Lieberman, and the rest of the gang from going hog wild trying to censor video games. I lean left politically, but you can bet your ass I don't agree with censorship.
Do what I did, I joined the EFF http://www.eff.org/ and joined the ACLU http://www.aclu.org/
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Hmmm.... I think I'll have to alter my game design a bit...
Let's see, yeah - the main character will now be carrying around an arsenal of flower-based projectile seeders. Upon hitting the target, these "horticulture tools" will instantly spread a rather red blotchy flower, possibly dripping petals. People will be so enamored by these lovely blooms that they will instantly transcend their ugly everyday lives, given enough flowers, and fall to the ground in pure bliss - possibly with a soul-shattering scream of freedom.
Some people will be driving around in horticulture-tanks, which do massive seeding. Upon sufficient counter-seeding, these tanks will celebrate the wonder of the event by launching short-range non-violent fireworks, breaking down once they are satisfied that their flowery job has been complete.
The flowers will be everywhere - breaking down walls, flooding innocent cities, carried by massive armies of rabid horticultualist monsters. Apparantly, many people in the game world will be flower-phobic until properly administered to with a variety of area-affect flower spreaders.
Thanks, California, for providing the perspective we need to make games imaginative, once again!
Ryan Fenton
Kids will get their hands on games the same way they get their hands on alcohol and cigarettes: by finding a store too lazy to card them, or just getting an over-18 friend to go out and buy it for them. The first option is by far the best, because word-of-mouth spreads fast among kids with a desire to purchase age-controlled products; this means that the wealth of the newly-attained business will pay for any fines the government can hand down. The second option is the fatal flaw in any situation: there will always be some older guy you know, or some uncaring 20-year-old outside the store that will do it for you.
The VSDA, according to the headline, suggests that juries will be the sole determinant in whether or not a game is "violent". The bill, however, is fairly explicit in its definitions:
(A) "Cruel" means that the player intends to virtually inflict a high degree of pain by torture or serious physical abuse of the victim in addition to killing the victim.
(B) "Depraved" means that the player relishes the virtual killing or shows indifference to the suffering of the victim, as evidenced by torture or serious physical abuse of the victim.
(C) "Heinous" means shockingly atrocious. For the killing depicted in a video game to be heinous, it must involve additional acts of torture or serious physical abuse of the victim as set apart from other killings.
(D) "Serious physical abuse" means a significant or considerable amount of injury or damage to the victim's body which involves a substantial risk of death, unconsciousness, extreme physical pain, substantial disfigurement, or substantial impairment of the function of a bodily member, organ, or mental faculty. Serious physical abuse, unlike torture, does not require that the victim be conscious of the abuse at the time it is inflicted. However, the player must specifically intend the abuse apart from the killing.
(E) "Torture" includes mental as well as physical abuse of the victim. In either case, the virtual victim must be conscious of the abuse at the time it is inflicted; and the player must specifically intend to virtually inflict severe mental or physical pain or suffering upon the victim, apart from killing the victim.
(3) Pertinent factors in determining whether a killing depicted in a video game is especially heinous, cruel, or depraved include infliction of gratuitous violence upon the victim beyond that necessary to commit the killing, needless mutilation of the victim's body, and helplessness of the victim.
Interesting that mental torture is included in the definition; so much for Medal of Honor: Abu Ghraib. There does seem to be a theme that simply blowing away your enemies isn't enough -- you have to relish it, go out of your way to cause extra pain to the digital victim -- "gratuitous violence upon the victim beyond that necessary to commit the killing."
On a practical level, I don't really care about this legislation, beacause, on a practical level, it won't have any effect. Most stores have a policy of not selling M an AO games to 13 year olds anyway. However, the comments about how violent games increase crime rates piss me off. It's simply not true. There was like a six page article in Computer Gaming World a month or two ago on the subject, and it showed a graph of video game sales vs crime rates. If there was a relationship at all, it was perfectly inversely proportional (at least until the war in Iraq started, when the crime rates started to creep up again.) Video games are still a scapegoat for politicians and the media, and they will continue to be until people who grew up with the medium, and actually understand it, find their way into positions of power.
No single raindrop believes that it is responsible for the storm.
I notice that nobody is bitching about the busybodies in the California legislature who actually wrote this bill. This is just the latest in their endless campaign to make us all Better People. No soft drinks or junk food in schools, no "ethnic" team mascots or names, feng shui in the building code, requiring vending machines to sell health food, banning GMail ("we think it's an absolute invasion of privacy. It's like having a massive billboard in the middle of your home"). These are all recent bills they've considered. These people, mostly Democrats, have an absolute mania to micromanage our lives in this state, and we somehow keep electing these radical loons.
If you're not a slave, why should you care about slavery? Dangerous logic my friend.
Precisely! But some of you are clearly not experienced enough to know what the hell you're even talking about or how complicated that proposition gets.
I am a parent. I don't want society raising my children. In that regard, I don't want society shoving overtly violent or sexual imagery into my childrens' faces at every turn. I want to raise my child... not society and not corporate entertainment industries (that includes video game companies.) I want to make decisions about what imagery and content is appropriate for my child. I don't need advertisers, movies and video game companies deciding what's appropriate to put out there for my children.
So, when you say you don't think "society should raise your child," I agree.
And if you think video game companies are all about over-the-counter game sales, then you're fooling yourself. Look around. Violent video game imagery is gradually saturating our society and I don't care to be pummelled with that at every turn. Even now, I have to keep my kids away from the video games in most movie theater lobbies because some of them are ridiculously violent--more violent than some of the crap on the movies playing there. I have to carefully watch what games are demoed at Toys-R-Us. I have to keep a close eye on what my kid sees on the covers of the game boxes.
It's not all just parents monitoring what their kids are buying and playing. I wish that's all it was. That's the easy part. That's not what inspires this kind of legislation. If you think that's all this is about, then get outside more often. And stop griping at this strawman argument about inattentive parents you've propped up. That's not even the half of it.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Are you serious? They HAVE. Long ago.
It's called the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, ESRB, you can find them at www.esrb.org. They are a non-profit ratings group started by the games industry to rate games. Developers submit games for ratings, the ESRB rates them based on known criteria, and then returns a rating. You may then place that rating and ONLY that rating on your game.
It's those little stylized black and white logos. They have a letter, tilted to the left in them. They are located on the lower left or lower right of the front of the game box and are clearly visible. On the back, there's a clarification of why the game got that rating. So, go to a retailer some time, and look at the games. See how many you find that don't have an ESRB rating. My bet? You'll find none. Nearly all games are submitted for ratings (all large publishers submit all their games) and most retailers will not carry unrated games (even retailers that carry unrated movies).
They already have a very effective regulation system in place, that is just like the one the movie industry has. The logos and ratings are trademarked so you cannot use them without the permission of the ESRB, and they only grant permission for the rating your game actually recieved (same way the MPAA does it for movies).
So get off your high horse. The game industry has done a great job of regulating itself. If you can't control your kids and won't take the time to play the games first and see fi they are acceptable, that's not their problem. There are plenty of adult gamers out there and we don't want you telling us what we may and may not play.
This law seems to serve no purpose other than to let bad parents lash out at retailers and distributors when they fail as parents and their kid does something wrong. HAte to break it to you but if your kid does a drive by, GTA did not make him do it, he had much deeper problems.