Clinton, Lieberman Propose CDC Investigate Games

Gamespot reports that Senators Clinton and Lieberman have asked the Centers for Disease control to investigate how games impact us poor deluded citizens. From the article: "Even though the legislation--called the Children and Media Research Advancement Act--does not include restrictions, it appears to be intended as a way to justify them. That's because a string of court decisions have been striking down antigaming laws because of a lack of hard evidence that minors are harmed by violence in video games. The original version of the bill earmarked $90 million for the study, but Lieberman press secretary Rob Sawicki said that the committee had approved the measure without any dollar figure and that such a figure would be added later during the appropriations process." Gamasutra has some background on the bill, which was originally proposed in 2003.

Comments

It's a philosophical problem

[John Miles]

I'm not sure why there is such resistance here on /. (other than the fact that most /.'ers are possibly adolecent gamers) to the idea that activities you engage in for a large percentage of your time can have an impact on brain development and function. Those changes in brain structure can lead to changes in behavior - that's the emerging consensus from scientists who research the brain.

The resistance comes from the implications of your proposition with respect to what it means to be a human being.

To the extent that books, movies, and computer games actually have a deleterious effect on adolescents' brain development, they are effectively the same as executable content. It's not much of a leap from there to conclude that people, or at least children, are nothing more than sophisticated programmable devices -- machines that have no free will to choose their own influences in life. It's an argument that rests on determinism, which bothers freethinking geeks the same way evolution frightens protestant Christians.

More specifically: if it turns out to be true that children can be "programmed" by media exposure alone, then everything Hilary Clinton has ever said about child-rearing being a collective responsibility suddently gains a lot of scientific weight. Any conservative who's tempted to jump onto this particular bandwagon had better think carefully about its direction and speed of travel. The bandwagon's next stop will be in the far-flung territories mapped by Huxley.