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Congress Sets Sights on Videogames
boarder8925 writes "According to CNET, Congress has set its sights on 'the purported problem of violent and sexually explicit video games.... A U.S. House of Representatives committee on consumer protection says it will hold a hearing on the topic later this month, with a focus on 'informing parents and protecting children' from the alleged dangers of those types of games.' " The article goes on to describe seven bills under consideration that either attach fines to the sales of Mature titles to children, or study "the effect of electronic media on youths." Five of them are sponsored by Democrats.
The article goes on to describe seven bills under consideration that either attach fines to the sales of Mature titles to children, or study "the effect of electronic media on youths." Five of them are sponsored by Democrats.
I love how our political system works. You can either vote for the party that pisses all over the middle of the bill of rights... or you vote for the party that pisses all over the top of the bill of rights.
AWESOME!
Push Button, Receive Bacon
According to this article, parents already seem to oversee game purchases.
And anyways, isn't this what the ESRB was started for?
If you can't convince them, convict them.
It's my, and only my, responsibility to raise my kids. Not that of government, not that of special interest groups, not that of any political party. Mine!
I, and I alone, decide which values to give my kids.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... the republicans and the democrats are two sides of the same coin.
It makes no sense to differentiate between the two anymore. Sure there are "polarizing issues" -- like them god damn queers and whatever else is on the docket today -- but for the most part it is fairly certain that regardless of a given particular cause, the cause itself seems to be a restriction on individual liberty.
Ridiculous. Cant we let the parents do the parenting? It's really their responsibility for watching what their kids are doing, not the governments.
Or... write in "No Confidence."
I think the fines and restrictions are totally unnecessary and possibly unconstitutional, but I'm 100% in favor of the studies. We've heard enough about violent and sexual video games warping children and turning them into serial killers; let's shine some light on it. Ultimately it's an empirical question with an accessible truth value. I suspect we'll find that video games do not damage children in any statistically significant way, and I think that'll go a long way to deflating this particular political football. If I'm wrong, and it turns out that video games do damage children, then I'd be first in line to regulate their sale. Either way, we're better off knowing for sure.
Recently, watching the Da Vinci Code movie, I marveled at how we have movies that allow PG-13 to contain "disturbing violent images" but only mild sex. There's a lot of sex not in that movie that's in the book. But the violence that was only passing in the book is really graphic in the movie. My conclusion was that the government cares only about limiting sex and not violence. p>
Now I read here that the government cares about violence in video games. Why not in movies?
It's the random way in which the government incoherently stabs us with little points of pain rather than ever creating any notion of consistent policy that troubles me way more than just whether they want ratings on video games or not.
I wouldn't care if they rated all video games heavily for sex and violence, and then left it to the market what to buy. But when they rate some but not all, regulate some but not all, what's the point? The only obvious result I see is the eventual strangulation of all US business by litigation.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
Does any of the bills address the Pentagon's usage of video games as a recruitment tool? Last I heard, the military can't even wait for students to get out of middle school before signing them up.
This is where you find out that the Democrats are the other political party and not "liberal" by definition.
They're just following the most basic of political teachings: It's easier to get people to vote if they're "protecting" their "children" from the "bad people".
You don't hate the children, do you?
You don't support the bad people, do you?
The only way to prevent this from happening is by writing letter to your Congress Critters and telling them exactly how you feel about the issues and that they will lose your vote (and the votes of anyone you can convince) if they do not vote against those bills.
Then you just have to convince enough of your friends/family to become an active voting bloc with you.
Freedom is not free. At the minimum, it takes time and effort.
Oh, whoops, I guess it is.
Well, I guess the Democrats have to find something to do with their time this year. After all, if they couldn't find something to keep themselves busy, they might have to start taking on the Republicans on things like systematic corruption-- or the process whereby the management of federal departments like FEMA or NASA have now been bungled to the point where they might as well not exist at all-- or the handling of a "War on Terror" that's long since stopped being about any actual threats to America and started being about just pouring money into a big pit-- or the Republican Congress' refusal to investigate the President's admitted violations of the law.
And of course the Democrats don't want to do that. So it's time to concentrate on the things that are really threats to America's wellbeing-- video games!
Does it seem odd to anyone else that additional laws are typically enacted to make previously criminal offenses even more criminal-y instead of enforcing those laws already enacted (or perhaps punishing the non-enforcement of said laws)? For instance: killing someone is already a crime - does it really need to be extra crime-y if the victim is somehow different from the perp?
The problem is you won't turn out to be right or wrong. You'll be both alleged right and alleged wrong because each side will pay for biased studies. It's not that good science is not done, it's that bad science is done, too.
See Ron Rivest's very interesting paper on chaffing and compare his theory of security through what amounts to a formalized and theoretically sound notion of smokescreen with the way the market is going.
I think in the end it will be something where people make up their minds and we just have to vote and hope. But I would hope we vote for freedom if we're unsure because freedoms lost are hard to get back. There probably is some occasional effect of violence in movies against weak minds, but the effect of lost freedom is not without tangible cost and I weigh the latter more heavily in my own book of public accounting. No scientific survey will ever sort that out.
For most of us, though, video games still come down to choice. Does letting someone pull a trigger not also let them not pull it? Rather than removing violence, maybe we should focus more on seeing the consequence of violence. In the studies I've chosen to believe (heh), the idea of consequence-free violence is closer to the root of problems than the mere choice of violence.
The Sims, for example, is full of ways to torture people to death with no consequence to the player. I might argue that practice, bloodless as it is, was worse than a game with guns that lets you rescue a princess or save a hostage or a nation, which some might argue instills basic values.
And what about movies, which offer no choice but force you to just ride the course. How is this better than sitting in a movie where you want the violence to stop but can't make it stop without leaving the people you came with. At least a video game gives you a choice at each moment.
It might be kinda cool, actually, if some movies were more videogame-like and you could press a button saying "no more of this kind of scene please" and it would dynamically tone things down for either just you or for the whole of an audience if everyone voted likewise... Then seeing the movie multiple times would give you a different experience every time, too, which would be great for the movie houses...
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
make sure to drink a cup of hot coffee
sulli
RTFJ.
The Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. I've just received word that the Emporer has dissolved the council permanently.
Game makers should just cover their asses and make an agreement/disclaimer that pops up before the game can be played that says,"By pressing the button, you agree that you are playing a game and understand that any violence in the game is for entertainment purposes only. You also agree that the author is not liable for anything detrimental you do in real life as a result of playing this game." Even if people don't read it, at least the game makers won't get in trouble for it.
I've been waving my shotgun around at the slightest noise while cowering behind this upturned dining table for years! For a long time I've been expecting video games to smash my doors down or climb through my windows and anally rape me, but now that the Guvmint is going to spend many hundreds of millions of tax dollars to banish this terror once and for all I can finally take this old blanket off my head at last.
Normally when a blurb like this comes up about 95% of slashdot freaks out and starts screaming "It's the bible beating republicans". Now that the blurb actually points out it's the democrats the posts are suddenly "the problem is both parties!"
This kind of double standards piss me off. Come on fuckers! Vote em out! Vote em all out! or was the rest of that just bullshit talk because you keep your fucking blinders on when it comes to the democrats? Do you vote on ideals or do you vote on the party line? I think the answer is apparent.
well considering that in my area, you may remember this in the national news, but a group of highschool football players shoved a pinecone up another teammates ass causing serious damage.
Also a kid from my area, is a suspect in that lacrosse team rape story you heard about on national news...
I'm in total agreement about sports... and i like sports just the way they are.
Its when we go too far, that things get us in trouble. Thats where parenting comes into play.
Do we laugh at the idea of kicking a baby... I sure do.
BUT do we actually kick a baby?
Most of us would never dare think of doing it in reality, but there are those few.
So what really is the problem here? Videogames? Sports? TV? Movies? Art? Speech? or humanity itself?
We are the one common aspect to all of the things we blaim for the behavior of humans...
It starts with us.... our parents.
These politicians are just out for a photo op. Senators/congressmen dont do anything on TV anyways unless its for PR. Ever watch C-Span? How much debate is actually taking place in the senate or the house? Very little. Most officials dont even show up because they are busy fund raising.
Our bills are written by lobbiests and "sponsered" by officials.
Its either an election year, or its time for the videogame lobby to pay up.
Dont worry, nothing will happen, and it if it does, you really cant do anything about it anyways because the government is out of control and beyond the reach of Americans.
This stuff never worries me.
the wedge issues:
abortion
race
gay marriage
sex and violence on tv
etc..
they will never go anywhere because there are always large numbers of people representing each side, but theyre nice little red herrings to drag up and grandstand upon during elections.
meanwhile, the real issues get swept under the rug so the incompetent can remain in office.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
The reason congress isn't seriously investigating activities that the press has called "illegal" is because they approved of all of those activities in the first place. Not only that, but the still do approve of them. And not only the republicans support it, so do the democrats. Why would they want to draw attention to the fact that the approved of some politically unpopular programs? You'd be better off if you'd just look at the facts and realize that the democratic party is not now, nor has it ever been the party of civil rights.
I guess the real problem isn't that the political parties are against civil rights, so much as the american public is. At least two thirds of this country is obsessed with inappropriately controlling aspects of other peoples lives. Some people want to tell you not to do drugs, some people want to tell you not to have gay sex, some people want to tell you you can't shop at wal-mart, some people want to tell you that you can't decide how to spend you own money, some people want to tell you that you can't play violent video games. Add all of that fucked up shit together and you have millions of people using the ballot box to try to control and regulate every little aspect of your life.
And then, people pretend that just because you can vote, they aren't trampling all over your rights. WTF? If I want to buy pot and gay porn at wal-mart, why the hell shouldn't I be able to? These people always talk about what's good for society, and the common good and all that crap, but you know what's really best for society? Everyone staying out of everyone else's shit. That's what's best for society. When it comes down to it, democracy is just another way of doing the same thing dictators do.
Morons.
Optimist.
KFG
focus on 'informing parents and protecting children' from the alleged dangers of those types of games.
It would be better to protect children from a knowledge-phobic society first.
Products are not speech. ... A game or a product has no status of any kind under the Bill of Rights.
No products? So books don't count... Whoops, thanks for playing.
Please re-read the text of the First Amendment, it doesn't have a 'unless it's for sale' clause in there.
Incredible. So sneeringly condescending, yet so naïve...
So many of us would love to vote them out. We would gladly cast votes for candidates who don't propose legislation based entirely on the bleatings of focus groups, and who doesn't put popularity above common sense.
The problem is, you're preaching to the choir, bruthah. (If by "preaching" you mean "being alienating and insulting.") We're not the problem. The problem is that there is no shortage of candidates who do just that--they've literally made a science out of fooling as many people as possible into thinking that they represent their best interests while doing little but muddy the waters and sully their station. And there's no shortage of induhviduals who eat up the FUD with a spoon in each hand because they think they're voting for their man.
Personally, I think the situation needs to get significantly worse. Slave-labor-camp worse. RIAA-rent-a-cops-shooting-to-kill worse. Eminent-domain-gone-wild worse. American-Idol-gets-preempted-three-straight-weeks- by-the-President-saying-everything-is-improving worse. Only when they start to notice that something is amiss, when they, or their children, or their relatives is finally inconvenienced to death, will they be ready for a long-overdue sea change.
Now, how can we make it worse?
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
As far as I know the video games that include violence and sex are rated for not so young people. People that could find the same stuff on tv without any problem anyways.
This witch hunt against video games is as stupid as it can get. I for one do not think that violence in video games causes violence in the real world (else I would be a serial killer) I actually think that it is the opposite, violence in the real world is the cause of violence in video games
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
The fact you seem unaware of there being more then 2 parties suggests a fault in your information gathering tools or methods. I'd suggest investing in new tools and/or methods to gather information with.
While only a small fraction of violent criminals are even familiar with video games, nearly all of them have been exposed to the Bible, a book containing and glorifying torture, genocide, incest, and many other despicable acts. Furthermore, many murderers have explicitly stated that they were motivated by the Bible.
(I'm only semi-kidding; I think the Bible cannot be banned, and most criminals would be criminal with or without it. But the Bible really is a horrific document and it really has been used to justify more killing that any other single document. And while the Bible contains some parts that promote moral behavior, large parts of it can only be described as abhorrent and reprehensible.)
Remember the saying "The devil makes work for idle hands"?
It often seems to me that the reason politicians come up with these madcap ideas is that they have nothing better to do.
It's depressing.