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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
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.
I, and I alone, decide which values to give my kids.
;-)
So that they can grow up and rebel against them, of course!
-stormin
The Southern Baptist Convention has creationism. On Slashdot, we have porn.
It makes no sense to differentiate between the two anymore.
It never did. If you're voting for a party, you're a moron. Vote for people, not parties. There are good ones and awful ones in all of them.
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
That is for sure one of the values I'll give them.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. I've just received word that the Emporer has dissolved the council permanently.
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.
Or humans, but we grade on a curve.