They're Thinking Of The Children (Just Not Thinking Very Hard)
We don't mean to ALARM you ... but it's possible that President Kennedy is in VERY GRAVE DANGER.
Although similar recent efforts have mostly failed, our very own Assembly Speaker Pro Tem Leland Yee is pushing a bill -- AB 450 -- that would fine retailers $1,000 for selling M-rated video games to the under-17 set. Leland, himself a child psychologist, points to surprisingly convincing evidence that violent play can lead to violent behavior, particularly among chowderheaded urchins whose useless, idiot parents are raising them without any common sense or impulse control. He's joined, for some reason, by the California Girl Scout Councils, who compare M-rated games to pr0n, tobacco, and alcohol -- a comparison at which there simply aren't enough eyes in the world to roll. According to one Scouting spokesperson, some video games "teach them to abuse women, join street gangs, kill police officers, even assassinate President Kennedy." Their concern for JFK's safety is touching. Srsly. We hear Lee Harvey Oswald was a minor, and played Grand Theft Auto all the time. If only Electronics Boutique had carded him!
As hysterical and clueless as some of the bill's supporters' remarks are, though, we surely would welcome an end to the game industry's sophomoric obsession with sex and guts. After the jump: boobs, parents, and a guy named Henry.
The International Game Developers' Association's lobbying efforts refer in offended tones to attempts to censor "creative endeavors," as if game designers are incapable of being creative without vomiting out an endless supply of decapitations and boobs. After all, it's not as though their ability freely to offer sex and violence to 14-year-olds was resulting in the production of many great masterpieces. Maybe shifting developers' focus away from Mature-content games (most of which are actually completely immature) for adolescents and onto thoughtful games for grown-ups is just what the videogame industry finally needs to start innovating again, something they haven't really done en masse since the late 80s. That's a change in direction that we'd really like to see, and would probably result in videogames being taken more seriously, as well as legitimizing the countless hours and dollars we've thrown away on them.
But getting the government involved in changing an industry's demographic focus seems like a recipe for disaster, and besides, that's certainly not the goal of AB 450's backers. They just want to protect kids from what may be psychologically destructive behavior, or at the very least, force kids to ask their parents to buy M-rated games for them, thereby making parents aware of what kind of gaming their kids are up to. Of course, responsible parents would already be keeping an eye on their childrens' media-consumption, and tempering any images of sex and violence. How, exactly, does one go about tempering images of sex and violence, thereby ensuring that their childrens' violent gaming (which may not be all that harmful after all) is not translated into violent actions? After all, it must be possible; plenty of kids play M-rated games and somehow live balanced lives and are raised into well-adjusted adulthood. But Leland and friends don't really have an interest in talking about that -- after all, it's so much easier and more exciting to enact bans than it is to get involved in a discussion of media literacy. Violence against women! Street gangs! President Kennedy!
It would be really helpful if kids were being taught how to constructively (or de-construcively) respond to images of sex and violence, rather than those images being hidden away and then suddenly sprung on them when they turn 18. But that would require media-literate legislators, educators, game developers, and parents -- all things that are, alas, in short supply. We're having trouble deciding whether we'd rather see kids raised by absent parents, by clueless legislative consensus, or by an industry that's obsessed with the free distribution of sex and violence to children.
If you're interested in this stuff, we super-highly recommend reading the works of MIT's Henry Jenkins, or his blurb for PBS, or some of the blog entries here, here, or here. You nerd.