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Clinton Would Crack Down On Game Content
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Dec 23, 2007 08:58 AM
from the proud-of-fepa dept.
from the proud-of-fepa dept.
thefickler sends us word that Hilary Clinton has taken a public stand in favor of shielding children from game and other animation content that she deems inappropriate. Quote: "When I am president, I will work to protect children from inappropriate video game content." Politically, this puts her in company with Republican Mitt Romney on the subject of game censorship. Her fellow Democrats are content to let the industry self-regulate.
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ESRB Supplements Rating System With Summaries 53 comments
The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) announced today that in addition to their standard ratings for video games, they'll begin including summaries of the games, highlighting the parts which earned the rating. As Giant Bomb points out, some are quite entertaining to read. The new policy drew praise from Senators Hillary Clinton (D-NY) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT), both of whom have spoken out against "inappropriate" game content in the past. The summaries are viewable at the ESRB's website; thus far, they've only done them for games rated since July 1st.
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In your face parents (Score:4, Insightful)
Now parent can focus on what's most important to them... consuming propaganda.
Well, Screw Democrats then (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well, Screw Democrats then (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Well, Screw Democrats then (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not if the parents approve?
If your legal guardian feels that you are old enough and responsible to enjoy said entertainment then it should be their right. It should also be their right to prevent their child from playing such things if they so desire by not giving the money to their kids in the first place and/or monitoring their internet activities.
If you bring up tobacco and alcohol, those things are of course dangerous and have been scientifically proven to cause harm. That said, once you are 18 then I believe you should be able to put whatever into your body you feel like, but a parent giving his kids cigarettes is about as negligent as giving them some mercury or cyanide to play with.
Video games and even content of pornographic nature has never been conclusively shown to cause physical or mental harm to the average human. Yes, there are cases where people play a video game and flip out (like kids jumping out of windows because they thought they could fly like in Pokemon), but the same thing could be said about a psycho who reads the Bible or Koran and kills someone because he claims god told him to do it.
Again, if a parent feels their child can handle it or just don't care, they'll buy it for them anyways. Its kind of just stupid to have more laws on an issue that in reality is a moot point.
Parent
Re:Well, Screw Democrats then (Score:4, Insightful)
On the contrary, you should never STOP debating it and you should strie to make sure the politicians know that whichever of them does it more will be losin votes. Make them compete about who will do it the least.
Parent
Yup (Score:5, Funny)
The gaming industry is obviously young and naive (Score:5, Insightful)
Something of a Stretch (Score:5, Informative)
Why cant they be treated like the movie studios? (Score:5, Informative)
Why cant the politicians and the industry come together and set up a system thats just like the MPAA ratings system and policed the same way? Oh wait, they did, its called the ESRB.
I guess the problem is the small number of highly publicized incidents (Hot Coffee, various games where the clothes and human body are seperate meshes and therefore you can "remove" the clothes and get a "naked body" and others) where the ESRB has been forced to change the rating given to a game.
What the video game industry needs is a lobby group as powerful as the MPAA is (they have a lobby group but it doesn't have much influence in the halls of power). They should try and get the retail stores on side (perhaps get the big retailers to push arguments like "we do everything we can to check that people are legally allowed to buy these games" or something)
Hrm! (Score:5, Insightful)
A few examples:
Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. A store selling 18+ games to twelve-year-olds should be punished.
Good idea, honestly. Sorry, but I found Hot Coffee pretty stupid.
Again, I approve of that idea, greatly.
After all, this legislation is going to affect underage people, unlike Jack Thompson's ideas of banning such games for everyone.
Re:Hrm! (Score:5, Insightful)
Fining a video game store for selling certain games to minors? Who decides what games are appropriate for minors? When I was 12, a friend of mine and I played Doom II on his Sega Saturn, and neither of us was harmed by it, even when we decided to have fun and run around with the chainsaw, spewing blood all over the place. When I was 14, I got a hold of a copy of GTA 3, and my friends and I thought it was great fun to run around shooting cops with a rocket launcher, and again, nobody was harmed by it.
What counts as a harmful game? "Hidden sexual content?" I wasn't aware that 12 year olds were harmed by sex as depicted in the GTA games. It is a stretch to claim that after playing a game like San Andreas, teenagers were running around, joining gangs, picking up hoes, and killing cops. If a teenager has emotional problems to begin with, or has trouble distinguishing the fantasy presented in a video game from reality, then they need professional psychological help.
Just how far do we take the "harmful" label, anyway? Is it more harmful to be in a game where your character is a gang member shooting cops, or a game where your character is a pilot dropping bombs over Vietnam and Iraq? Are both games harmful? What about a game where you are a wizard, who throws bolts of lighting at your enemies and electrocutes them? What if the Ender's Game novels were made into a video game; would that be harmful to youth? For that matter, why hasn't Ender's Game been taken off the shelves, or subjected to an age requirement: Ender murders a few of his classmates, with his bare hands, and then leads an army to commit genocide. Why isn't Mrs. Clinton calling for a crack down on violent novels as well, which describe violence in quite a bit of detail, far more than a video game can (video games can only provide a visual and audio reference; a written work can describe all the senses in a single passage)?
Of course, video games are an easy target, just like music was an easy target in the 80s and 90s, or hippies were an easy target in the 60s and 70s, or Jazz singers in the 20s. A candidate who wants to say they are protecting our youth only needs to find an easy target, and they are good to go: Lieberman chose Marilyn Manson, Al Gore chose Twisted Sister, and Hillary Clinton chose San Andreas. I doubt that any of them actually care about our kids, except to try and get our votes.
Parent
Re:Hrm! (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Big Brother (and Sister) (Score:4, Insightful)
PGA
Re:Big Brother (and Sister) (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Well, that decided it for me. (Score:4, Interesting)
I've really been trying to figure out how I was going to vote for in the primaries. Since I'm registered Democrat in Florida, I can only vote to Democrats in the primary. I like Kucinich, but know he is terribly unlikely to win the primaries let alone the general election. That left Obama and Clinton as reasonable choices for me since I'm not a fan of Edwards. I've been leaning toward Obama because Clinton just seems to be too populist, almost as if her stance on issues is determined by the changing winds of public opinion. Despite his lack of experience, I think I'm going to have to vote for Obama because this sort of thing goes directly against my belief that government should be getting up into this type of thing.
*emo sigh* I'm such a tortured mix of liberal and conservative. No one gets me.
Subject needs fixing. (Score:5, Insightful)
Fixed that for you.
Honestly, I doubt that H. Clinton gives one whit about games. But her focus groups tell her it'll get her a couple points with the "Think Of The Children" voting segment, so she'll say she's "against violent video games." She'll say whatever'll get the voters off to get elected (the same can be said of many politicians).
On a somewhat related note, Ms. Clinton has always struck me as the kind of person who, if presented with a pistol and a note from that stated if she killed the people on the attached list, she'd be out the door, gun in hand, before checking that the thing was even loaded.
In the USA medium ratings are NOT laws (Score:4, Informative)
In the USA no other medium has its ratings enforced by the government. Not the music industry, not the comic book industry, not the internet, not tv, and not the film industry. The MPAA ratings are self-enforced. There is no law against selling a ticket to an R rated or unrated film to anyone. If someone under 17 isn't allowed into an R-rated movie without an adult it is because the movie industry is enforcing those rules, not the government.
There are state and local laws against pornography but to the best of my knowledge there are no state or national laws regulating the sale of violent forms of entertainment.
Numerous laws from places like Indianapolis, St. Louis county, Oklahoma, and Illinois have all been ruled unconstitutional. To single out videogames for regulation would require a mountain of evidence that they are harmful to minors. No such mountain exists.
And this is surprising anyone? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Think of the children! (Score:5, Insightful)
Didn't you pay attention to the last election? Those things don't matter. What matters is "family values."
Parent
Re:Socialism (Score:4, Insightful)
And before someone goes into a rant about the cost, don't you think spending money on fixing your broken and wounded is better than spending billions on killing others?
I've seen people around here saying "oh but its too hard for parents to monitor games 'cos they'd have to play them".. well there are plenty of review sites (and room for new websites that rates games suitability for kids) that comment in more detail about what's in the game than the ESRB rating.
Parent
Re:Socialism (Score:4, Insightful)
Take the following scenario, you are in a car accident, or been shot. Would you want to be shot or in a car accident in say Mexico, or say Norway? This is important because the quality of emergency care you get is a result of the quality of health care. So if more people die in America due to accidents or gun shots then you have two reasons; bad drivers and lots of guns killing people, and health care that is not capable of dealing with those situations.
What you are doing by removing accidents and homicides is being selective in your statistics and focusing on those people that don't do dangerous sports, or do anything that might bring harm on them. Not a good idea...
Parent
Re:Socialism (Score:4, Insightful)
The entire point of stats aren't to give credit to your cause. While that is the popular thing to use them for, it is to see where the problems are or the trends. Lets put it this way, If more people are dieing from gunshot wounds in one country where guns are legal for everyone to own then in another country where only government officials, law enforcement or military people can have, the problem isn't the medical treatment, it is the presence of guns. When you do something like a comparison of countries, you have to look for places where things are severely different and find a way to normalize them. Poor people in the UK don't have cars, so normalizing the effect of motor vehicle accident makes sense. Average citizens in the UK and Japan don't carry guns, some can in the US, normalizing for this needs to happen.
So yes, it is entirely appropriate to make a fair comparison. Even when it doesn't agree with your world view.
Parent
Re:Socialism (Score:4, Informative)
No one in the US goes without treatment. Hell, even illegal aliens get treated. It may bankrupt you, but if you are in need of treatment in the US, you will get treated.
Parent
Re:Title is incorrect... (Score:4, Insightful)
That makes some sense - just like rating movies.
Ok, But that's what we have NOW. We have a voluntary ratings system that the industry standardizes on. Same as the movie industry.
The catch is they're trying to make it illegal to sell these games to minors, which, well, yeah. That's a bit beyond what they currently have going in the film industry. Yes, if you're 14 you'll been shooed out if you try to see a R rated movie, and most rental stores will stop you from renting "Faces of Death". But it's not outright illegal. And most retailers and rental stores will shoo you away if you're not old enough to buy a M rated game. But again, not illegal if the occasional kid slips through.
Proponents of "video game regulation" aren't really interested in the market, or even protecting kids. They know that 99% of people over the age of 30 think "Pong", "Pac-man", and "Space Invaders" when they think video games, and are exploiting them wanting to make sure the industry stays that way. It's a cheap political ploy, nothing more.
Parent
Poster is incorrect... (Score:5, Interesting)
"I was motivated to take action when I found out that there was embedded illicit sexual content in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. The [ESRB] was unaware of the embedded content. I called on the FTC to investigate the source of the content and, as a result, the company issued a recall of the game."
Hillary takes full credit for getting GTA:SA off the shelves. That's not limiting who gets access, that's eliminating access.
Video games are already rated. Parents need to be aware of what their kids are buying, and the current ratings system allows this.
Also, her position in that bill was to create an oversight board to make sure the ESRA was giving "correct" ratings. If you'd like to see her full waffle on the issue (including the part where she shuts up in trade for campaign cash) check out Ars Technica's coverage of the dustup.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20051212-5740.html [arstechnica.com]
According to the Ars-ticle, even Jack Thompson knew the bill was a bad idea.
Think about what that means - Hillary is both more dumb and more rabid than Jack Thompson.
Parent