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Edited by Macharius: 1/18/2013 9:40:44 PM
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Video games legislation introduced to US Congress

[quote]But in the United States, it’s Congress’s role to create laws and legislation, and Utah Democrat Jim Matheson has done just that. With the 113th United States Congress freshly sworn-in, the legislative maelstrom has begun unabated with H.R. 287, entitled the “Video Games Ratings Enforcement Act”. At first glance, this may seem confusing since the ESRB has been rating games in the United States for nearly two decades. However, the ESRB is entirely voluntary and self-regulating; this legislation, in essence, would make the ESRB the law of the land. “It shall be unlawful for any person to ship or otherwise distribute in interstate commerce, or to sell or rent, a video game that does not contain a rating label, in a clear and conspicuous location on the outside packaging of the video game, containing an age-based content rating determined by the Entertainment Software Ratings Board.” [...] Specifically, “It shall be unlawful for any person to sell or rent, or attempt to sell or rent (1) any video game containing a content rating of “Adults Only”… to any person under the age of 18; or (2) any video game containing content rating of “Mature”… to any person under the age of 17.” Breaking this proposed law wouldn’t result in a criminal charge; rather, it would result in a civil penalty of upwards of $5,000 per transgression.[/quote] [url=http://ca.ign.com/articles/2013/01/17/violent-games-legislation-introduced-to-us-congress?abthid=50f86be3cab6cfb906000059]Read the full story, fresh off the press.[/url] I would like to point out that children under 17 can still play M rated games, they just can't buy them.

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  • Edited by tlgCallum: 1/18/2013 4:02:24 PM
    Okey-doke, let's come at this from a legal perspective. In the words of the Dude, "this isn't a first amendment thing". This has nothing to do with freedom of speech. What this has to do with is regulating what is appropriate for minors to be viewing. All I'm seeing in the comments are minors who are grumpy because they'll no longer be able to buy games that are not necessarily appropriate for them. My advice? Get over it. Hell, maybe you shouldn't be viewing that content. Now, both film and music have ratings sytem that theoretically prevent minors from accessing adults-only content, and this will be no different. The government are not using videogames as a scapegoat for anything; the fact that the gaming industry has gone so long without a proper institutionalised system of age ratings should indicate that the government have actually not even looked at videogames closely enough over the past thirty years for it to become an area warranting legislation. The relatively recent growth of gaming as an industry and entertainment medium has caused a massive uptake in videogames by younger audiences. This naturally necessitates a legislative code of conduct that will properly regulate the sale of adults-only videogames to minors. While this might not work in practice, it's a step in the right direction for legitimising videogames as both an entertainment medium and an art form, as the majority of people still don't take them seriously. Let me put that on a new paragraph: "[b]While this might not work in practice, it's a step in the right direction for legitimising videogames as both an entertainment medium and an art form.[/b]" The idea of opposing this kind of legislation is ridiculous. It is a simple fact that there is content that is inappropriate for minors to be viewing. This ranges from sexual content, to violence, to drug use, and it's not because videogames affect behaviour (although the jury is still out on that one), or because minors are more impressionable than adults (although they actually are). It's simply because minors have a low emotional maturity, and sometimes intellectual maturity, and should not be presented with the images presented in say, the excessively-violent BlOps2. Don't -blam!- with me here, I've played BlOps2, and it's horrendously violent. I'm not usually affected by that stuff in games or film, but it was just ridiculous: guys caught in bear traps and then shot to death? An almost constant stream of throat-stabbing? It's a simply fact that the vast majority of minors are not at the point that they should be exposed to that. Preparing for intense flaming from under-18s in 3... 2... 1...

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