Posted by
Just a guy on Wednesday, August 09, 2006 12:15:00 AM
Legislation was recently signed into law in Louisiana to ban certain video games for any minors. Now you may think that stopping violent video games from getting into the hands of our kids is a good thing or you may be vehemently against it but this bill is pure lunacy. This bill does fill the normal role of anti video game legislation in that it stops the sale of violent video games to our youth. But it takes it a bit further, and by a bit I mean they burn the constitution.
It has now become illegal to sell a game to a minor that: "The average person, applying contemporary community standards, would
find that the video or computer game, taken as a whole, appeals to the
minor's morbid interest in violence."
Now I'm no saint, but I feel that I have contributed my share to society. I pay taxes and have never once committed a violent crime. What may surprise you is that I used to be obsessed with guns! that right, I played cops and robbers and "shot" my friends to the point where they were "dead". Now I know that the point "Video games don't cause violence" has been driven to the ground so let's jump to my favorite part of the legislation.
"The game, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors."
That's right Mario, get off our TV screens you sadist! To leave something up to that much interpretation is just lunacy. We have now come to a point of appeasement. The ESRB was established to prevent something like this from happening, but we all now how appeasement works. Now politicians are deciding that the losing battle they are fighting against violent video games should be expanded to gratuitous video games.
Maybe I'm just a young whippersnapper that doesn't understand the evils of interactive electronics yet, or maybe I'm just ignorant, but since when is it ok to censor something due to it's artistic or educational value? I believe that no one would argue a Fahrenheit 451 society to be a beneficial one for our youth, but I find it hard to believe there are those who find the antithesis of that to be acceptable. I only hope that the appeals put together by the Video Game lawyers remove this legislation as it did in Minnesota as censorship is not something that this country should stand for.