Brendan Doms

I was happy to see from various news outlets over the past couple days that a federal court smacked down an Illinois law forbidding the sale of violent video games to minors for being unconstitutional.

This latest craze of violent-video-games-are-bad-for-our-kids has especially irked me. It's hammered home the fact that most of the people making laws out there have no clue about the technology that those laws are for. This reaches as far as the DMCA, but it also strikes closer to my hobby of choice - including even the ridiculous and laughable bill that Schwarzenegger signed for California this past October (it's a law that will help ban sales of games that he added his likeness and/or voice talents to).

At my workplace this summer there were many fathers who complained about the San Andreas Hot Coffee mod, and they screamed that something like that should not be in a video game that their kids could potentially get their hands on. Except that the ERSB works, because the horrendous Hot Coffee mod (which in my opinion should have been allowed in a game intended for adults) was just that - a mod - which is illegal and not actually a part of the game. For some reason the smart intelligent men I worked with didn't see the distinction, and neither did a lot of state legislators.

Since then, a lot of bills have been shuffling around state offices, threatening to impose laws on the sales of video games. Now, Best Buy and Target can limit who they sell their merchandise to all they want (though I think it's incredibly stupid, and not worth their time, especially when I went to Target at the age of 17 to buy an M rated game that said "17+" on the box and one of their employees refused to sell me the game because 17+ "obviously means you have to be 18 to buy it"), but the ESRB exists so that no law will hamper the sale of video games. And like I said above, it works. The industry has become self-regulating, the way it should be. Rockstar did not include anything like the Hot Coffee mod because they knew it would hurt sales getting an A rating from the ESRB, not because there was any moral reason not to.

If lawmakers are going to ignore the ESRB they might as well dissolve it. However, I feel that this would be the worst possible thing that could happen. The ESRB has kept video games in check, and is much more cost effective than Washington. Besides, we should want lawmakers to be giving us rights, rather than be taking them away. And, that being said, if they're going to ban anything, they should start with books. Books by far have the least censored, most explicit, and most violent depictions of sex of any pop medium out there. Movies and games and music are far tamer than books when it comes to sex. Don't get me wrong, I don't want any form of expression censored or banned, I'm just saying that if our statesmen actually cared about the moral issue instead of the media buzz then they should have started banning books long ago.

As for repealing dumb laws that ignore the ESRB and try to unconstitutionally hamper our first amendment rights, all of the affected states - here's lookin' at you Cali - should be jumping on the bandwagon.