"District of Columbia political, religious and community leaders gathered at a church this week to support a proposed ban on the sale of violent and sexually explicit video games to minors. They summed up their objections in a word: poison," detnews.com reported on Saturday.
We all know of course that these people have a point - children shouldn't be playing games like Grand Theft Auto. But this is a complex issue and reading the piece carefully reveals the many problems at the heart of this debate...
For a start:
"These politicians cannot pull this," said Ian "Red" Morganstein, 29, an assistant manager at For Your Entertainment, a store that sells Grand Theft Auto and other games labeled mature. He said the store does not sell the games to anyone younger than 17.
"It's not us. It's not the game companies. It's the parents," Morganstein said. He said he has turned away youngsters only to see them return with a parent. "If you're concerned about it, don't bring your 8-year-old son in here to buy games about violence and sex."
How do you legislate against poor parenting decisions? How do you educate stressed-out, over-worked and sometimes just plain stupid mums and dads that little Johnny should probably not be blasting hookers to death for two hours every night? You can't. Some people chose not to engage in the arguments concerning videogame violence, because videogame violence gives them a few hours of peace every night.
Another problem is this: the key guiding force behind this campaign is the religious right, and who wants to be told what to do by a bunch of self-righteous zealots, who find it utterly impossible to take a moral stance against anything without dragging Christian dogma into the equation? And we know they won't stop at preventing minors from playing violent games.
Meanwhile, it's difficult to stick up for the videogame industry while it transmogrifies into just another collective of buck-passing, profit-rabid corporations, treating their employees and customers like automatons and justifying every morally questionable action by lazily citing freedom of speech or the pressures and demands of the market place.
As gamers, we're stuck between these ridiculous groups as they plot out the future of this industry. Do we have a say?
