 | Another game law struck downAugust 25th, 2006 |
Well, “preliminarily injuncted” anyway. CNet reports that this time it was Louisiana’s, on the by-now familiar grounds that games are protected speech, there’s no solid evidence of harm to minors, and the terms were all left vague. Pretty much the same grounds that all the other laws have foundered on.
At this rate, we’re building up a nice set of precedents to make it nonsensical to keep passing laws of this sort.
The law in question wasn’t against publishers and developers, of course; the approach these days is to come up with wording that puts the burden on retailers, under penalty of fines, to not sell violent games to minors. These laws never use the industry’s own ESRB ratings as criteria, and they ignore that books and other media do not have this same restriction.
I’m not a fan of selling M games to kids either, obviously, but we do need to ensure that games are treated the same under the law as any other form of creative expression. Anything else would be incredibly stifling for the development of games as an art form, which frankly has a long way to go.
If developers and publishers want to help the cause, the best thing they could do is make significant positive inroads on the publicity front with games that do advance the art form , or at least the accessibility. I’m engaged in an email discussion right now with one of my aunts, who is a teacher, and she is very down on games because of the violence, the increasingly short attention span of the kids she teaches, and the general rise in plain old disrespect that she sees. But she does see the potential for games that, as she puts it, “games for manners, turn taking, kindness and so forth” — things that ironically, are quite within reach for games.
(How about a game about making other people win? Everyone has a given objective that is public; every player has limited resources to work to try to help everyone else get to their objective. Each “hand” or something, a “hand winner” is declared; both the person who helped the most and the winner split the pot. After a set of hands, the person with the largest pot is the winner overall).
We have to convince people like her, who are the voters that politicians are catering to when they propose legislation like this. And we’re not going to accomplish it with Dead Rising, alas.
Part of the issue with even doing games like this is that we’re bound into our current audience; they want zombies, we provide them. But I think a well-done game that taught kindness (or insert your positive moral value here) would still do well, because above all, our audience are fans of gameplay. Many devs, though, probably wouldn’t tackle it because of financials; another group might not because it’s just not “cool.”
Perhaps part of what the ESA should be doing is providing grant money to help develop games that can serve as this sort of showcase for what games can do. I don’t actually know if the ESA does grants, but some proactive spending on things like positive games, positive studies, and so on, would eventually help the lobby not have to spend money on fighting lawsuits instead.
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[...] Another game law struck down Well, “preliminarily injuncted” anyway. CNet reports that this time it was Louisiana’s, on the by-now familiar grounds that games are protected speech, there’s no solid evidence of harm to minors, and the terms were all left vague. Pretty much the same grounds that all the other laws have foundered on. At this rate, we’re building up [...] [...]