A Challenge to Freedom
A European perspective on the Californian violent games bill. (Hi Ted!)
The chances are that you've already seen "A Challenge to the Press", a blog post made this week by Insomniac Games' Ted Price. In it, he bemoans alleged misquoting in press articles, and goes on to challenge the press to abandon tabloid-style quote-led stories in favour of in-depth reporting of an issue close to his own heart - the US Supreme Court's upcoming decision on a Californian law which would forbid the sale of games with mature content to children.
I don't really want to speak to the first part of Price's argument - others have already done so, more eloquently and passionately than I could. I would, however, like to briefly look at the second part of his argument - not least because, while Price may expect gamers to universally share his concerns, I'm really not sure that's the case on this side of the puddle.
As a European, the first time I encountered the long-running battle over the sale of violent games to minors in the United States, it took a long time to wrap my head around the industry's arguments. As a gamer, I love my pastime; as a liberal-minded person, I have no truck with censorship. Yet I've lived my whole life in countries where those views sit fairly comfortably with the idea of restricting the sales of certain media to minors.
Bluntly, the idea of preventing children from buying 18-rated games (or the US equivalent of same) just doesn't seem like that big a deal to me.
I don't think I'm alone in this view. Every time the issue rears its head - which it has done with clockwork regularity over the past decade or so - the comments from European gamers carry the same air of bewilderment.
Almost every European country has some variation on the system in the UK, where age ratings are enforceable by law at a retail level - in other words, where retailers can be punished for selling adult-rated games to kids - and yet our sky has resolutely failed to collapse onto our heads. Engage in a discussion on this topic with European gamers, and you're more likely to be subjected to frustrated accounts of watching ill-advised parents purchase 18-rated games for their 10-year-olds than you are to hear a heated call for the repeal of our laws.
Of course, California's violent games law isn't quite the same as the laws enacted by European nations - not least in that it's a pretty hasty, ill-considered piece of legislation, by all accounts. The logical thing, from our perspective in Europe, would be to give some legal weight to ESRB ratings - making it illegal for shops to sell M-rated games without seeing some ID first. (In a nation which happily asks white-haired, bearded grandfathers for ID before serving them beer, this is surely less of an imposition than it sounds to us free-wheeling, non-ID-carrying British types.)
That would make sense to me, although I don't think Price or his peers in the games businesses would like it much. The current proposed law is altogether less easy to agree with, as it ignores the ESRB in favour of setting out a rather nebulous set of standards for "unsuitable" content. The law's proponents clearly don't see the ESRB as being harsh enough in its judgements on content, a strong hint towards the ultra-conservative thought which underlies the bill.
Yet there's an argument which says that the bill has only been able to make it this far - all the way to a hearing in the US Supreme Court, where admittedly it seems likely to be defeated on constitutional grounds - because the industry has fought tooth and nail against it, rather than taking the wind out of its sails with a compromise.
Game publishers and retailers claim to be committed to keeping unsuitable products out of the hands of minors, and have launched various initiatives to that end over the past decade - but even if this has achieved some success in preventing retailers from unquestioningly handing M-rated games to children, it has always felt more like a rearguard action to stop US states from legislating against mature games, rather than a movement rooted in any true sense of social responsibility.
The pivotal legal point in the Supreme Court's judgement will probably be whether California's proposed law violates the first amendment of the US constitution, so the industry's rhetoric - Price's included - is now focused on dangling the spectre of government censorship in front of the eyes of the public, and on pointing out that no other forms of media face this kind of control (although it's worth noting that cinemas in particular have tightened up their enforcement of age restrictions in recent years).
These are reasonable arguments, of course, but Price only mentions in passing the real elephant in the room. Sitting right in the middle of the shattered wreckage of the conference table trumpeting loudly is Wal-Mart, the largest retail chain in the United States - and perhaps one of the most conservative. The fear among publishers is that if California's law, or other laws like it, were to pass, Wal-Mart wouldn't institute age checks. Instead, it would just stop stocking M-rated games entirely.
It's not an unjustified fear. There is, after all, another age rating in the United States - the extremely rarely used AO, or Adults Only, rating. Wal-Mart doesn't carry AO games, and the limited number of retailers which do carry such titles keep them squirrelled away in a separate area of the store from the rest of the game titles. As a result, selling an AO game in any numbers is a challenging proposition - which of course means that not very many AO games get made.
As Price suggests in his blog, California's laws could have a similar chilling effect on M-rated games. The end result could be, quite simply, to kill off the market for M-rated boxed games entirely. This is the "censorship" to which Price refers - not strictly speaking government censorship, but rather an economic censorship forced upon the industry by one of the world's biggest retail players.
That's a frightening and unpleasant prospect, and gamers are right to get behind efforts to prevent it from happening. Yet it's not the only facet of this issue. Many parents - many of them gamers themselves - will understand and support the desire to place control of the media their children access back into parental hands.
It's one thing for a parent to make a decision that their child is mature enough to handle an M-rated game, and entirely another for a child to be able to buy an M-rated game without parental involvement. That's a contrast which is recognised in most European nations right now, but which is only subject to a voluntary code in the USA. That may sound like a small difference, but it's a cultural gulf which can make this argument pretty difficult to comprehend for those of us back on the old continent.
One thing is certain - the real bogeyman in the entire debate is not the games business, nor is it concerned parents. It's not Governor Schwarzenegger (whose hypocrisy in signing a bill clamping down on the kind of violent media which made him famous has been noted far and wide). It's not even, though I say it through gritted teeth, the conservative Christian pressure groups who campaign against mature media. The villain of the piece is Wal-Mart and the other retail chains which would follow its lead. Their involvement threatens to turn what could (with a little work) be a sensible, moderate piece of legislation into sweeping, hugely damaging censorship.
That's what this debate is really about. Before the games business can be free from the danger of censorship, it must first be free from the chilling effect of being in economic thrall to retail chains who will always put the desires of conservative America ahead of any high-minded concepts of freedom. Until that happens, Price is right - if perhaps for the wrong reasons.
For the sake of our dearly loved hobby, for the even more fundamental sake of basic freedom of expression, we should all (even those of us in Europe) cross our fingers and hope the Supreme Court crushes this bill.
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Comments (32) Latest comment 2 years ago
Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!
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If that doesn't suit you, bypass the shops and use digital distribution. Or go independent. Indie developers (like filmmakers and musicians) remain free to create and distribute what they want.
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Games makers will make games that sell. Wal-Mart will stock games that sell. They obviously think the market is for conservative non offensive material, and don't want to alienate their market by stocking offensive games.
I'm sorry but thats how the market works Ted. You live in a county full of retentive bible readers, get over it.
If there were enough folk clamouring to buy M or AO rated games, they could shop somewhere else and Wal-Mart would lose market share.
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Laws should exist to protect the safety of others. But they're banded about to control the population and justify the existence of people who are supposed to be at the top of our society. It's no wonder the majority have as little regard for these people as they do for the laws they keep sh*tting out year on year.
The games industry's only concern for such laws is the potential for it to reduce profits.
I don't think there's a gamer on the planet that thinks laws will ever stop anyone from playing a game they choose. That's not to suggest limiting access of violent games to the young isn't a bad idea if there's hard evidence it does actually affect them. In which case there must be huge ramifications for many industries who products and services could also potentially harm young minds. As far as I'm aware there isn't a shred of evidence that suggests a normal non-violent person's personality is changed by playing a game. If there is, then I think we'd already know about it, and there would understandably be a massive outcry and action would already have been taken.
Utlimately the responsiblity of keeping disturbing images away from children falls to parents. Perhaps if society and all it's governing bodies did more to help and ensure people were better parents, we wouldn't need to live in a world with a million laws desperately trying to guide us into being little saints.
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Happy to see some of the context behind the story, rather than the "GOVERNATOR'S APPLICATION TO OUTLAW VIDEO GAMES" headlines being bandied around.
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I thought they did, and surely the underlying principle is exactly the same.
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"I don't think there's a gamer on the planet that thinks laws will ever stop anyone from playing a game they choose."
Let's take a look at other stuff of which the access is restricted to adults: porn, alcohol and tobacco in some countries. I think almost every European country has laws preventing under age persons to buy any of these goods. That's the theory. Now let's take a look at the RL, as we gamers like to call it. In France (where I live), cafés and tobacco shops won't ask for your age if you try to buy tobacco or a beer.
I can even remember, in the 90's, when I was maybe 12, my parents dropping me on a regular basis at a Tobacco shop's corner, asking me to go on a quick refill trip while they waited in the car. Of course, the lady behind the desk asked me my age, but always, the sentence "It's not for me but for my parents" was a received by a comprehensive nod followed by the delivery of the restricted goods. Maybe that's just France. Or the 90's.
Point is, no one is surprised when they see a 15 year old smoking on a bench in a park, flipping through the latest PlayBoy issue, a beer can sitting next to him. I know I wouldn't. So we can all agree that laws, in these cases, are not made to be strictly enforced, but to remind the responsible adults that on these issues, they should control and educate their children.
Back to your initial problematic, "how children can buy games without a parent even around." They will always be able to. Law or not. And we all know it. If that California law gets approved, it will just join a long list of stupid and useless laws that flourish (and sometimes disappear) in the different States of America (did you know that until 2003 sodomy was forbidden in several US states?).
By the way, I would also have to agree with Jimmyhill11. There's no such thing as economic censorship. Wal-Mart won't distribute M-rated games in California because they would be reluctant to do age checks - which, by the way, they're already doing for other products they sell? So what, other retailers will do it, (Best Buy etc.)
Really, Ted and Rob, I think you are both extrapolating on the consequences of a law that has every chance to get smashed by the Supreme Court hammer anyway. Much ado about nothing, as Shakespeare would say
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They may look like us, talk like us, and (apart from the gun thing) mostly act like us, but the laws that underpin their lives are structured in a very different way. I think thats why most people just don't see the problem.
I was going to ramble on a whole ton, but I'll just cut it down to this:
Its not thae rating itself that is the problem, its the stigma of the rating that does all the damage.
Getting an AO rating, or (for DVD's) an NC17 rating carries a stigma far worse than a BBFC 18 rating in this country, so much so that studios will do all they can to avoid it, because the damage it does at retail is great enough.
While I don't think this law (in the unlikely event that it was passed) would cripple games as an art form forever, I think it could stun their progress for a few years while their biggest market adjusts to the changes.
I'm sure Wall-Mart would stock them in time, but there would be several years of resistance first.
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Not so much, no. Unlike over here, where an 18 means you have to be 18 to even sit in front of the screen, the 'R' (Restricted) rating in America means that anyone under 17 can see the film if they are accompanied by someone over 17. Which leads to strange situations like when I was in Florida and saw Terminator 3, and had my viewing experience pretty much ruined by a couple of restless 4-year olds.
I have to totally agree with this article, I find it ridiculous that there is an argument over this. There should be no problem with restricting certain games to certain age groups, and I'm incredulous that games companies are fighting this. I though they'd be only too happy to pass responsibility for censorship onto the retailers and parents, really. If the parents are the ones who have to legally buy these games for their kids, surely much of the controversy would disappear, but what do I know, eh?
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Surely your viewing experience was ruined by the fact that it was Terminator 3 that you were watching?
That film should be erased from the earth.
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Violent games are more silly stoned so two birds with one stoner and all that....
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Of course, producers now do their damndest to avoid an X rating simply because no advertising is going to hurt their profits. There's also the issue that AFAIK under 18's can be legally barred from X rated films in the US, so again reduced profits. So there is total hypocrisy in the arguments coming from the US now, as there is already a rating in place that prevents access to media on the basis of age (not to mention the fact that this is also true for XXX porn).
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If it was my children wouldn't be so much concerned about the graphical violence but more the messages behind it. I'd rather see my kid play GTA than one of those 'look at how awesome the (US) army is'-games or movies.
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Yours isn't one of them.
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Anyway, I do not mind laws restricting the sale as long as the stores are aware that the majority of gamers are over 18 anyway and do not think they cannot sell 18 cert games (not much an issue in Europe but over in Puritanistan across the Atlantic...)
Another interesting difference between here and there is that IIRC most European countries do not criminalize what minors can do (regarding drinking etc.), the laws instead only regulate the adults that are supposed to prevent the minors from obtaining age-restricted items and services. However, in the United States they have criminalized underage drinking etc. - why not do the same for games if they are serios about it? A 14-year old playing an M-rated game should be punished - if they followed the drinking laws logic...
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In the US the only other media that has a legaly enforced age rating is pornography. Combine that with the insane policies of Wall Mart (something the movie industrie also suffers from, see This Movie Is Not Yet Rated) and you get a verry different situation then the one in Europe. A situation that is much closer to censorship then sensible regulation.
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plus remove talibans from games..... since we kill them in reality ....there is no need to do it virtually too
Man and his laws.....
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'...retail chains who will always put the desires of conservative America ahead of any high-minded concepts of freedom.'
Nicely put
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So if some scrote went into WalMart, bought an M rated game, and was found out, it wouldn't be the scrote that was busted for fraud, it would be WalMart carrying the can even if they had checked the ID and it was convincing. A shut-down would cost them enormous sums, and so the risk isn't worth it just to sell a few copies of Manhunt.
Age related restrictions are only useful if the law only obliges the shop to check, and busts them for not checking. Prosecuting the store for accepting fake ID in good faith kills the whole thing stone dead. The problem is the whole way the US deals (or fails to deal) with age restrictions, for guns, booze, the works. Unless the entire system is overhauled, it's stuck that way.
It's the laaaaaaw... of the west...
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Americans don't have any objection to violence in the media, only sex. If this law goes through, Walmart will still sell Modern Warfare 3, along with anything else that sells by the truckload.