I don’t know for sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, it’s pretty reasonable to penalize people for deceiving a ratings board about the content of a game. On the other hand: The thing that leaves me with a sick feeling in my stomach is that it will be the government penalizing people for deceiving the ratings board.
As it stands right now, the ESRB can leverage fines against the developer/publisher for doing shit like Hot Coffee — but I guess that’s not enough?
Maybe I just don’t like the precedent that it sets. Even though it seems on the surface like an eminently reasonable bill, it makes my skin crawl and I’m not entirely sure why.
I don’t like it because it points out video games as “different.” It’s an entertainment media. I don’t want the government to do the same thing to movies, music, or other entertainment.
You know, I was thinking about it some more and I realize more reasons why I don’t like this.
This bill makes the assumption that the game industry needs help regulating itself which is BS.
I was thinking about an example while playing World of Warcraft (sorry for those who don’t play, but it made sense to me at the time). So we have our own guild with our own policies in WoW. It would be as if Blizzard knew what our policies were and decided to step in to enforce our own policies on us as if we can’t regulate ourselves.
Or another example is a parent who has children in a club. This club has its own policies, and it would be like a parent stepping in assuming the children can’t regulate themselves.
It perpetuates the idea that the game industry can’t regulate itself, and that’s a bunch of BS. The mere idea of this bill probably makes a lot of people think the industry is incapable of taking care of itself and needs outside assistance. And that just isn’t the case.
This bill makes my skin crawl, too.
Yeah, I don’t get it either. Other than hot coffee, has there ever really been an issue before where developers purposely deceived the ESRB? I haven’t heard of any. This bill seems like unnecessary righteous overkill.
It’s an unnecessary and unconstitutional law. We don’t need an anti-Hot Coffee law, since it was an isolated and harmless incident. The FTC doesn’t have the right to regulate the games industry, either. Luckily, the court system has been showing a rather large amount of good sense on these issues, so I’m not too worried. 🙂