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 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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This is a great addition to the previous thread about MMO addiction Raph.
From that discussion I started doing some research. I think promoting an industry movement to be proactive rather than reactive to legislation and regulation will go farther than throwing money at the lobby and hoping it goes away. Because it wont. In fact it’s likely to get worse
My research thus far:
There is no organization promoting positive effects of games on players
There is little data and research to bolster an industry position that games promote positive socialization behaviors.
I could not find any studies that conclude that by spending time playing video games younger gamers avoid involvment in things like drugs, gangs, truancy, etc. since there are no studies, again there is no data, and thus no data points to capture. Sad.
Funny this:
I had the exact same conversation with a friend of mine this morning at coffee, she’d asked what I was doing working so early on the laptop and I explained the above research and she laid it out quite nicely:
First her demographic:
Age 48ish, Female, Married, Mother of 2, Boy: 13 Girl 7;
I’ll paraphrase:
“The problem is there are no educational games, (My reply: Sure there are..) No no I mean on Console games, if there are I havent found them, and it would be nice to have thier games off my PC. But I cant find ANY console games that are educational, you know geography, science, math, he (son)loves that history war game, thats as closest as I have found”
Futher:
“And youd think there would be, I buy the games, I make the purchasing decesions on games, its not about getting them to play them either, I can regulate that based on allowing them time with the other games…”
She dosnt know a lot about games, just what shed like to see, but she nailed it nonetheless. I’d like to also add that she is a community activist. There are likely millions of other mothers out there like her.
The video game industry needs her buy-in, she votes and buys.
So I looked it up. There are slim offerings for any type of educational games, Im not talking about age 5-10 stuff (thats slim as well really) I mean for kids 12-18….
I think theres a differance between your audiance (content consumer) and purchaser (buyer, real consumer). How much of household game purchase decesions are made by parents (middle aged female mother of 2). And what would they like to see?
Im not proposing replacing zombies and blowing up things with “Linear Algebra Maze Quest” but I am saying at least the industry should expand the offerings to encompass some educational/socialization games for consoles. Who knows they might get significant ROI on it.
Maybe if there we’re a few more educational console games out there, attempting to face a gonvernment panel straight faced might not be so hard. Either way the VG industry might want to have something together before significant studies get done.
All congress really needs is the precedental missing link, after all state legislatures are only precendental testing grounds, federal laws will be crafted to avoid where lower courts have gone awry, federal law supercedes state laws anyhow.
There is no organization promoting positive effects of games on players
There might be one within a year or two. I intend to push for it; who knows, maybe something will come of it.
Maryland is the only state that seems to have their shit together, when it comes to restricting game sales:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060524-6907.html
I don’t object to laws that effectively hold games to the same precedents established for other media. Other states would be wise to follow Maryland’s lead on that one.
Gaming is my second hobby. Off-roading is my first.
But, as I read more and more about the issues involved with gaming it seems to me that some of them are very similar to issues with off-roading.
Namely, bad press.
You see, I promote off-roading as a wholesome, family oriented sport/hobby which serves to strengthen family and friendship bonds. Indeed, I have an entire commercially successful website centered around this to prove it.
But that is not what the public knows about off-roading. I can be almost certain that many of you who are reading this blog right now are saying to yourself… “An off-roader? Those guys are terrible. They destroy the environment, drink too much, drive loud vehicles and chase naked women. What’s an off-roader doing here?”
But rest assured, your perception of off-roaders is just that, a perception.
When it comes to fighting for our rights as off-roaders we come up against a brick wall due to these perceptions. After all, isn’t it just common sense that an off-road vehicle is bad for the enviroment? When we try to defend ourselves in court we are presented with cases which say things like… “Obviously the off-road vehicle cannot help the flora and fauna in the area, therefore they need to be banned/controlled.”
Isn’t this pretty much the same problem that the gaming industry is having?
“Obviously those violent games can’t have any redeeming value!”
We in the off-road industry are beginning to turn these perceptions around and it seems to be having an effect. Websites like mine and others which promote good values and the love of nature are starting to become mainstream. People are starting to see the folly of their ways.
This is what gaming needs to do. You must work on the bad press. You must change those incorrect perceptions.
IRO educational games, I’m very very interested to see what the popular press will make of Will Wright’s Spore this xmas; the link to The Sims will provide the background that most people will identify with, but the more identifiable (if somewhat abstract) goals will make it the most written about game of the year I believe. It could be the trickle of interest that turns into a flood for non-gamers.
On a side note, news.bbc.co.uk is running an article on the usual “I can’t believe that games are corrupting our children….oh, and a copy of GTA: SA for my Grandson as well, please Mr EB Employee”…
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5277422.stm
[…] The Sunday Poem: On the Carretera Panamericana, South of LimaThe billboards along the road, dry, Sandblasted pink and pale, Aren’t even markers of distance yet. At my age of fourteen and at 80 at least The little crosses by the highwayside Look like stupidity—I see a straight road, Air sharp as thirst, dunes and sand piled high, The beach somewhere ahead. We even stop to look At one grave, and puzzle out […] ManifestingAs just about everybody has noted, Greg Costikyan’s grand experiment to bring indie gaming to the center of the gaming world has launched: ManifestoGames.com. A lot of old indie game faves are here, from Crimsonland to DROD, plus a bunch I have never heard of before. Check it out. Worldcon: “World of Warcrack” panelSo yesterday morning I moderated this panel. The folks on the panel were a distinguished bunch: Bill Fawcett, who dropped anecdotes about when Gary would use NPC thieves to rob his party blind — yes, he meant gary Gygax; Justin Lloyd, who started developing games sometime in the Pleistocene; Mike Stemmle, who’s a lead on […] Another game law struck downWell, “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 […] PalabraSo I finish dinner, then I wander about the hotel lobby here at Worldcon, and see a sign saying “Gaming Registration This Way.” So of course I follow it. At the end of a series of posters I find a room where there’s some kids playing something loud, a few scattered tables with Carcasonne and […] I’m at WorldconAfter a day of meetings and six hours of driving. I parked, registered at the hotel, and went straight to register for the con. In the space of five minutes I saw Joe Haldeman and Harry Turtledove. It’s so big that I am unsure where to go or what to do now. Find food is probably a […] So much for revenge.Today Microsoft is giving away Texas Hold ‘Em as a free download on Live (they will charge for it tomorrow). So I grabbed it. Elena has never played poker. We walked through the help screens, then I started a single-player game with $150. I lost a few, I won a few, and I was at $120, […] Table Tennis RevengeLong ago, I blogged about how I suck at Rockstar Table Tennis and my kids were crushing me. The tables (ha ha) were turned yesterday, as they played the real thing for the first time. David had trouble hitting the table, and Elena had trouble hitting the ball on a serve. Then I showed them a real […] State of Play IV Asia announcedAnd it’s going to be in Singapore! Well, that lowers the chances I’ll attend, I suppose! I haven’t made it to the last two because work pressures kept me away, but this year I was looking forward to it. Here’s the announcement for State of Play IV Asia, whose topic is “building the global metaverse.” […] ( vote for this news ) […]
[…] 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 […] […]
Imagine a game about being a fireman. As you play the game, you have to rescue people (and pets) from burning buildings, and try to put out the fires, all at substantial risk to yourself. You could be the guy aiming the hose, the one on top of the ladder pulling someone out a window, the one with the ax in hand running up the stairs to get people off the top floor.
It could be just as fun and exciting as the game about bashing in the heads of zombies, if not moreso.
That’s just one example of where an “adventure” game doesn’t necessarily have to involve violence.
It should even be possible to make “acceptable” games that have some violence in them, as long as you take care that the violence doesn’t become the reason to play. Consider an outer-space game where your primary gameplay is interstellar trade and asteroid mining. Your endgame/social metagame is building a colony/space station. Of course, you occasionally have to defend yourselves against pirates in all endeavours, but that’s not really the point of the game, and doesn’t happen often.