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from the better-do-10%-less-in-nice-video-games dept.
Philly.com (the website of Philadelphia's two local newspapers), published an editorial about a little known bill which would impose a 10% tax on the sale of all M for mature and AO for adults only rated video game sales in Pennsylvania.
On Jan. 28, several Pennsylvania members of Congress introduced a bill that would impose a tax of 10 percent on action-oriented video games rated M for mature or AO for adults only. In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled that California's efforts to single out action games violated the First Amendment. Beyond standing on similarly questionable grounds, Pennsylvania's own proposed bill is more likely to do harm than good.
The proposal is driven by the popular belief that such games cause acts of violence. In a September memo that previewed the legislation, its sponsor, Republican Rep. Christopher B. Quinn linked violent games to societal violence, including the 2018 Parkland shooting in Florida. He cites a Washington think tank that connects playing videos games to showing aggression in real life. But as researchers in this field, we've found the evidence to be clear: No links exist between video games and violence.
[...] data on school shootings going back to a 2002 Secret Service report find that less than 20 percent of school shooters played violent video games with any amount of regularity. Evidence suggests these individuals are actually less interested in violent games than the typical high school student. Many people continue to believe falsely that some shooters, such as those in the 2012 Sandy Hook and 2007 Virginia Tech shootings, were avid action gamers. Yet official investigations reported that these individuals preferred the nonviolent games Dance, Dance Revolution and Sonic the Hedgehog, respectively.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by nobu_the_bard on Friday February 08 2019, @03:38PM (4 children)
AO games are easy to pick on, they are a tiny subset of games. The few games that get it typically do so deliberately as part of their marketing strategy. Very few games accept that rating and will work to get M rated instead because lots of vendors will not carry AO games at all (Wal-Mart, etc). On many occasions there have been developers and publishers who have been claimed to have pressured the ESRB (the industry group that does the ratings) to rate their games M instead of AO to avoid the marketing problems being rated AO cause.
Most AO rated games, additionally, get that rating for sexual content, not violence. The ESRB rates sexual content far more harshly than violence when compared to similar organizations in other countries. If anything they under-rate games when considering only violence.
Why do I mention all this? Because I want to stress the ESRB is not a government organization and building laws on an independent industry standard is shaky. Laws built in such a way have been overturned before in court, there was one in the news recently though I forget the details. The ESRB could just retire the M rating and make up a replacement to avoid the tax if they really wanted to. They could throw the whole system out and make up a new one that uses numbers or colors instead or something.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Thexalon on Friday February 08 2019, @08:15PM (3 children)
The USA in general has some really weird hang-ups about nudity and sexual content.
A perfect example of this has to be the whole controversy back in 2004, because during the Super Bowl, two things happened of note, and only one of them generated outrage:
1. Janet Jackson accidentally showed her breast to the audience for a couple seconds.
2. A bunch of guys spent hours bashing each other's heads in to inflict lifelong traumatic injuries so that half of them could get a trophy.
Apparently, seeing a human female nipple, something most kids see shortly after they're born and after they're weaned used to have to hunt down in National Geographic or a local art museum but now can easily find on the Internet, is a horrible scarring event. Meanwhile, hitting people in the head just because they're wearing a different color uniform from the one you're wearing is good clean wholesome All-American fun for the whole family.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Friday February 08 2019, @08:51PM
Yeah that's all true. Re-reading what I wrote I think I skimped over the point I was making with that bit, which goes to explain why talking about it is on topic-
I meant to point out AO does not constitute a rating based only on violence, and that games any random guy may consider "violent" might not even rate a M in some cases, since the ESRB does not prioritize violence as much as it does nudity/sexual content. Many games with nudity/sexual content by default rate M, so you might actually be snagging more of those games than violent ones in this law.
Many AO games are merely gambling or pornography with no violence at all, the former of the two PA is trying to tax in a separate initiative, and the latter is a form of protected speech. Neither of those categories of gaming are addressed directly in the discussion of the bill that I have read in most places.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 08 2019, @09:03PM (1 child)
I want you to take a second to reflect on how parroted what you said was. Not that I disagree, I find hilarious the hangups of north americans.
But the outrage permeating this post is so artificial it ticked me off. This is written in a way that doesn't truly reflect your state of mind.
It's a histrionic attempt at getting a reaction. It's been done before and pretty much everyone has heard it. It feels like a buzzfeed article.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 09 2019, @04:02AM
Do you have an actual point?