Leland Yee Reaction to Brown v. EMA Decision

I'd like to introduce him to Joe Lieberman.

For me, I just go read the 9 part transcript every once in a while. It is condensed Jack, that old flavor we all miss.

It wouldn't take too much effort on the behalf of the developers to create multi-rated games.  I, for one, want an option to turn off the rampant cussing that seems so prevalent in the games released today.  As an individual who doesn't use such language, I find it distracting to hear it exiting the mouth of the main character(s) and thus effectively ruins an otherwise decent storyline for me.  Such a "feature" would literally take a day or two to implement and would possibly allow for the ESRB to start doing multiple ratings for a single game.  It would be even better if Steamworks, for example, offered an API that automatically selected appropriate settings within the game to match a desired rating/level of each of profanity, sexual content, gore, etc.

Let me put this another way:  Developers, you are losing money because you can't be bothered to add a simple feature to your M-rated game.  So the super-simple question you have to ask yourself is, "Do I want to make more money or not?"

- Left4Dead

Why are zombies always eating brains? I want to see zombies that eat toes for a living. Undead-related pun intended.

While I certainly agree, the ruling seems to be rather broader than that:

"But a legislature cannot create new categories of unprotected speech simply by weighing the value of a particular category against its social costs and then punishing it if it fails the test."

I read that as saying that even if there WERE strong evidence of games having a negative social impact, it wouldn't matter, they're still covered.

Which is a good thing; otherwise we'd just be playing this same song and dance again in a few years against people citing research which they claim supports their claim that games harm children.  This way we don't even have to worry about demonstrating that the research is flawed -- at least, not in court.

In fact, in the majority opinion, SCOTUS pointed out how the law had conflicting interests, split between trying to "protect children" and "assist parents in making the choice for their children" (paraphrasing). Further, they stated that the law didn't do much to help parents anyway, since many violent games purchased for children are done so by parents who simply don't care. If the law's purpose was really to protect children, it would have to do more than force a parent to make that choice.

Yee seems to think every parent in his state will somehow feel empowered by his legislation, and 100% of them would make what he thinks is the morally responsible choice. Given the track record of video game retailers as noted by the FTC in thwarting children from purchasing M-rated titles, and yet the prevalance of children playing M-rated games online, there's really nothing that law would have changed except to make some retailers pay fines occasionally.