Working Title 07.01.11: Working Rant on California Video Game Ban Decision

Posted by Dan Watson on 07.01.2011

The Supreme Court struck down a law this week banning the sale of violent video games such as Grand Theft Auto to children! 411's Dan Watson takes a look at the ruling and whether it has any affect on the rest of the country!

Welcome back to this week's Working Title. I am still filling in here and this week a Supreme Court ruling really got me thinking. I am happy that I am writing this column this week, as many of the other columns don't really give the ability to take a column and discuss why I am upset about something that most gamers would probably be happy about.

Working Games

Duke Nukem

I am still playing Duke in hopes that I can beat the game shortly. Some of the boss fights are just extremely hard, even on normal difficulty. I cannot imagine how hard this game is going to be on the hardest difficulty. I will say that the review that went up this week is pretty dead on for what the game is.

Half Minute Hero

This is an arcade game that just released this week and is quite fun. To sum up the game, you go through this journey of a war against evil and the missions typically take about one to three minutes. The hard part is there is a countdown and if you fail to rest the countdown every thirty seconds, you fail. It is a cool story and plays very nicely. I recommend picking this one up if you have some points laying around.

Dungeon Siege III

I am working on a review of this game now, and have been pretty happy so far. There are some negatives to the game but if you enjoy a game like Diablo, this game is for you. You have the choice of four different classes to go through the game with. There are main quests and side quests that take about the same time as most other RPGs.

Weekly Rant

The Supreme Court this week ruled against a California ban on violent video game sales to children. The reason that was given for the ruling was that it would infringe on the children's first amendment rights of free speech. Now, I have two big problems with this. Before I get into those, I would love to hear readers' opinions on this, however, let's try to keep this as an adult discussion without trolling and being dicks about everything.

My first problem is that living in Illinois, I have been asked many times by children to purchase a game that is rated Teen or Mature because their parent isn't around and they will give me the money. I don't do this. Many of you are going to disagree with me here, however, this is just what I have found in the last twenty years of playing video games. Normally, if I am playing a game that involves intense action or I am extremely focused, and the game is violent, I tend to become more violent or at least agitated more easily. An example of this, few years back, I was playing Halo three with some friends. We were playing what could only be described as a simple game of four on four. I was put in a room with people who, for the most part, hadn't played many video games. After about an hour, I finally snapped and yelled at the only female in the room. Normally, I am a cool tempered cat, I don't flip out or attack anyone, especially not verbally attacking a female who was doing her "best" to play. (In my defense, what threw me over the top was she was walking into a corner while texting her friend that she was playing Halo.



Anyways the moral of the story, violent video games do have a small, temporary affect on how a person reacts. Had we been playing Mario Kart, I wouldn't have flipped out as badly. I had played many of times with her in Guitar Hero and again, never flipped out. My fear is not that children will shoot up schools or turn to violence. My bigger concern is that children will become desensitized to violence and bloodshed and not know how to react in a situation when something "wrong" is happening. If children were blocked from buying these games, there would be more parental control as well. A parent should be aware of what the kids are playing. This brings me to my next point.



The second problem I have is that we are protecting CHILDREN'S rights here. When I was growing up, I didn't have rights. I was told what to do, when to do it, and if I talked back, you damn sure better believe there were going to be repercussions for it. Today, children have too many rights. You spank a child, you have to worry about DCFS on your ass, or you have to worry if the neighbor is going to call the police. This has gotten ridiculous. Children need to have limits and boundaries and if you cannot enforce these limits with some type of punishment, then there will be no boundary anymore. On that same note, if this law would have passed, parents could no longer use the excuse of the video games made him do it. The parents would have to take responsibility for their child playing the video game because they bought it for him/her. The video game industry would no longer be the scapegoat for everyone's screwed up kids. They can go back to blaming movies and music until the next piece of technology finds its way into the spotlight of violence.



Another great benefit would be we would hopefully have fewer annoying kids playing games like Call of Duty and Gears of War. Imagine a cyber world without twelve year old kids with their high pitch voices. We could play games and talk as adults, hopefully some of the racism would go away and the hate would disappear into adult, intelligent conversation. Ha, what am I smoking, this would never happen, but at least we would lose most of the annoying kids and could use words without Mircosoft coming after us for offensive language.