Jack Thompson the Douchebag vs. Penny Arcade

[Silver Adept]

...tying video games into the obscenity standards is the worst. It's obscene by itself, and as bad as it is, I'm hoping there's a significant backlash. (And we hope there's a development company that makes a game that is artistic and redeeming but that would trip every problem three is in that law.)

[Kugyou]

And, as an update to my Devil's Checklist, I give you the Oklahoma video game amendment. I saw (and commented on) the story at Kotaku, which referenced the story at GamePolitics.

Full text of the bill here (RTF file, no one should have problems opening it I hope).

To summarize my comment on Kotaku: Despite the claims that many of the supporters of these bills are giving, the bills do not give any legitimacy to the ESRB ratings system, as the bills do not specifically state anything about a game's actual rating. Instead, they hand the whole issue over to the mob rule of obscenity standards, allowing any isolated "community" to band together and override industry regulatory groups like the ESRB.

Slightly off-topic bit: Would you believe I got my Kotaku comment invite because I pointed out a spelling error on an article?

[Silver Adept]

Yay. Huzzah. Can I cause greivous, video-game-inspired violence to these people now? There's an industry rating system in place to avoid having to deal with a federal ratings/regulation system, and now that's apparently not enough for some people. It's a uniquely American way of looking at things, I think: Since I don't want my child to see any of this or play it, everyone should not have access to it, so that I can be sure my child is safe.

By tying in whether or not a business can do business to the local obscenity standard is almost ensuring that no business will be done in that community. Which, I suppose, is what they want. But really, how much will it actually fix?