South Carolina Bill Seeks to Outlaw Profanity

South Carolina (my home state! Go Gamecocks!) Bill 56 seeks to outlaw any written or oral display of profanity in the public or in correspondence with minors (aw, so much for my short-lived regional pride...). For some reason, perhaps because of the bill's mention in GamePolitics, this has really been circulating around the gaming website community. Of course, video games are under another sort of attack by legislators, but this could have other effects on games as well.

Would the passage of this bill form a de facto ban of profanity-using games to minors? Would it mean that classic novels that say "Damn" once would be held away from 15-year-olds like pornography? Would I have just been fined 5,000 dollars for using the word "damn" on my site?

It shouldn't really matter, because this bill is completely idiotic even before you get into discussing it on a constitutional level.

Alcopops Banned from Video Games by Illinois

Um, yeah. Not that there has ever been a game that happened to advertise "alcopops", but in Illinois, there never will be. There you have it.

via Kotaku, via GamePolitics

The State of the Union: Gaming 'Round the World

America isn't everything, even though Super Tuesday is tomorrow, but other countries have gaming controversies as well. Some of them have it even worse off, despite the fact there's no Thompson, Clinton, Romney, or Lieberman in their country. I'll quickly summarize the state of gaming in several other countries recently.


China: As GamePolitics reported today on a very old blog post from Henry Jenkins of MIT, China doesn't care so much as the United States about violence in video games so much as "gaming addiction". The notion of gaming addiction is supposed to loosen traditional family and community bonds and decrease productivity, and Jenkins argues that it benefits China to build the concept of an addiction to gaming. This would provide justification for China's increasingly restrictive policies on the internet and video games. China has banned all sorts of things online and modified a few others: China has banned children from internet cafes, imposed time restrictions on visiting those cafes, banned certain games for showing China didn't always belong to the current regime, and forced Google to support the great firewall. As capitalist of a communist country China is, they're still really restrictive about the internet, putting them at about the worst civilized country to be in if you're a gamer.

Germany: Germany has a strange couple of rulings on games as well. First of all, they don't allow any swastikas in their games or anything that's "not art", which is way more trouble than it's worth, but not very important. In a very strange decision, Half-Life was forced to tone the entire game down by a lot, resulting in robots instead of marines, no blood, vanishing enemies, and other nonsense.

Greece: Alright, this is the worst country for a gamer in the world, assuming you're not in a third-world country. In 2002, Greece right-out outlawed gaming. Nothing from solitaire to Brain Age could be played in Greece, even by foreigners just arriving in the nation. There was obviously a tremendous outcry, and the ban was reduced to only apply to internet cafes in December 2003. That was a close one.

Finland: Another recent story from GamePolitics, the Finnish Christian Democrats are asking for an extra screening process on video games to be doubly sure they don't have any hidden bad things. The Finnish Games and Multimedia Association was quick to say that the process is really rather unnecessary and would simply hurt the industry by giving Finnish gamers a reason to buy their games from elsewhere while they face delays and possible censorship, sidestepping the extra process. I wouldn't expect this to go anywhere especially, it's just a party considering the motion, but I'm not exactly up on my Finnish politics, either.

South Korea: Take China's information, and tone it down a lot. South Korea has banned several of the usual violent video games like Grand Theft Auto and Manhunt, but also has a slight issue with games involving the two Koreas. Mercenaries, Ghost Recon, and Splinter Cell have all been banned due to either showing North and South Korea at war or destroying Korean land in the games.

You Have a Kid, I'll Tax his Name, You like Xbox, I'll Tax Your Game

The Sierra Club is proposing a 1% sales tax on televisions and video games similar to the Wisconsin tax proposed a while ago. This law would be in effect in New Mexico if passed, but a similar proposal in that same state has apparently been shot down before, though I can't find that specific instance. The tax would be set out to "tax part of the problem to fund the solution", with the funds of approximately 4 million dollars going to get children outside and families out to state parks.

As was the situation with the Wisconsin proposal, where the tax was going to fund reform to the youth judiciary system, the cause is fine with me. Still, the idea of a sales tax on video games is spreading, and it's a dangerous idea. The Wisconsin proposal seemed to link video games with youth crime, even if it wasn't meant to. This proposal is more justifiable in its link, that being video games to children not getting enough outside activity, but the tax doesn't need to suddenly spread to every state. Chances are the proposal won't gain any ground, but the idea will likely spread to other states now.

small update: The Electronics Consumer Association has now responded to the couch potato tax idea, and unsurprisingly, they're against it. They say "it's unconstitutional to target video games with a special tax that would unduly burden gamers, leaving out other forms of entertainment media like movies, music and books. This proposed tax would also stifle trade and disproportionately impact generations X and Y, who are increasingly becoming more politically aware and vocal." There you have it.

'Cause I'm the Taxman