This is still going on?  Really?  We haven’t settled on this stupid thing yet?  Good grief, people!

I keep getting nagged to sign a petition, to let my voice be heard, and nobody is telling me why, and it rarely makes itself clear.  Once again, the gaming community is being reduced to a bunch of unread morons who just make demands and don’t say a thing otherwise to let you know why you should do what you’re told, and that’s led to me being pretty annoyed with this Govenator VS. EMA business, because my perception of the “big deal” has been completely off-base and wrong. Maybe I’m solo in this, but for anyone else who’s only connection to this is some screaming gamer friends and a URL, let me try and set the record straight a bit.

For those not in the know, back in 2006 Governor Schwarzenegger passed into state law that violent games could not be sold to children in California.  The definition of violence, while loose, basically summarized itself as “a game in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being.”  (source)  This was four years ago, and the bill continues to be repealed and fought over to this day, now on its way to nothing shy of the Supreme Court itself.

The definition of violence is pretty poor, I’ll admit.  The “sexually assaulting” bit is something I don’t see come up much in this country, and sounds like grounds for an M-rating in and of itself, and I’ll get to why that’s important in a minute.  What worries me is the “killing” of human beings, as the rest of that list probably shouldn’t get into kids’ hands anyway.  What isn’t clarified as when that becomes inherently violent, as I seem to recall that back in the day plenty of games had me “killing” human beings that would proceed to vanish in a puff of smoke.

Thank you, Japan?

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