NEW AMERICAN BILL PROPOSES MAKING SELLING NON-ESRB RATED GAMES ILLEGAL

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Puddor
if squallbutts was a misao category i'd win every damn year
5702
Invalid YouTube URLhttp://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=65vO9JvPlTk
I'm not sure whether it'll carry through, since it seems like a pretty difficult thing to pass with Steam and other indie groups getting bigger every day, but it might be enough to be alarmed about.
Can't they do something constructive instead of wasting money & time with these stupid bills? So many things need improvement and attention, yet all they care is this lame shit. Ugh.
author=JosephSeraph
Can't they do something constructive instead of wasting money & time with these stupid bills? So many things need improvement and attention, yet all they care is this lame shit. Ugh.


b-b-but think about the children! damn internets, damn computers, damn vidya games urghghaharhh
LouisCyphre
can't make a bad game if you don't finish any games
4523
I'm not concerned.
I am. Not about the bill passing, but this exhausts energy & money that should be directed elsewhere... Well, it's the american government anyways. Better spend money & energy with this than harming people.

author=Natook
author=JosephSeraph
Can't they do something constructive instead of wasting money & time with these stupid bills? So many things need improvement and attention, yet all they care is this lame shit. Ugh.
b-b-but think about the children! damn internets, damn computers, damn vidya games urghghaharhh


Religion should be taken less into account for political decisions, ugh
ugh
ugh
UGH
Heh; It would be a nice to read the whole bill to learn what it's true scope is, but in principle I don't see anything wrong with this.

mini rant
It's kinda funny to see the reaction though: "ZOMG! Censorship! Leave my vidyagames alone!!" ...The only downside that I can see of this are obviously the rating fees that I hear are not quite in tune with today's reality of most indie developers barely making a profit. But then again, since these days it's so easy to lure humans into giving you thousands of moneys with just a kickstarter campaign then you can surely pay those fees. What's a few less dollars in your pocket if it's for a good cause?

I find some things the guy mentions in the video to be really unnerving, like comparing the ESRB with the MPAA for one. But more specifically, when he says: "We are the ones that dictate this". It's just a lonely sentence in the middle of an amorphous rant, but the way I interpret it makes me think: "No, we don't". We as a 'community' fail to police what content we put out. That's why there are games by the truckloads. That's why we don't know what game is any good, or what KS campaign is not just a scam... The point is, if even among us there's a good deal of mistrust, how do we expect scaredy-cat parents to just take our word for it?

Ratings provided by a non profit organization actually help lessen the weight people put in videogames. And it's a sign that creators are not just a bunch of entitled little kids. It says: "All right, we came clean and we meet you halfway. The ball is in your court now." So the next time Jr. picks up a gun and kills someone they don't come and blame us... Well, in theory.

In a perfect world we wouldn't need any of this nonsense. But in this world maybe we do need to make compromises sometimes.
Puddor
if squallbutts was a misao category i'd win every damn year
5702
Not everyone uses kickstarter, and these fees are most likely aimed at professional studios rather than independant developers, so those who don't go through kickstarter will most likely not be able to release their games due to exorbitant costs.

Also, there are other rating systems and games in the world, and I definitely don't live in America myself, so in order to get a game playable by one of the market's top consumers I have to pay a fee to have my game rated by an off-shore company? At least from what this states, the bill cuts off any commercial game from any country besides America. And it's not like I could get a kickstarter just to get the fee paid, because Kickstarter is mostly American based. IndieGoGo isn't, but the fact remains that this bill places a stranglehold on several different aspects of the indie game development community.

Frankly this shouldn't even be on the table; games do not cause gun violence, unobservant parents do. We are reaching the stage where videogames have been active and around for a good part of 35 years, which is most likely the age of many parents. They don't have our parent's excuse of living in an age where such technology wasn't on the move or even present; they, too, have developed into this age of smartphones, and with most people over the age of 18 owning a device of that persuasion maintaining diligence over what games your children are playing isn't that hard.

Children under five are permitted to view movies like Die Hard in their own homes and my eight year old brother has been allowed to play Black Ops. I get ripped into if I so much as suggest I know anything my step mother doesn't, so I can't bring it up, but if it were up to me he wouldn't be playing games like Black Ops or Uncharted. They're not appropriate content for him. When I was his age Final Fantasy VIII wasn't considered appropriate content and all it does is throw around few iterations of 'frickin' and one scene where the protagonist's face is cut open.

The ESRB's has become lenient (or receives payouts) in regards to games that would have blown our minds if we had been projected into the future as kids. Giving games an ESRB rating is not going to fix the problem at hand. If they're going to blame gun violence on games like Black Ops, prevent them from getting into children's hands rather than stomping on the indie game industry and ruining video games for everyone who has enough intelligence to not pull out a weapon just because someone pisses them off.
LouisCyphre
can't make a bad game if you don't finish any games
4523
Guys. This isn't going to pass.

You heard it here first.
Well, I haven't read the bill, and I'm not going to. I did read SOPA back it the day and tried to tell people it wasn't as evil as they said it was, but I just wasted my time by doing so. xP ...But I imagine that as long as you don't host your game in America an you comply with your country's laws then you're free to go. Likewise if you game is not commercial maybe you don't have to worry about this.

But the thing is, that while I understand and agree whit what you're saying, the fact remains that there will always be people unfamiliar with our little videogame world and that slapping an 'M' or whatever in our games in consideration of those people's concerns is not the worst that could happen. If only the fees were reasonable -if only the process were practical (Because that's actually my main concern about this. What if the burden proves too much for the ESRB?) then it wouldn't be any different than, say, commissioning some art.
_
Also, yeah, it's probably not going to pass. xD But it's interesting to discuss these things... It is to me, at least. xP
Caz
LET'SBIAN DO THIS.
6813
Games I often hear complained about for being "violent" which come to mind:
Call of Duty
Halo
Gears of War
Hitman
Max Payne
Duke Nukem

Of those, games with ESRB ratings:
Call of Duty
Halo
Gears of War
Hitman
Max Payne
Duke Nukem

Smallscale indie games without ESRB ratings that will suffer in order to stop "violence" being an influence on children:
Pretty much every innocent little game you've ever seen

How does having an ESRB rating prevent violent video games again? I think we're confusing the word "violent" with "not giving me enough money for trivial shit". There is no correlation between violent games ceasing to sell and having ESRB ratings, unless parents actually look at the tiny icon on the cover of the Call of Duty game they're about to buy their kid and go "OH HEY WAIT THIS SAYS THERE'S GUNS IN THIS?! But that man on the front looks so friendly!" Here's ESRB's official site where you can search for any violent video game that comes to mind, and I'll bet it has a rating. And here's a nice article on research done into games actually being HELPFUL in the fight against violent outbreaks.

But yeah this won't pass anyway.

Frankly this shouldn't even be on the table; games do not cause gun violence, unobservant parents do.


Actually I'd say it was lack of gun control laws. And basement arsenals of high-quality hunting shit probably don't help any. Yeah, I went there.

Back on the topic: I don't care what they say, there will always be dirty corners of the internet (Sweden~) where you can get your fix for practically anything deemed illegal. All it takes is a quick google search and there you go.

The main question is, would RMN be affected by these laws if they were to pass? We're based in Canada, right? So...~


(Also, fuck that shit. If I want blood, guts and sex dungeons in my games, I'll put them there. So should others. Because fuck the politicians. I don't see it passing, though. The outcry from gamers world-wide would shatter their eardrums. I don't think people realise just how many people play games nowdays. It's no longer a little niche thing. Look at ones like Angry Birds - which has GASP! violent concepts (You smash those fucking pigs. You smash em reaaaal good.) or ideals. Yeah... not a hope.)
Hmm. Perhaps the word 'indie' would take on a more properly 'underground' meaning. Maybe I should start calling myself an underground game developer, either way. I like the sound of it!
Puddor
if squallbutts was a misao category i'd win every damn year
5702
I don't think it's going to pass either personally- these sort of uninformed laws tend not to, thank god- but it remains that someone somewhere despite overwhelming evidence and several studies conducted into the topic believes that games still cause gun violence, which is...really stupid.

And yes, that's also correct. Gun control laws need to be put into place- because frankly the 'right to bear arms' is now 200 years out of date and was put into place because England confiscated their weapons, forever ingraining guns = freedom into the American consciousness. Which is on a long list of other intense failings on America's part during its founding.

That said, the basement arsenals are obviously a necessity, Libby. What if a ghost comes after your kids? Wendigo? Shtriga? Vampire? Long list of Supernatural-featured mythological creatures?

that last part is a joke by the way
Another poorly thought out bill made by people that don't understand the immeasurable damage it would do.

Not going to pass anyway, though.
masterofmayhem
I can defiantly see where you’re coming from
2610
You know with all you people going “this isn’t going to pass, this isn’t going to pass” you know what would be hilarious? If it passed.
LockeZ
I'd really like to get rid of LockeZ. His play style is way too unpredictable. He's always like this too. If he ran a country, he'd just kill and imprison people at random until crime stopped.
5958
Over 5000 bills were proposed by lawmakers in 2012; less than a hundred became laws. Of the ones that became laws, almost all of those were either extensions of previous laws, meaningless semantic bullshit like "A bill to strike the word 'lunatic' from Federal law, and for other purposes", and budgeting for various organizations and projects. The chance of a real law that is proposed turning into a real law that actually exists is less than one in a thousand, and if it does happen it'll go through multiple heavy HEAVY revisions.

Proposing a law isn't an indication that anyone is gonna really try to do it. It's just an indication that the ESRB donated $5000 for Senator Gooberpooper's campaign fund, and he wants to make a cursory show of pretend support for them so they'll do the same thing again next year. Sometimes its not even that; it's just an indication that someone had a random idea and asked how people felt about it.
Again, allow me to point out how silly this sounds to me: "Gun control. YES! Internet or Games control. HELL NO!" Or said in other words: "Whatever as long as it doesn't affect ME." ...The thing is, neither guns or videogames cause violence, nor is the purpose of background checks or rating systems to stop it. So I don't see the need to toss the blame around.

But they're... useful. Don't you think? In the case of game ratings; (It's not censorship. We have to understand this.) It's just information that responsible parents seek (as much of a minority as they might be) to know what kind of content they're exposing their children to. That's their right after all. And if we developers were reasonable enough to provide this information out of our own volition then perhaps the people behind this wouldn't see the need for a third party to do it for us and charge us for it. XP
KingArthur
( ̄▽ ̄)ノ De-facto operator of the unofficial RMN IRC channel.
1217
Strict enforcement of attainment of the ESRB rating simply means that a game about chess needs to say it's a game about chess if the game wants to line store shelves. As the ESRB is just a rating organization they have no power to say "WE DON'T LIKE GAMES ABOUT CHESS, GTFO.", if a game about chess was somehow inappropriate the market will respond appropriately without outside influence.

All in all, I do not find a problem with enforcing the ESRB and I could not care less one way or the other whether this bill passes or not. In fact, I find it a problem if games cannot or are not being rated by ESRB prior to commercial debut; why do we even have ESRB in the first place if it is not compulsory?
Nightowl
Remember when I actually used to make games? Me neither.
1577
amerka pls

Why does America focus on shit like this, instead of actually doing something useful?
I want to add to this, but most of my points have already been pointed out by other people.
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