Perhaps you may remember that a landmark court ruling is soon to be decided here in the United States. The Supreme Court will rule on a First Amendment rights bill that could restrict video games and player’s right to free speech. In a nutshell, the law prohibits excessively violent video game sales to children. This may sound like a good idea, however, if this law is not proved unconstitutional, how far will the lawyers go? They could end up trying to censor books and movies, even for adults. I don’t know about you, but I appreciate my right to decide when I want to virtually snipe a terrorist. The Entertainment Software Association also appreciates this right. They are the ones who are fighting in this trial, which will start oral arguments on November 2, 2010. As part of their effort to protect the First Amendment, they are asking you to send in your old or broken controllers to Senator Leland Yee, the Senator who took the action to make this law in the first place. You can find all the details in this link.
After the ESA made the plea for gamers to send their protests to Lee, Game Politics was able to get a statement from Senator Yee’s office. Basically, Yee’s Chief of Staff had this to say,”I can only assume these broken controllers must represent the broken promises of the video game industry to parents.” In addition, he also declared his own knowledge of video games when he said this,”…I think the Senator would appreciate a Kinect add-on rather than those dated controllers.” It would be interesting to go into much more detail, but I am afraid I would go too far. So, I leave it up to the community, the Supreme Court and gamers across the world to respectfully keep video games alive and uncensored.
