A comentary on anti-violent videogame legislation., Originally a post I made on Kotaku

[LuppyLuptonium]

But what about the children? The ESRB has allowed these games to end up on store shelves, which allows parants to buy them WITHOUT LOOKING AT THE LABLES. Shouldn't they bear some of the responsability?

Yeah, THAT is the kind of crazy we are dealing with, the same type that got money from McDonnalds because their coffee was hot, the same as the people who still are suing the tobacco companies because the "THESE THINGS WILL KILL YOU" labels are not big enough. The people who really really want to sue resteraunts for making them fat.

What the hell has happened to the American people? We wanted our government to be revolutionary. We wanted it to be by, for, and of the people. But then the people don't want any responsability, it is like we have all just become babies trying to crawl back into our mothers wombs.

We don't want to raise our children, so we use shortcuts, like the media to tell them what to do and how to live. Then after several years of being ignored by their parents our children become depressed social outcasts who in turn start shooting people. Then when people start to look for blame we go "It's not my fault, I DIDN'T RAISE MY KID, THAT VIDEOGAME DID" and noone questions what is wrong with that... EVER!

[Spriteless Girl]

Yes we do. Just the media doesn't much. The media loves to focus on the vocal minority in all forms.

And the hot coffee at McDonald's case only won because McDonald's defense added up to: "yeah, we were thinking of putting a warning label on it," and she only got a percentage of what she was asking for anyways.

[LuppyLuptonium]

The proper defence should have been "It's Coffee" and that should have ended it.

Now I will admit that the media is full of panderers, liars and scum but that's just good capitalism.

Did you know, Newspaper print stories written in inverted pyramid style so their stories can fit around all the ads, and not the ads around the news?

Have you ever heard "if it bleeds it leads?"

It's a phase that started in newspapers and moved on to broadcast news. It means that since people read more papers, or more modernly watch more newschannels when there is blood, those stories take priority.

My point is that the media talks about what it believes the people will talk about, if they didn't do that people would stop buying into their product and while newspaper stories would get longer, and media outlets would be going out of business left and right.

So this brings me back to the story at hand. The Violence in videogames debate. Because of the fact that it has violence in the title, that gives it points on the "If it bleeds it leads" scale... So that makes these stories more likly to print. But why is it we always hear about one side?

The ESRB winning the last 6 cases of these laws was hardly even covered, but the fact that the senator who pushed these laws the first time is now going to try again seems to be being treated like a big story...

Is this a bigger comentary on our newsmedia or our society? Because I'm not leaning with the news.