BATON ROUGE, LA — Although still reeling from the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana state Governor Kathleen Blanco signed HB 1381 into law, immediately making it a punishable offense to sell video games deemed inappropriate for minors to anyone under the age of 18. This makes Louisiana the third state to adopt sales restrictions on violent video games.Violators of the new law would face fines ranging from $100 to $2,000 in addition to prison time of up to a year. The bill, submitted by Democratic Representative Roy Burrell and created with the assistance of wildly anti-game activist and Florida attorney Jack Thompson, allows judges to determine which games qualify as being inappropriate for youths, based on established criteria, and permit the titles to be forcibly removed from shop shelves.
“The corrupted and corrupting game industry will, of course, challenge this law once it is signed by Governor Blanco,” Thompson predicted prior to the bill’s passage. “The reason is that this industry, through the ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board), its developers’ lobbyists, the ESA (Entertainment Software Association), and the retailers’ lobbyist, IEMA (Interactive Merchants Association) are involved in ongoing fraudulent conduct in marketing video games that contain adult material to children.”
As expected, both the ESA and IEMA have announced plans to file suit against the law. “We are confident this bill will be found unconstitutional, as have similar statutes in other states,” ESA president Doug Lowenstein assured. To support his belief, Lowenstein pointed out that “As recently as March 31 of this year, the Honorable George Caram Steeh, U.S. District Court, Eastern District of Michigan, stated that video games were ‘expressive free speech, inseparable from their interactive functional elements, and are therefore protected by the First Amendment.”
Likely expecting a battle on precisely those grounds, the bill’s creators used language reminiscent of the Miller test for obscenity, stating that videos affected by the law would be those that were determined by “The average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the video or computer game, taken as a whole, appeals to the minor’s morbid interest in violence.” Further, any game that “depicts violence in a manner patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community with respect to what is suitable for minors” would be covered, along with those that “taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.”
Thompson called the signing into law of his bill “personally gratifying” and claimed that the videogame industry was involved in an organized conspiracy to harass him for his activist efforts. In spite of opinions by other attorneys to the contrary and the overturning of a nearly identical law in Michigan, Thompson insists that the law is constitutional and “addresses all of the complaints raised by federal courts which have struck down other state video game laws. It is unique in its approach, as it borrows a time-tested three-prong approach approved by the U.S. Supreme Court in obscenity cases.”
Unsurprisingly, Lowenstein completely disagrees, forecasting an ultimate overturning of what he calls a “reckless gamble” at Louisiana taxpayer expense that is likely to drive video game related tech jobs away from an area that has been attempting to lure them during the past year.
Ultimately, Lowenstein believes the law is yet another example of public officials grandstanding on morals and attempting to remove power from parents. “The Federal Government has found that parents are involved in game purchases more than eight out of 10 times. Retailers already have increasingly effective carding programs to prevent the sale of Mature or Adult Only games to minors. Legislators know full well that this bill is destined to meet the same fate as other failed efforts to ban video game sales.”
