ALBANY, NY — New York state senators have been hard at work crafting bills they believe will protect youths from the evils associated with “depraved violence and indecent” images in computer games. During the month of May alone, they passed two bills into law within mere days of their introduction, and had another waiting in the wings.The moves came after senators Andrew Lanza and Martin Golden vowed to introduce legislation aimed at a “crackdown” on computer games they deemed inappropriately violent. Prompted into motion in part due to Grand Theft Auto IV’s intention to locate its action in an obvious New York City inspired landscape, the senators promptly introduced legislation to create an advisory council specifically focused on determining the value and effectiveness of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) rating system, and to establish a parent-teacher anti-violence awareness program.
Additionally, the bill mandated rating labels for all games sold within New York state and included penalties for any retailer who did not abide by them during sales transactions. No exception was made for games predating the ESRB.
A8696, the second of the bills passed, aims to make the sale or rental of games deemed to possess “depraved violence and indecent images” a class E felony, and mandates that non-PC or handheld home gaming consoles have parental restriction features installed to block out “certain content.” It defines “depraved violence” to mean “any photographic, photorealistic, or other similar visual representation of the rape, dismemberment, physical torture, mutilation, or evisceration of a human body.” “Indecent images” are those that show “a person or portion of the human body which depicts nudity, sexual content, or sadomasochistic abuse and which is harmful to minors.”
How the legislators would determine whether or not something “is harmful to minors” was not explained.
The Entertainment Merchants Association issued a statement condemning the bills as being “impermissibly vague” and opining that “A8696 seeks to apply real-world standards of violence to the fictional and fanciful world of video games, an environment in which they have no meaning. As a result, retailers and clerks will not and cannot know with certainty which video games could send them to jail under A8696. It was depressing to hear members of the Assembly note the constitutional problems with the bill and then state that they were voting for it.”
The bills have 120 days to take affect after being signed into law.
