Leave my hobby alone!

It amazes me how much people want to stop something they have absolutely no understanding of, nor a desire to see beyond their own distorted and uneducated views of.
Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) is trying to get the “Truth in Video Game Rating Act” approved. This would constitute a congressional oversight committee handling the current ESRB rating agency. The first thing the committee would ask is that all games are played through 100% before release, in an attempt to stop such controversies as the Grand Theft Auto “Hot Coffee mod”, and the current favorite whipping boy of lawmakers, the Elder Scroll: Oblivions “Breast” Patch. While it is all well and good for the lawmakers to get upset that these mods and patches allow youngsters to see digitized sex and/or naughty parts, what no Senator or Congressman or lawyer has yet to take into account, or at least tell the public… These patches and mods have to be searched for on the internet by the individual owner of the game, installed with some knowledge of computer files and system mapping, and then run as an entirely different game then what the discs right out of the box would play. In some cases (Hot Coffee) the scripts were in the game, but as tool for the game designers only, that were then unlocked by some seriously skillful hackers. No one would have ever known it was in there just playing the normal game. But, something like Oblivions “Breast” patch which adds bare digital boobies to some female models in the game was created by someone at their house and then posted on the internet for someone to find then download then patch into their game. It had nothing to do with Bethesda Software, the maker of the game, yet they are under intense scrutiny and serious litigation because they made a game that could be patched in such an awful way that children (with some bad ass programming skills) could see some virtually digitized versions of what they can see the real thing of in PG-13 rated films... My favorite argument for how bad and obviously corrupt the Hollywood rating system is. How long do we get to see Kate Winslet’s huge and bare fun bags in Titanic? A lot longer then we should have in a PG-13 film… Thing is, any game can be modified this way. If had the skills I'd whip up a Pac-Man "Wang" patch so fast! The ESRB actually does a good job of rating games with their current system. What do they do now? The makers of the game tell them what the game is about, and what potentially harmful things are in it and then play the game at least part way through. The makers of these games know what they have made. Rock Star Games has never hidden the fact you can kill anyone in their games (no children, their #1 rule), visit hookers, and hear harsh language. So when the ESRB has rated their games as Restricted and requiring the purchaser be 17, they never argued. It is now the retailers job to insure ID’s are checked, and parents are made aware that if they buy their kid this hugely popular game, they are in for some R rated stuff (Hence the huge R rating on the front of the box plain for all to see.) It works if the retailers play their part, for which they are hit with HUGE fines of they don’t, and parents take even the slightest interest in what their kids do. Any parent who bought a Grand Theft Auto game for their child, with no idea what it was actually about, needs to get their heads out of the sand. They would have to go out of their way to be that ignorant.
What the newly proposed bill would change: The system would be more accurate, and games could be held back if found to objectionable. Ok, how do the ratings become more accurate? The game would be rated and released once it was played through 100% by an assigned group. Well, one of the reasons the current ESRB group only plays partway through a game is because there are a lot of games that you literally never finish. Or they are so huge with so many side missions, objectives, and goals that it takes some people a year or more to complete. The Grand Theft Auto games can take 200-300 hours to complete. Elder Scrolls; Oblivion may not have an ending. I’ve played over 100 hours, and I don’t think I’m even close to halfway through that game (WITHOUT the “Breast” patch installed)… Technology has reached a point where these games are literally entire digital universes. The worlds most popular mmorpg World of Warcraft at last count had 17,000 quests, over 30 dungeons (each with their own quests), and two complete continents to explore, with an addon being released at the end of the year that will add another full continent, another 12,000 quests, and 15 more dungeons. Nobody has done them all but the programmers and playtesters at Blizzard, Creator of the game, that tell the current ESRB rating system what the game has in it… The system works, because if it wasn’t done that way, games would never be released. And I’m really questioning if that isn’t the point of this in the first place. I feel like we are looking at the biggest act of censorship the world has ever seen, and most people won’t even bat an eye because they don’t care about something they know nothing about and only hear negative things about. The video game industry now makes more money then Hollywood. What they need is a lobbyist group as big and influential as Hollywood’s. It’s time for the nerds to play some major hardball, because I fear that if they don’t, then the internet is next… And as much as we all complain about the government and politics on this blog… We’d go down boys.