Okey-doke, let's come at this from a legal perspective. In the words of the Dude, "this isn't a first amendment thing". This has nothing to do with freedom of speech. What this has to do with is regulating what is appropriate for minors to be viewing. All I'm seeing in the comments are minors who are grumpy because they'll no longer be able to buy games that are not necessarily appropriate for them. My advice? Get over it. Hell, maybe you shouldn't be viewing that content.
Now, both film and music have ratings sytem that theoretically prevent minors from accessing adults-only content, and this will be no different. The government are not using videogames as a scapegoat for anything; the fact that the gaming industry has gone so long without a proper institutionalised system of age ratings should indicate that the government have actually not even looked at videogames closely enough over the past thirty years for it to become an area warranting legislation. The relatively recent growth of gaming as an industry and entertainment medium has caused a massive uptake in videogames by younger audiences. This naturally necessitates a legislative code of conduct that will properly regulate the sale of adults-only videogames to minors. While this might not work in practice, it's a step in the right direction for legitimising videogames as both an entertainment medium and an art form, as the majority of people still don't take them seriously.
Let me put that on a new paragraph: "[b]While this might not work in practice, it's a step in the right direction for legitimising videogames as both an entertainment medium and an art form.[/b]"
The idea of opposing this kind of legislation is ridiculous. It is a simple fact that there is content that is inappropriate for minors to be viewing. This ranges from sexual content, to violence, to drug use, and it's not because videogames affect behaviour (although the jury is still out on that one), or because minors are more impressionable than adults (although they actually are). It's simply because minors have a low emotional maturity, and sometimes intellectual maturity, and should not be presented with the images presented in say, the excessively-violent BlOps2. Don't -blam!- with me here, I've played BlOps2, and it's horrendously violent. I'm not usually affected by that stuff in games or film, but it was just ridiculous: guys caught in bear traps and then shot to death? An almost constant stream of throat-stabbing? It's a simply fact that the vast majority of minors are not at the point that they should be exposed to that.
Preparing for intense flaming from under-18s in 3... 2... 1...
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If you're going to take a legal perspective you should at least understand the fundamentals behind both the first amendment, the motion picture association of america, and the laws that relate to them. It's cool you have an opinion, but it's a really uneducated and incorrect one.