Illinois Governor Rod Blajojevich signed a bill into law on July 27th that prohibits the sale or renting of violent or sexually explicit games to minors. Violators of the new law risk being slapped with a $1,000 fine. The Entertainment Software Association condemned the law, calling it a limit of free speech and too vague for retailers to be able to enforce properly. Indeed, the bill which lists “extremely violent” content doesn’t define it. That could mean a few titles each year are subject to the ban, or anything where a gun shoots something. That’s not for us to decide, however, now that belongs to a judge.

This is just the latest assault on the industry caused by the notorious Hot Coffee modification. The mod let users who downloaded it perform a sex scene in the PC version of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Editors from online magazine GameSpot later performed the scenes on the PlayStation 2 with use of an Action Replay device. As it turns out, the code for the sex game was hidden within the final product, hidden from the prying eyes of the ESRB which, last week, announced a rating change from Mature to Adults Only.

The end result of the San Andreas situation has been a flurry of political scrutiny of the videogame industry with calls for tougher laws against game sales to minors. Senator Hillary Clinton of New York was one of the first, seeking a Federal Trade Commission inquiry into the game, which she got on July 26th. This wouldn’t be the first time Senator Clinton took a shot at the industry either. In March she co-sponsored a bill with Senators Sam Brownback, Rick Santorum, and the always gaming-friendly Joseph Lieberman that created a study to discover the effects that different forms of media—Internet, TV, radio, and video games— have on minors.

Aside from the more serious scrutiny, there have been incidences of strange and just-plain-desperate measures, too. Jack Thompson, a lawyer and anti-gaming crusader, has sought to bump up the rating on the casual-hit Sims 2. The reason being, you ask? Mr. Thompson is upset that codes exist which can disable the blur that the game uses to censor out private parts on nude sims. Never mind the fact that EA claims there are only Barbie-esque plastic-looking bodies under the blurs. Apparently, when you’re trying to simulate human life, you can’t simulate breasts, genitals, or reproduction. They may as well mandate individual twin beds in the parent’s bedroom.

Yes, sex is the deer in the legislative headlights and with incidents like the Janet Jackson half-time show angering the masses and Howard Stern being forced from FM radio, should any of us be surprised? The moral crusaders will use any excuse to get this “smut” out of the hands of anyone who’s under 18. Even in the complaints of Sims 2 and in the criticism of the ESRB, the emphasis is on sex, with only fleeting remarks in reference to the violent content in San Andreas. Where was the outcry when the T-rated game Tiberian Sun had live-action actors graphically slitting a despot’s throat? How many complaints were received when Freedom Fighters had you stealthily assassinate a foreign government official? There was no outcry, and that’s partially due to the times. If the current government has taught us anything over these past five years, it’s that evil men deserve to be taken out or killed, simply because they are evil.

You won’t hear much condemnation about the violence in the games because it is the culture that we live in. You won’t hear it about the latest Hollywood blockbuster where the body count reaches into the hundreds and parts fly left and right. You won’t hear it about shows like Real TV, which show bank robbers firing assault rifles through crowded suburbs. You won’t hear it about the news, where our troops in Iraq are shot at every day and we are given the latest body count from the most-recent car bombing. No one will raise a fuss over violence, but they’ll tack it on to any legislation that will supposedly be helping the children, like keeping sexual material away from their eyes. What’s good for the children is great for a re-election campaign.

Of course, no one is guiltier of giving them a reason to than the industry itself. Long ago, the MPAA ratings became the standard for movies. It relied on the voluntary participation of individual retailers and movie outlets, and for almost 40 years the system has worked. The ESRB ratings, which are no less voluntary, can’t boast the same results. For years, retailers have ignored ratings, either by policy or through individual employees. I can vividly remember buying Perfect Dark, rated M, when I was 16 from a Toys-R-Us. Even this past November, teenagers as young as 13 and 14 were purchasing Halo 2, another M-rated title, without so much as a glance from the person behind the counter. You can’t blame the children for wanting a game, but you can make it harder for them to obtain.

It’s not just the retailers; Rockstar is more to blame for this fiasco than any other single party. The politicians wouldn’t be screaming to protect our nations youth if we hadn’t given them a reason to. Rockstar made a mistake by leaving the original code for the sex mini-games available on the discs. Whether or not it was accidental is irrelevant, it’s the fact that it’s on there. How many would condone hidden sex scenes on their favorite Disney animation DVD? I may be stretching the bounds of comparison, but it’s foolish to think that both San Andreas and Aladdin have completely different audiences—I’ve witnessed more than one five year old play GTA.

The games industry has been around for decades, but it’s still in its early stages. As Lev Grossman of Time magazine put it, “The video game is a brand-new medium, and we get to see it evolve from the very beginning.” We must be responsible enough to see this evolution through to the next faze. As games overtake movies in overall revenue, and as next-generation consoles continue to expand the casual market, there will be an increased acceptance of games into the mainstream culture. Unless we take action and police ourselves, we’ll find the AO rating emptying the shelves on everything from mildly-suggestive situations to survival-horror games that may happen to scare a “concerned parent’s” kid. We’ve got to take responsibility, or the politicians in Washington will do it for us.