The first amendment "games-as-porn" debate has come to my backyard. Massachusetts House Bill 1423 (pdf) aims to add "Interactive Media" to their current definition of material that can be harmful to minors. They've inserted the obligatory description of violent games as "patently offensive to prevailing standards" appealing "predominantly to the morbid interest in violence of minors" and lacking in "serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value".

Despite the fact that similarly worded bills have been declared unconstitutional (or failed to pass because they were deemed too likely to be overturned anyway) in several states, more and more states keep jumping on the bandwagon. This worries me, because traditionally where Massachussetts leads, Maine follows. The Maine legislature is liable to look up from its campaign against puppies and notice that the current trendy move in being parent to the masses is to legislate video game sales.

Another thing that worries me is the fact that when I try to search out news on this bill, I google for EIGHT pages without finding something that isn't directly from a pro-games site.

This is where I found myself before giving up on finding mainstream news on the subject.

This is the top story on the eighth and final page I searched, including very specific search terms.

What this tells me is that this issue really isn't on the public radar. It's not something that people can easily find on an outside website, it's not something that's going to come up on their "AOL today" homescreen. I know I'm in the vast minority of people who keep GameSpot News on my iGoogle homepage and have quicklinks to sites like GamePolitics and IGN. If this issue isn't out there in the mainstream media, regular people are not going to hunt up a video game site to find it, and if they do they're not going to consider it worthwhile.

Fortunately a few public figures do have things to say about this. Austin (MrChup0n) brought this one to my attention today (via Kotaku): Stephen King, horror author extraordinaire (and Maine resident), speaks out in his column in Entertainment Weekly in defense of video games and in opposition to the demonization of popular culture.

To quote King's editorial:

"According to the proposed bill, violent videogames are pornographic and have no redeeming social merit. The vid-critics claim they exist for one reason and one reason only, so kids can experience the vicarious thrill of killing. Now, what does and doesn't have social merit is always an interesting question, one I can discuss for hours. But what makes me crazy is when politicians take it upon themselves to play surrogate parents. The results of that are usually disastrous. Not to mention undemocratic. "

Entertainment Weekly is probably not the best platform from which to reach the masses, but hey. It's a start. There are tons of Americans out there who don't realize that there's a precedent of these laws being ruled unconstitutional. They don't realize that there's any sort of resistance to the idea of regulation. They don't see the double standard presented by violent music, movies, and even fiction going largely unregulated. Public awareness needs to be raised.

I don't want to see this issue on the table in my home state. However if it does come here, I want to know that the general public-- just not the self-proclaimed experts-- will be aware of the issue and its background. I want to know if I'm calling up my representative's office that I'm not the only one.

[During the course of writing this up, I ran across one (and only one) source that states that the bill has been tabled for one year but since this hasn't popped up anywhere else yet, and since "tabled" and "altogether scrapped" aren't interchangeable terms, I'm gonna go ahead and leave this commentary. It took too long to write it to table it now. ;)]