EA’s Green: Schwarzenegger a Hypocrite

EA.com Editor-in-Chief Jeff Green took to his corporate blog to write about why gamers should care about Schwarzenegger v. EMA.

Agreeing with EA CEO John Riccitiello, who said that a Supreme Court decision upholding the California law would “screw us up in a real way,” Green argued:

… it could have a chilling effect on the gaming industry as a whole--both the makers and sellers of the games, who will have to seriously think twice about the kind of product they can and want to sell, out of fear of ending up in jail. And therein lies the bigger question at hand. Because if you substitute books or movies or music in the previous couple sentences, you can see just how wrong this is.

Echoing sentiment from a previous post today on GP, Green takes issues with Governor Schwarzenegger’s upcoming movie The Expendables, noting that the MPAA movie ratings are voluntary, just like the ESRB Ratings for videogames. Green wrote, “As bloody as this movie may be, it's not actually illegal for a theater to sell a minor a ticket to this movie, nor is it illegal for a parent to let his or her kid in with them.”

Green continued:

If Schwarzenegger really believed in the underlying message of the law with his name on it---that it should be illegal to sell or rent material deemed excessively violent for kids---then he should take the first step and make it illegal for kids to see "The Expendables." Until then, this is all nothing but hypocrisy of the highest order.

Green urged those who care about the issue to sign the Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA) petition page dedicated to the issue.


Disclosure: GamePolitics is a publication of the ECA