Where Politics And Video Games Collide

I see no evidence that this addresses any of the objections to the previous bill.

1. How can the government force the ESRB to do anything? They're a private body. The government can't make legislation that applies specifically to them. This would be a violation of equal protection.

2. This would severely change the mandate of the GAO for no apparent reason. Doesn't this sort of thing fall to the FTC?

3. Playing games all the way through would make it take much longer and be far more expensive to rate games. This would do considerabel econimc damage to the industry.

4. The raters would have to be sufficiently skilled in video games to play through in a reasonable amount of time. This would rule out most people who would be thought of as representative of America's parents. Some games would be okay, but imagine some soccer mom trying to get through Ninja Gaiden on the top skill level to make sure it doesn't unlock boobies or something.

5. You can never really be certain whether you've seen all content in a video game. There are too mahy variables. Hot Coffee should have been an object lesson int his, but the people who matter don't seem to have caught on.

6. Requiring games to have an ESRB rating for distribution would mean that you had to pay a great deal of money (see point 3) in order to practice your right to free speech. This is a clear violation of the first ammendment.

The only part of this that may be legally valid is forcing accurate description on games with content descriptors, though I believe this already falls under the FTC's current powers to enforce truth in advertising.