Under New York State law, the sale of any "indecent" material to a minor is a "Class E" felony punishable by three to four years in prison. Albany is currently debating amendments to existing laws that specifically target the sale of console games (XBOX 360, etc.) to minors if they contain "indecent" or depict "depraved violence." The amendments exclude games that run on computers and handhelds.

The changes would prohibit the sale of new consoles without parental controls and would create an Advisory Council on Interactive Media and Youth Violence.

This is in line with one of Governor Eliot Spitzer's campaign promises: to pass legislation against video games. And why not? Who could be against distributing damaging material to children? Why would anyone object?

Actually, a lot of people do, myself included. Here's why:

1) To specifically target games is redundant. It's already a felony to sell indecent material to children. The indecent material could be a game, a videotape, a magazine, a movie ticket, or a collection of Sumerian sexual escapades inscribed on clay tablets. Why target a specific medium? Why make today's computer games the "seducers of the innocent" that comic books were in the 50's?

2) Targeting merchant sales to minors is backdoor censorship. And worse, it's an itty-bitty locus of control. Since those who object to the content of games cannot target the content creators (that ugly Freedom of Speech thing), they target the merchants instead, and indirectly the hardware manufacturers and content creators.

Beyond that, it's often not the minor purchasing the game who is the problem. My game-design students often have experience working in game stores. Over the past several years, whenever we've discussed ratings in class, I hear variations on the following: "Often if I tell the customer the game they're buying for the kid they brought with them is inappropriate, they just tell me, ‘But it's what he wants.'"

To specifically target console games makes no sense. Don't our legislators realize that often the same games appear on consoles, computers, and handhelds? If they do, perhaps the legislature and the governor were wary of earning the wrath of the major media, computing, and telecommunications industries that are responsible for significant parts of our economy in this state. But perhaps they thought that antagonizing the game industry would have little economic impact in New York.

Legislating against sales of "new" consoles without parental controls is prosecuting a non-existent case. All current consoles have parental controls, and it's unlikely that future ones won't.

A "Commission on Interactive Media and Youth Violence"? Do we have Commissions on Books, Music, Television, and/or Film and Youth Violence?

The commission would evaluate existing rating systems. And it would study the relationship between game violence and real-world violence. But running additional studies and revisiting long-standing rating systems are more redundancies.

Buried within the legislation is a nugget of sense: several items that address intervention and prevention of youth violence overall. An Advisory Council on Youth Violence that did those things could be a real asset statewide, especially if the governor looks at existing programs at Baden Street Settlement, Community Place, and the other exceptional efforts here in Rochester.

The best-case scenario is that this unnecessary, redundant, and illogical piece of legislation makes its way into law, where it is challenged in court, costing the taxpayers money, and then fails in court. And when it fails, the minors of this state WILL STILL BE PROTECTED from indecent material, as they were before the legislation was proposed.

The worst-case scenario is that it passes and survives the legal challenges. These new measures will provide NO ADDITIONAL PROTECTION to minors, but will label the state as unnecessarily antagonistic toward the game industry, which is just bad business.

The state currently has a small number of existing game companies. Ambrosia, here in town and started by RIT grads, has a long history of producing good games independently to the shareware market. Vicarious Visions, in Albany and founded by RPI grads, and 1st Playable, in Troy, are creating major licensed properties for the industry. RIT and RPI are leading universities in the education of game developers.

A homegrown, upstate game industry is within our reach, and could be a major force in retaining the technical and artistic talent we are currently hemorrhaging out to other states. If, instead, we pass legislation that declares us antagonistic to and/or ignorant of one of the largest economic drivers in today's global economy, we'll just be doing business as usual.

If this legislation seems as silly to you as it does to me, contact the governor's office and the leaders of the legislature: State Senator Joe Bruno and Assembly Leader Sheldon Silver.