Vernon on 7/10/2010 at 08:17

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Presumably it applies to any gamer who plays games produced in a country through which a precedent set in the US would propagate?

Anyway I don't really see what this is beyond the usual write-to-your-local-politician-and-sign-this-petition website. I suppose having the (http://www.theesa.com/) European Space Agency (yeah I had to look up ESA) on board is pretty cool tho. I honestly don't understand lobbying, other than a [probably] misinformed notion that if you want to convince politicians to stop kicking your hobby about like a political football, you have to have shedloads of money

negativeliberty on 8/10/2010 at 00:05

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For the moment it's aimed at the US mid-term elections in November though. I don't doubt that legislation like this might have an effect across borders, but I'd say this primarily concerns US gamers and US developers/publishers. Of course there's an anti-fun brigade in every country, but outside of Australia, Germany, China and a few other countries they haven't gotten very far, as far as I know (and I think both Australia and Germany are putting their game censorship policies under review).

It's more of a precautionary thing, legislation such as this can creep up out of nowhere (even if it's often very local and short-lived) and like Yahtzee says games don't get the fairest of coverage in the media, which I could care less about so long as the demagogues don't exploit it to censor game development (although such legislation would in practice mean that US-made games are only censored in their US-versions, not internationally, as has been the case with German games).

:laff:

You know what, I like your plan better, gamers should definitely team up with the European Space Agency, we can tell them we want interactive space-travel and fast loading times between spacedocks :p