Video Vigilantes

One of the best-selling video games of 2004, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, lets players control a character called CJ, who has just returned home to the fictional town of Los Santos to avenge his mother's murder and resurrect his once powerful street gang. To make money, CJ robs people, which often involves punching and kicking his victims until they are lying dead in a pool of blood. To cruise around town, he steals cars and mows down pedestrians who get in his way. And to keep his spirits from flagging amid all the mayhem, he can hire a prostitute and have sex with her in his car. While the game does not show the sex onscreen, the rocking of the car, the sound of the woman groaning and the vibrations of the PlayStation 2 game pad leave little to the imagination.

Like about 10% of all video games on the market, Grand Theft Auto is rated M for mature by the Entertainment Software Rating Board, a self-regulated group created by the gaming industry, and is recommended only for players ages 17 or older. Yet there is no law preventing retailers from selling Mrated games--including other hot titles like Halo 2, Half-Life 2 and Doom 3--to kids. Now the Governor of Illinois, Democrat Rod Blagojevich, is trying to do something about that. Outraged by a news report about JFK Reloaded, a game available for download from an overseas firm, in which players try to assassinate President Kennedy, Blagojevich plans to propose two bills this month that would make it a misdemeanor, punishable by fines of $5,000 or up to a year in jail, for retailers to sell or rent games with certain sexual or violent content to kids under 18. The $7 billion video-game business, says Blagojevich, is an industry that "targets its products at kids. Just as a child buying cigarettes is inappropriate, just as a child buying alcohol is inappropriate, just as a child buying pornography is inappropriate, the same kind of thinking, in my judgment, applies to violent video games and graphic sexual video games." If passed and upheld in court, the laws would be the first statewide measures to impose fines and jail time for selling M-rated games to minors.

Blagojevich is in for a tough fight. As video games have become a regular part of kids' daily lives--a recent survey by Michigan State University found that eighth-grade boys play them on average 23 hr. a week and girls 12 hr.--many people agree that the games' increasingly realistic depictions of violence and sex need to be examined. Nevertheless, three previous attempts to block the distribution of violent games to minors--initially approved in Indianapolis, Ind.; St. Louis, Mo.; and Seattle--have been overturned in federal courts on the grounds that video games are protected "speech" under the First Amendment.