In the News Archives

July 2006

(P)laying Down the Law

Over the past several months, numerous state legislatures across the U.S. have passed laws regarding the regulation of video games. The Entertainment Software Association (ESA), the national representative of the video-game industry, has opposed some of these laws while supporting others. Here’s a summary of some of the recent legal highlights:

• Minnesota – HF1298 mandates $25 fines against underage customers who purchase Mature or Adults Only-rated video games. Previous Minnesota law had included fines for those who sell inappropriate games to minors, but had not penalized buyers. The ESA says that the law is a violation of the First Amendment and is currently challenging the law in Federal District Court.
• Oklahoma – HB30004 adds video games that feature “inappropriate violence” to a list of items, including hardcore pornography, that are considered “harmful to minors.” The result of the law is that it is now a felony for anyone in Oklahoma to sell or rent video games that have “inappropriate violence” to underage customers. Again, the ESA is challenging this law, claiming that “similar laws have been ruled unconstitutional by six federal courts in the past five years.”
• Maryland – A new state law imposes penalties from a $5,000 fine to a year in jail to those who sell Adults Only-rated games to minors. The ESA supported this particular bill, largely because it only concerns “illicit sex”-based content and not violence-related content.

You can follow these and other legal issues around video-game regulation at Gamasutra. To get information about the current video-game rating system, visit http://www.esrb.org/index-js.jsp.

Teaching Teachers How to Play

“Games are fun because they’re good for learning,” says Nick DeKanter of Muzzy Lane Software. “People like to acquire new skills, they like to learn new things…. Games facilitate that very well.”

And thanks to Muzzy Lane, in collaboration with the Game Institute, teachers are the ones acquiring the new skills. The two companies are collaborating on “Using Games in Education” (UGE), an online interactive course that teaches educators about the benefits of using learning games in the classroom. UGE offers practical knowledge ranging from how to select the right learning game to how to convince school administrators that learning games are indeed a good idea.

According to DeKanter, there has been “a tremendous amount of excitement about gaming in the classroom, but very little has been put out about tying games into the curriculum and affecting educational outcomes. We realized we had some knowledge to share.” UGE is taught in four one-week periods that can be taken consecutively or spread out over several months in order to accommodate teachers’ typically busy schedules.

For more information about UGE, visit http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/PFshowstory.cfm?ArticleID=6214 and http://www.gameinstitute.com/courses.php?coursedisplay=115.

That’s Exertainment!

The typical stereotype of a video-game player is a lone wolf, male, teen-to-young twenties-type whose only exercise is pressing the buttons on his game controller. However, a recent study indicates that gamers are a much more diverse lot, with many being older, female and even fairly sociable. And now comes a new movement suggesting that many gamers actually like… movement.

It’s called “exertainment,” and it’s a combination of exercise and entertainment. One example of this new trend is the soon-to-open California gym, the XRtainment Zone. Dr. Ernie Medina, one of the founders of the gym, had long been aware of the widespread notion that America’s childhood-obesity problem is largely a result of kids spending way too much time playing video games. But he also knew that there was a growing body of video games that actually asked players to get up and move – games like Dance Dance Revolution and EyeToy, in which players move their bodies to control the on-screen game action. So Medina and his partners decided to open an 8,000 square-foot facility where kids would be able to play cool video games and get a great workout. He believes the XRtainment Zone has the potential to offer a healthier (and cheaper) alternative to typical video-game arcades. “Kids are already spending from $20 to $100 a visit to the arcades,” he says. “At our gym, they can pay one monthly fee and come in whenever they want to exercise and play games at the same time.”

To learn more about the XRtainment Zone, check out their ongoing blog at http://xrtainmentzone.blogspot.com/.

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