I understand how quite a few game hackers would be in favor of a ruling like this, but if these are truly your convictions, I would like to see some video (not screencast, video) of your 12 year-old son playing some game with his mostly nude, thoroughly adult female character slavishly hacking on the corpses of other characters. Is that normal?

I was in an ethics discussion in my military surgical program and started to see how the effects of these policies. Full disclosure: a number of my friends have died in the current conflicts, starting with the Pentagon on 9/11. One of the situations we were posed with, by staff who were there, was this:

CIA officers approach you, as a doctor, in Kandahar, with a captured informant-turned-double-agent. They want you to give him Ativan so he'll talk. They tell you he knows where a weapons cache is that could be used against Americans. You say no, there's no medical indication. They say, if you don't, they'll torture him and get the information anyway. You're role will only cause him more pain or less.

The overwhelming consensus of medical students, interns, and residents was to give him the Ativan. Three of us took the opposite position: you can't let people cajole you into making moral decisions based on threats. Then your just complicit.

The irony was that the majority consisted of essentially everyone who hadn't thought about these problems before. In the minority of three were two of us with prior service, and the philosophy major.

Here's the point: video game violence develop a shitty moral compass. It's just shit. I don't care if it points in the right direction or the wrong direction. I, your comrade in arms, don't know where it's going to point next time. And that's not the guy I want be sharing a tent with.

So enjoy your expanded access to an audience willing to pretend they understand violence. Moral consistency matters. Reliability matters. You can look forward to further international embarrassment when they grow up to make the wrong, randomly wrong, decisions behind the trigger or, worse, at the voting booth.

Edit: Look, I'm all for the first amendment. I took an oath to defend it, and I carry a copy of the Constitution with me everywhere. I read it regularly. Genuinely, I support the ideas in the opinion. My concern is that waiting in the wings around this particular opinion, there's a lot of unscrupulous adults salivating over the opportunity to take money from my kids in exchange for making my job as a parent, doctor, military officer, etc, harder.

Edit 2: For those asking for evidence: here is the American Academy of Pediatrics Policy Statement on Media Violence, which includes abundant (3500) references if you would like to dig deeper: http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/108/5/1222.ful...

Preview of that statement: "The strength of the correlation between media violence and aggressive behavior found on meta-analysis is greater than that of calcium intake and bone mass, lead ingestion and lower IQ, condom nonuse and sexually acquired human immunodeficiency virus infection, or environmental tobacco smoke and lung cancer."

Edit 3: I would like to point out that here is a thread full of programmers justifying, essentially to themselves, why their industry is best off with less regulation. Do you extend your arguments to other industries gray areas? Meat processing? Tobacco? Defense? Isn't "corporate self-regulation" best for everyone?