Stan Lee, Bobby Kotick Stand Up For Free Speech Re: Video Game Sales

Attention, fellow gamers! We have a very powerful voice in our corner as it pertains to a lawsuit that could see the sale of certain games banned for under-18s. That voice, of course, is Stan Lee, the comic book legend. I mean, if even I know who Stan Lee is, then clearly he transcends the world of comic books.

The deal is that there’s a lawsuit in California, Schwarzenegger v. EMA/ Entertainment Software Association, that will pretty much decide whether or not TO BAN~! violent video games from being sold to minors. Normally, what happens to minors I could not care less about, but this strikes home. I was once a young lad, and played everything from Mortal Kombat to Grand Theft Auto to Whatever, and you don’t see me running around trying to hijack cars.

Anyway, Stan Lee said this:

I’m writing to urge gamers everywhere to take a stand and defend both the First Amendment and the rights of computer and video game artists by joining the Video Game Voters Network (VGVN). My memory has always been lousy and it’s not improving with age. But it’s good enough to remember a time when the government was trying to do to comic books what some politicians now want to do with video games: censor them and prohibit their sales. It was a bad idea half a century ago and it’s just as bad an idea now. And you can do something about it.

He said more, but there’s an awful lot of words there.

You know who’s also on your side? Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision Blizzard everyone loves to hate (primarily because he says some pretty annoying things, and quite frequently).

He says, powerfully:

The argument that video games present some kind of new ominous threat that requires a wholesale reassessment of one of our nation’s most treasured freedoms and to take that freedom away indiscriminately from an entire group of our population based on nothing but age is beyond absurd. These are the same attacks Americans have witnessed against every previous emerging entertainment medium and genre including books, comics, rock ‘roll, movies, TV and the Internet. In each case, freedom prevailed.

OMINOUS THREAT~!

Yeah, we’ll see if any of this has any impact on how the case is decided. As bankrupt as California us, you’d think it would be more concerned with, I don’t know, keeping police in the streets, than whether or not a 16-year-old buys Halo: Reach from Best Buy.