Violent Games and Mature Films

Title: Violent games and mature films: trying to limit youth access; when is a TV audience considered too young? RSPEAK_STOP Author(s): Jim Rutenberg Source: The New York Times. (Oct. 2, 2000): L, Business News: pC1. Document Type: Article Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2000 The New York Times Company please do not remove this comment, in place to remove the extra space http://www.nytimes.com RSPEAK_START do not remove FT/IMG Full Text: As Henry Liu riddles aliens with bullets from a compression rifle, he considers the advantages of having recently turned 17. His parents let him get his first driver's license, he points out, and he can now attend Rrated movies at will. He is also now of age to buy M-rated video games, which the game industry says should be marketed and sold only to those over 17. But Mr. Liu, playing a Star Trek game at a demonstration kiosk in a downtown computer store, said this particular rite of passage was moot. ''I've been playing Doom, Quake, Unreal for three or four years,'' he said -- all games rated M (for mature), with graphic gore and violence. In Doom, for instance, Mr. Liu said he could use 10 weapons, including saws, shotguns and submachine guns, to kill human opponents, whose bodies explode and scatter when they are killed. For the video game industry, Mr. Liu and hundreds of thousands of other teenage players present a financial opportunity, but a sensitive one. A report last month by the Federal Trade Commission criticized game makers for deliberately marketing adult games to minors in violation of the industry's own policies. And it said retailers made it too easy for minors to buy those games. In some ways, the video game industry got higher marks in the report than the movie and music businesses. Jodie Z. Bernstein, director of the

bureau of consumer protection for the Federal Trade Commission, said in an interview that the video game industry had ''the most comprehensive of all the self-regulatory bodies.'' But ''that doesn't mean...