There have been plenty of ridiculous laws made in the past but to what lengths do legislatures go to these days to censor what they deem inappropriate. Well it seems that Illinois has recently created a new law that is aimed at restricting the advertising of “alcopops” in video games and other media.

The part of the law that is of interest to the gaming community is under section 6-36 b-4:

(b) No entity may advertise, promote, or market any alcopop beverages toward children. Advertise, promote, or market includes, but is not limited to the following:

(4) the display of any alcopop beverage in anyvideogame, theater production, or other live performances where the intended audience is primarily children.

So… all the games with a “T” rating and under will be in danger of censorship or outright prohibition of its sale. The question is, what games would that be? Obviously this law was made with some reasoning behind it, or a die hard conservative mother worried about the well being of her children as they play on their Nintendo Wii.  One of the games that comes to mind (and I’m sure there are plenty more out there) is The Sims 2 and it’s various expansion packs such as the University Expansion Pack where all sorts of debauchery can be had.

Other games with a “Teen” rating that could be under the scrutiny of this law:

• World of Warcraft (Your character can drink alcoholic drinks such as beer and get a “drunk” hazy screen effect)
• Overlord (there are beer distilleries in the game)

All I can is that I’m glad to live in europe which for the most part is pretty liberal with censorship. If anyone else knows of other games with a “Teen” rating or lower feel free to comment!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 6th, 2009 at 02:04 am and is filed under Advertising, Censorship, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.