Good old Senator Leland Yee. Or, as Kotaku expertly put it, "supercilious wanker Leland Yee." Observant readers might have spotted him last week, getting a smackdown from attorney Katherine Fallow.
Or perhaps they remember the bill he championed in 2005, labelling and banning sale to minors any game that happened to fall under the vaguely-defined umbrella of "violent," getting declared unconstitutional earlier this month. Well, Senator Yee is back, and this time he’s demanding some information on the causes for the Manhunt 2 re-rate:
Parents can’t trust a rating system that doesn’t even disclose how they come to a particular rating. The ESRB and Rockstar should end this game of secrecy by immediately unveiling what content has been changed to grant the new rating and what correspondence occurred between the ESRB and Rockstar to come to this conclusion. Unfortunately, history shows that we must be quite skeptical of these two entities.
This is a pretty ridiculous statement. The MPAA, the body that rates movies, functions in a similar fashion and yet receives no complaints. At any rate, it’s not actually a conflict of interest because the ESRB and its members don’t get paid based on how many games sell. On the other hand, granting Senator Yee and groups like the CCFC intimate access to the re-rating process would be a conflict of interest, as both parties have their own anti-video game agendas already in place.
[via GamePolitics]
