Posts with tag violent

We may not know just what political stance Activision Blizzard has decided to take on the issue of S.134: The Violent Content Research Act of 2013, but we do know the company has hired lobbying firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld to lobby the Senate over it. The bill calls for the National Academy of Sciences to study the correlation between children playing violent video games or watching violent video content and violent behavior -- and could be a stepping stone towards more legislation aimed at restricting game sales.

There have already been studies on video games and violent behavior, but the results have been mixed: ask a dozen experts and you'll get a dozen different opinions on how violent content might affect violent behavior. To this end, the bill also calls for study to identify gaps in current research. However, it's questionable whether more research will give us a real answer or just more mixed signals. In the meanwhile, game-makers are definitely edgy about how this could impact their bottom line... which is probably why Activision Blizzard has jumped on the lobbying bandwagon.

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Blizzard has been having all kinds of issues trying to bring World of Warcraft back online in China, but here's one piece of good news for them: China's Ministry of Culture has gone through the game and approved all of the content in it. They apparently were concerned about some violent content (we know they've already made changes in the past to the Undead models), but that's now been cleared, and the only thing left is final approval by the General Administration of Press and Publication. There's no date on when that might happen, but it seems that will be soon (not soon(tm), just soon).

Blizzard should be extremely happy to see these content checks cleared, as it means that they're not only that much closer to bringing the servers back online, but that they can also finally bring out Wrath of the Lich King there. The whole issue with Netease and The9 backed things up, and then these content checks were a problem, but hopefully most of the obstacles have been cleared by now, and Chinese players can soon start making their way back into the game and up to the snowy shores of Northrend.