Utah pushing new violent game bill

Earlier this year, a Utah bill treating violent games as pornography failed to make it into a flurry of last-minute laws approved in the state legislature's 2006 general session. Now with the lawmakers back to work, a very similar bill is making progress, according to a report from the Deseret Morning News.

The new bill, still in draft form, was approved Wednesday by the Judiciary Interim Committee despite warnings from Utah attorney general Mark Shurtleff, according to the Deseret Morning News article. Shurtleff warned the committee that the bill would likely be declared unconstitutional if the industry were to challenge it in court.

The draft was approved anyway, with Rep. David Hogue, the original sponsor of HB 257 and a member of the committee, brushing aside concerns of a legal battle.

"Somewhere we have to stand up as citizens and parents and legislators and say, 'That's enough,'" Hogue was quoted as saying. "I very seriously think that we need to push this forward and find if we're going to have a challenge or not and have the attorney general fight those battles."

Utah HB 257 would have classified games containing "inappropriate violence" as harmful to minors. Currently, only material that is sexual in nature receives that designation from the state. The law originally would have applied to movies, music, and other media, as well, but it was revised after failing to make it out of committee in its original form.

This new measure, sponsored by Rep. Scott Wyatt, retains much of the language of Hogue's bill, with one specific substitution. Where Hogue detailed a number of criteria that would classify a game as having inappropriate violence (if the violence was "the thread holding the plot" together, if it used "brutal weapons designed to inflict the maximum amount of pain and damage," if it depicted protagonists "who resort to violence freely," among other criteria), Wyatt pinched a bit of language from Louisiana's pending game restriction law. Under Wyatt's proposed law, Hogue's descriptions are replaced with a single line saying that a game is inappropriately violent if it "appeals to the morbid interest of minors in violence."

Wyatt said he thinks the bill has a fair chance of withstanding a legal challenge, but indicated he would pull the measure if additional research suggests otherwise.