Steam Trading Cards Out of Beta

Steam's trading cards, mentioned briefly in this way-too-long post about virtual trading cards in general, are out of beta today. I already had the pleasure of "collecting" some of these cards a few weeks ago, thanks to a Steam friend who sent me a beta invite, but my participation thus far (spurred by curiosity alone) has been strictly passive. I got my standard card drops for Half-Life 2 and Portal 2 by running each game for a couple of hours, but I've yet to go out of my way to collect an entire set of cards for any given game.

It hardly seems worth it, since doing so would likely require trading with strangers or giving money to strangers; one is irritating and the other is insane. Meanwhile, it seems the only material reward for obtaining a full set of cards is the possibility of a coupon alongside a bunch of virtual things that are no more useful to me than the virtual cards used to pay for them. On the other hand, all of these virtual things are worth something to someone, so more substantial material rewards — monetary rewards, in fact — might be within reach if you know how to work the system for a profit.

How It Works

For those of you not in-the-know, the newly introduced Steam trading cards are the latest in a series of secondary features added to the already-bloated Steam Community over the past year or two. (Steam Market? Steam Workshop? Greenlight? What are these "Community Hub" things and why do these discussions need to be separate from the existing Steam forums? I think I've had enough.) Unfortunately, these trading cards don't do much, and they're not part of a collectible card game like Magic: The Gathering. They're just collectibles. You can exchange a set of them to get a handful of virtual prizes, but in the end it all boils down to more collectible stuff in your inventory, more cosmetic features on your profile, and perhaps a bigger ego if you're actually proud of this.

Your first few trading cards can be earned by playing any the applicable games, and additional cards can then be received from three-card booster packs which are given out at random. However, booster packs don't seem plentiful — at least, not at this time — so getting a complete set of cards before the heat death of the universe will likely require trade of some kind.

For most games, the initial gameplay-induced card drops are based on playtime only, so you don't have to do anything in-game to get them. In fact, you don't even have to play; you can just get your cards by idling at the main menu of each game. (If I remember correctly, it only takes a couple of hours to get your maximum share of trading cards from any given game, much less than the length of a typical playthrough, so whether you're playing the game or leaving it paused for card-mining, there's no grinding involved here.) The only games with special card-dropping rules are the so-called "free-to-play" Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2, which only drop one card per $9 spent on in-game items.

Leveling Up

So what's the point of all this?

Here's a hint: Money. But I'll get into that shortly. First and foremost, these trading cards give you another reason to care about your Steam Level, an arbitrary indicator of coolness according to Valve, which appears on your Steam profile. A user's level is based on experience points which are in turn earned primarily by accumulating badges. What are badges? Well, actually, those are nothing new.

Most of the badges on my own profile are from participation in Steam's sale-related events from previous years. (Valve has a history of using the Steam community as a platform for meta-games aimed at getting its members more involved and excited about spending money, and sometimes this involves handing out specially themed achievements for the various games on sale during an event. These achievements often translate to badges and thus to experience.) Badges and experience points can also be earned for being a long-time member, participating in beta tests, and — predictably — owning lots and lots of Steam games.

The trading card thing factors into all of this because each complete set of cards associated with a given game — all eight of the Half-Life 2 cards, for example — can be exchanged for a badge. (The same badge can then be "leveled up" multiple times by collecting the same set of cards again and again.) Along with each badge comes the aforementioned handful of virtual goodies, which may or may not include a coupon, as well as a bunch of experience which raises your Steam Level. Having a higher level then increases your chance of randomly getting a booster pack of three cards.

At this early date, however, it's not exactly clear how frequently one might expect to receive a booster pack. As I mentioned above, it seems pretty rare. The trading card FAQ only shows the percentages of increased drop rates associated with each leveling milestone, and indicates that booster packs are "granted randomly to eligible users as more badges are crafted by members of the community." Without more information, I'll just have to wait and see how long it takes me to get a booster pack, if I ever get one. Frankly, however, I'm more interested in how Valve is controlling the number of cards in circulation.

Artificial Scarcity

Logging playtime will only get you half the set of cards for any given game — for example, four of the eight Half-Life 2 cards — and that might include duplicates. In the absence of booster packs, a player who doesn't trade will literally never earn a badge, and a player who only trades card-for-card will literally never be able to craft badges for all of his or her applicable games. In such a system, allowing cards to be permanently consumed in the badge crafting process would very quickly lead to a shortage. Booster packs fix this, but giving them out willy nilly would lead to an ever-increasing surplus. I can only assume that the cards being exchanged for badges are the very same cards being redistributed in booster packs. After all, that would make loads of sense, especially if we're supposed to pretend that these imaginary cards are to be treated as actual collectible objects like Magic cards or vintage stamps. If it is the case, however, the seemingly miniscule odds of receiving a booster pack would suggest that a relatively small number of users are actually crafting badges.

In any case, while a user who doesn't trade still does theoretically have a chance of eventually crafting a badge, the system heavily encourages trading, which is far more convenient. The only question is whether you're trading cards for cards, or paying cash. Even more convenient than finding a stranger who has what you need, and needs what you have, is looking up exactly what you need on the Steam Market and buying it. Sounds crazy? It's already happening. Thousands of cards are showing up on the Steam Market, with the rare foil cards going for a few dollars and regular cards ranging from around 40 cents to just above a dollar. This doesn't necessarily mean that just as many thousands of cards are successfully being sold, but the list of recently sold items on the market's main page does show a few cards every time I reload it.

This brings me to Valve's other motivation for getting into the virtual trading card business. Simply put, the whole thing is designed to suck more money from the wallets of those who are prone to trading card addiction. Some people, like me, are driven to obsessive completionism in video games; for other people, that completionism extends outside of video games to stuff like this. There are people out there who will not feel complete until they've collected every card. It's not inconceivable that some poor soul might actually buy one of these trading-card-enabled games on Steam for the sole purpose of getting more cards to trade. For the slightly less insane (but equally addicted) collector, the Steam Market is there with individual cards for sale, always waiting, tempting you with an easy path to your next badge.

Free Money (But Not Just For You)

For everything sold on the market, Valve takes a small transaction fee, so even though they aren't selling cards directly to users, they're still making money. In addition to these user-to-user card sales, the introduction of this trading card meta-game brings a mess of other items to the market as well, namely the emoticons and profile backgrounds that are earned with the creation of each badge. As long as the market is alive, Valve is making money just by keeping the servers turned on.

Evil, huh? But none of this is particularly bad for the user. Sellers on the market can make some extra change to put toward their next game (if they don't want their cards and don't mind viciously undercutting thousands upon thousands of other sellers), and buyers needn't worry much about the transaction fee unless they plan on turning around selling the very same items they just bought (which appears to be a losing proposition when each buyer pays more than each seller earns). Some have allegedly made a significant profit (in Steam Wallet credit) by purchasing cards and selling whatever rare items come out of badge crafting, but I can only assume this requires some cleverness and some luck. Trading card hustling and associated caveats aside, though, it's pretty nice to have an official means of selling items that you don't want to keep, even if your Steam wallet will only grow by a few cents.

So it's not all bad, but don't think Valve is doing us any favors; if you try to look at this from the developer's point of view, all of our usernames turn into dollar signs as usual. If you think you're going to get rich by selling all your cards, think again. Valve, on the other hand, has created yet another way to generate revenue by doing very little work. They've created their own little economy in which everything is heavily taxed but nobody really cares.

In other Steam-related news, this year's summer sale is due to start pretty soon. No one ever seems to know the exact starting date, but last year's summer sale started in mid-July, and in the previous year it started at the end of June and overlapped with the July 4th holiday. I probably already own most of the Steam games I'd be willing to buy this summer, and my backlog is already long enough thanks to the incessant Humble Bundle events, but I look forward to another Steam event nonetheless. (Maybe I'll get another badge.)

The Problem with Trading Card Games

Scrolls, the upcoming collectible-card-based strategy game from Minecraft developer Mojang, enters its open beta phase today. Essentially, this means you can buy the not-quite-finished game for less than its full price and start playing early while they work out the bugs and make improvements. Some part of me wants to partake in this, because the game looks pretty interesting (and because we all know how playing Minecraft quickly became the most popular thing since breathing), but the rest of me doesn't want to touch this game with a thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot pole. It looks fun, but I'm conflicted.

Collectible card games are an interesting thing. I want to love them, because I think they're so cool in theory. I wanted to love Magic: The Gathering, the original trading card game published by Wizards of the Coast back in 1993. The concept of such a card game is ingenious, both for its unique gameplay and — let's be honest — for its potential to rake in huge wads of cash for the owners.

Over the past 20 years, new sets of Magic cards have been released on a regular basis, and the total number of different cards seems to have surpassed 13,000, yet the game still remains accessible to newcomers. New rules are introduced all the time, and the balance is tweaked with each new expansion, but the earliest cards can still be used (outside of certain tournaments) together with the ones printed today. The number of possible combinations in a 60-card deck isn't even worth counting.

The ability of each player to create his or her own customized deck of cards, drawing from a collection unlike that of any opponent, is what makes this type of game so fun to play. Unfortunately, this makes the gameplay inherently imbalanced, unless we consider the start of the collection process to be the true beginning of any given match (and that's a stretch). Even then, a game like Magic too often requires continual monetary investment if you want to remain competitive, and this feature (while I'd like to call it a flaw) is by design. I played Magic for a brief period of time, several years ago, and my cards might have been only half-decent back then, but they're total garbage now. More powerful cards and better gameplay mechanics are created with each expansion to keep players spending their money. Of course.

There's also a certain threshold of monetary investment required in order to become competitive in the first place, and that threshold is probably going to scale in proportion to the size of your opponent's paycheck. Things might be balanced within a group if everyone involved cares enough to go on eBay to buy selectively the individual cards they need for one of a few strategies deemed viable at the expert level, but this isn't always affordable. Meanwhile, for more casual play in which most cards are obtained from random packs, the guy who wins most often is going to be the guy who spent the most money on his collection. The three pillars of succeeding in Magic: The Gathering are building a good deck, making the right in-game decisions, and (perhaps most importantly) owning better cards than the other guy (which is where the "collectible" aspect comes in).

When a video game affords even the smallest advantage to a player who spends extra money (e.g., through micro-transactions), we call it "pay-to-win" (even if this isn't literally true) and we hate it because it feels so wrong. It is wrong, because the delicate balance of the game in question is either compromised or completely destroyed. Being at a disadvantage sucks, and if you give in and buy your way to the top then the challenge is gone and the game quickly becomes pointless. (In the most extreme cases, you've essentially just paid to see the words "you win" on your screen, so congratulations on doing that.)

A lesser form of pay-to-win merely allows players to spend some extra money to skip past a seemingly endless grind, as is the case in many so-called "free-to-play" games. This doesn't necessarily destroy the game's balance of power (because the advantages being bought can also be earned through dozens of hours of play), but it does highlight the major flaws already present in the game. If a person wants to pay more money simply to get less gameplay, the game probably sucks (and the person playing it probably hasn't realized there's nothing left to do if you're not grinding).

In the video game world, all of this is positively awful, but most collectible card games are pay-to-win by nature. Sure, they're fun to play if you're up against someone whose skill level and deck quality are in the same league as yours, but if you play against a guy whose collection of cards is twice as big (and twice as expensive) then it's completely unfair.

When I first heard of Magic: The Gathering Online prior to its release in 2002, I thought it might be a little more fair (and affordable) than its tabletop equivalent. I assumed (or at least hoped) that each player would be given access to the same pool of cards, or perhaps that better cards might be unlocked by winning matches, or something. At the very least, I naively believed that players wouldn't have to buy all of their virtual cards at the same price as physical ones because... well, you know, because they're not real cards. Unfortunately, Magic: The Gathering Online is identical to the original card game except that the cards aren't made of card stock and ink.

Duels of the Planeswalkers looks like a nice alternative, even with its relatively small number of cards, until you realize that you can't even build your own deck. This is no surprise, though, since Wizards of the Coast doesn't want this game to be a viable alternative. Duels of the Planeswalkers is meant to draw in new players and get them hooked, so they become frustrated by the lack of deck-building options and graduate to buying packs of cards, be they physical or digital. The virtual cards in Magic: The Gathering Online, despite being virtual, have monetary value because Wizards of the Coast doesn't let you do whatever you want with them. Artificial scarcity makes them seem as rare as the physical cards printed in limited runs on actual paper.

Digital game distributor Steam recently unveiled its own trading card meta-game, which is still in beta, and it's proving to be a nice example of how such artificial scarcity can make something desirable even if it has no real value, no purpose, and no practical function.

Players with access to the beta test can earn virtual trading cards for their Steam Community accounts by logging play time in certain Steam games. These currently include Borderlands 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Don't Starve, Half-Life 2, and Portal 2, as well as the free-to-play games Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2 (but only if you spend money on them). You can get up to four cards per game just by playing, while eight cards from a single game comprise a complete set. The fact that you can only earn half of any set on your own means that trading (or buying from other players) is a necessity.

Once you get a complete set, those eight cards can be turned into a badge and some other items. The badge is good for nothing at all, while the other goodies that come with it are mostly vanity items, like emoticons and points to "level up" your Steam Community account. (There's also a chance of getting a coupon, but my experience with Steam coupons is that the discounts they offer are less impressive than the ones you see during a typical sale.) The whole thing seems pretty dumb, but you can already see cards for sale on the Steam marketplace, and that doesn't usually happen unless people are buying. There's also a demand for those vanity items. Apparently, some users even made a profit by buying lots of cards and then selling the goodies that come with each badge.

In general, things that were specifically made to be collected usually don't have a lot of real value to collectors. However, if you turn that collection process into a game — even if it's a stupid one — people go nuts. If people are willing to spend real money on virtual trading cards just so they can earn virtual badges and virtual emoticons and level up their Steam accounts for virtual bragging rights, it should be no surprise if the same people are willing to spend money on virtual trading cards that give them an actual advantage in an online game. I can't really blame Wizards of the Coast for taking advantage of this kind of behavior. But when the game is a competitive one, I just don't like the idea of buying victories, even if it's done in an indirect and convoluted way.

A true trading card game, even if its entirely virtual, is going to have some level of imbalance. If each player draws cards from a unique collection, it's never going to be completely fair. All of this might be okay, however, if everything were unlockable through in-game actions and accomplishments. Naturally, I was hopeful when I first saw Scrolls; the official website tells us items at the in-game store can be bought with the gold earned by playing matches, and this presumably includes new cards (called "scrolls" because it sounds so much cooler). However, a "small selection" of items can also be bought with "shards" — a so-called "secondary currency" which you can buy with your real-life credit card.

So how significant is this "small selection" of in-game items? How much of an advantage can you gain by immediately purchasing everything that shards can buy? I can only assume the advantage is pretty significant; otherwise there would be no point. The real question is of whether a person who paid $10 more than you (and doesn't deserve the advantage) is distinguishable from someone who played 20 hours longer than you (and earned the advantage). As long as it's possible to unlock everything that matters through gameplay alone, and as long as doing so is feasible (i.e., not a 500-hour grind), there's some hope for this game.

Mojang has claimed that Scrolls won't become a pay-to-win game despite its purchasable items, but developers say a lot of things before their games are released. The only reason to believe them is that the game does in fact have an initial cost — in other words, it's not "free-to-play" so the developers don't need to rely on in-game purchases to turn a profit.

The cost of access to the open beta is $20, which isn't so bad when you consider the average cost of a modern video game, which tends to be around $50 or $60 regardless of quality. (While this high cost applies mostly to console games, high-profile PC releases tend to follow the same model with some notable exceptions. Runic Games, for example, earned some praise for selling Torchlight II at $20, which gave the action role-playing game a significant advantage over its controversial $60 competitor Diablo III.) Assuming that Scrolls turns out to be a decent game, this discounted price for early access is a pretty good deal.

Unfortunately for Mojang, I've been trained by Steam sales and Humble Bundle events to refrain from buying anything unless or until it's dirt cheap. With some patience and good timing, I could buy a handful of older games for the same $20 and I'd be sure to enjoy at least one of them. It doesn't take long for the price of a game to drop, and this is especially true of PC games now that developers are realizing they need to compete with piracy instead of trying in vain to stamp it out. As a result, people who play PC games — or the "PC gaming community" for those of you who can say such a thing with a straight face — have come to expect their games to be inexpensive. $20 is a good deal, but it's not great.

I certainly don't mean to imply, of course, that we should all wait a few years to pick up Mojang's new release. After all, we don't even know if it will ever be subjected to such brutal price-slashing. Furthermore, Scrolls is a multiplayer game which might only be fun for as long as the number of players remains high, so the time to buy is now, if you want it. The problem is that the game is a risky investment and my spending limit for such a risk is so low.

That limit — the point below which a risky investment becomes a risk worth taking and any potential buyer's remorse becomes bearable — is different for everyone. For me, it's about $5. That might seem like a ridiculously small figure, but it's what I paid for BioShock a few years ago. It's what I paid for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. It's also what I paid for the first two Max Payne games combined. I almost bought Metro 2033 for $5, but I waited and got it for even less. I got Killing Floor for $5, a few years ago, and I've put more hours into that game than anything else I can remember. None of these games were new when I bought them, but I still enjoyed each of them at least as much as any $20 game I ever bought.

None of this is really a complaint about Scrolls or the open beta price tag in particular. But I might be more willing to spend four times what I paid for Killing Floor if I actually knew Scrolls would be a worthwhile purchase. Isn't there some way of trying out a game before its release without paying $20 for access to a beta version? Oh, yes, a free demo certainly would be nice. Maybe we'll get one of those later on... but we probably won't.

No Sequel for Alan Wake (Yet)

This article was also published on Gather Your Party on May 23, 2013. Read it here.

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Today brings good news and bad news for Alan Wake fans.

The good news is that, for the next week, you'll be able to get both Alan Wake games for very cheap, along with some previously unseen goodies. The bad news is that it's the last we'll be seeing of this series for a while.

After a five-week break, Humble Bundle has gone back to its weekly sales, a practice which had initially lasted for less than a month before being put on hiatus. The flavor of the week, as you might have guessed, is Remedy Entertainment's third-person, horror-themed, psychological thriller Alan Wake. The bundle includes the original game alongside its ambiguously canonical and unnumbered follow-up, Alan Wake's American Nightmare, as well as a whole bunch of bonus content, some of which has never been released.

As with most other Humble Bundle sales, you can pay whatever you want (down to one cent), but you'll need to pay at least a dollar to get Steam copies of the games. Oddly, unlike most other bundles, there doesn't seem to be any material incentive to pay higher than the average contribution. Surely, you could just do that out of the kindness of your heart... but if you're not that kind, these games will never be cheaper. The bundle is a pretty good deal no matter how you look at it, even if you prefer the Steam keys, because a similar Steam bundle (minus previously unreleased bonus content) has only gone as low as $9.99 in previous Steam sales.

With this bundle also comes an announcement video from Remedy Entertainment creative director Sam Lake, which might have Alan Wake lovers crying themselves to sleep like Half-Life enthusiasts have been doing for the past five-and-a-half years.

The video, addressed apologetically to Alan Wake fans, reveals that Remedy is working on "something new, something big" — but the key word here is "new" which means, of course, that we're not talking about the continuation of an existing franchise. There's no way around it, so Lake comes out and tells it like it is: Alan Wake 2 will not be released in the foreseeable future.

This might come as a surprise to fans who were paying attention when Remedy seemingly dropped a few clues about an upcoming sequel. Most notably, Sam Lake tweeted a cryptic quote, the same heard as a backwards message in a song performed by Poets of the Fall as the fictional heavy metal band Old Gods of Asgard. It seemed promising, but maybe we shouldn't have been so excited.

The "town called Ordinary" might have been the setting for the next game in the series, but it might also have been a simple reference to the setting of American Nightmare, the game in which the song is featured. That game, after all, does take place in an unnamed town. (The narrator calls it Night Springs, but this is the Alan Wake universe's parody of The Twilight Zone, so if any part of the game takes place outside of Alan's mind then this disembodied voice can't be trusted.)

Regardless, it looks like Alan Wake 2 is on the back burner. Remedy "worked hard to make the sequel happen," says Lake, but the project apparently suffered from a lack of sufficient funding. Although total sales of the original game have exceeded 3 million copies, he notes, it was by no means an instant success upon its release. This makes throwing money at a sequel a risky investment, especially when the success of a modern game is judged so heavily on pre-order sales. One might expect a sequel to do better in that department, given the existing fanbase, but it would seem the franchise is cursed by its initial sales performance.

Lake remarks that Remedy could have done something "less ambitious" (i.e., less expensive) with the next Alan Wake, but explains that such a compromise "wouldn't have done justice to you... to us... and certainly wouldn't have done justice to Alan Wake." Perhaps, while we lament the indefinite postponement of what might have been a great game, we should be glad that Remedy Entertainment was unwilling to spoil the franchise with a mediocre cash-grab sequel. Lake is careful not to suggest that another Alan Wake will never be made; he only makes it very clear that now is not the right time.

Fortunately for Remedy, money isn't an issue for their new project, Quantum Break. The trailer, first shown at the Xbox One reveal, has live-action footage, a creepy girl with special powers, a bridge disaster, and some poor guy dying in slow motion. Sam Lake calls it the "ultimate Remedy experience" drawing on everything the development studio learned from Max Payne and Alan Wake.

Aside from these vague hints, not much is known about the upcoming release. The game is said to be an Xbox One exclusive, but only time will tell if this is set in stone; Alan Wake was an Xbox 360 exclusive before it was released for Windows a couple of years later, so we can afford to be optimistically skeptical. Maybe the same thing will happen again.

Until then, the Alan Wake Humble Bundle sale, along with an accompanying sale on Xbox Live, is Remedy's big thank-you to all of its fans. Sadly, it seems a bit too much like a tentative funeral for the franchise. The last minute of the announcement video is a live-action clip of various Alan Wake paraphernalia being locked in a crate and wheeled off into the back of a warehouse. The crate is labeled "Do Not Open Until..." but the date, of course, is hidden and will likely remain unknown until the Quantum Break franchise has run its course.

Government vs Video Games

When depictions of gratuitous violence in media come under attack after every mass killing, video games predictably take the majority of this misdirected blame, especially when the killer is twenty-something or younger. Good people who play video games, when they hear of this, are either indifferent or outraged, but no one is ever surprised. I bet no one was surprised the first time it ever happened, either. This kind of reaction might be reckless and inappropriate, but — let's be honest — it's understandable.

When a guy shoots a bunch of people, and they go into his house and find a video game in which the objective is to (virtually) shoot a bunch of (virtual) people, it certainly looks pretty incriminating. I can hardly blame the pundits and lawmakers for jumping to conclusions. More damning yet is that violent video games, unlike any of the violent movies this killer might have enjoyed, have an interactive element which puts the player in direct control of that violence. In the case of first-person shooters, it allows the player to pull the trigger.

Never mind the fact that ownership of these games is so common that their presence in the home of a killer is almost meaningless. When an innocent child plays Call of Duty and doesn't kill anyone for real, it's not nearly as newsworthy as the social outcast who (allegedly, according to some guy, maybe) became addicted to online first-person shooters before slaughtering children. People who get all of their information from the news are obviously going to have a skewed perspective. Those who think they see a correlation, and then blindly make the illogical leap to causation, don't fully realize that the video game has become such a socially acceptable pastime. They don't understand that recent spree killers who are known to have played video games did so only because they were, at least in this particular way, somewhat normal.

It's not entirely insane to draw bad conclusions about the effects of violent media when you simply haven't been told that an entire generation has been willingly exposed to everything from Mortal Kombat to Halo without a disproportionate number of individuals developing psychopathic or violent tendencies. The effortless and instant gratification that we get from video games and other computerized gadgets has only turned us into a bunch of lazy slobs. If it's true that violent crime has actually decreased in recent years, it's probably because we're too lazy to go outside and kill people even if we want to. We'd rather order pizza from our video game console and continue yelling obscenities into our headset while we 360 no-scope the kid on the other team and then brag about how tough we are.

Studies on the possible effects of exposure to violent video games continue to contradict each other, as do the self-proclaimed experts, but if video games do turn young people into murderers then it sure isn't obvious to those of us who actually play them. The gray-haired people who disagree with us have only an outsider's perspective.

Regardless of the facts, the usual scapegoat is used and abused every time a national tragedy prompts a discussion of what might be done to prevent violence. While cooler heads and logical thinking usually prevail, logic necessarily goes out the window for a period of time after every widely publicized act of senseless violence, because during such a time it's considered rude not to be ruled by your emotions. (If something terrible happens and you're not immediately calling for the public execution of the first possible suspect without waiting for a trial, you're a traitor; if children die and you're not calling for billions of dollars worth of unnecessarily legislation, you just don't care about children.) Proposals to restrict the content or sale of video games inevitably pop up here and there, and we all argue about them until our faces turn blue. However, by the time these proposals hit modern interpretations of the First Amendment like a brick wall, we've already forgotten about them, and things go back to normal until the next school shooting.

The cycle is currently in the process of repeating itself, thanks in part to last year's mass murder in Newtown, Connecticut. The push to depict the video game as a dangerous brainwashing tool has since gone into overdrive — not only because of the particularly horrific nature of this killing, and claims that the young perpetrator played too much Call of Duty, but also because violence in media had already been on the public's mind since the earlier shooting in Aurora, Colorado. After the more recent bombing attack in Boston, Massachusetts, I almost expected the anti-gaming sentiment to graduate from "video games cause violence" to "video games cause terrorism" (for it's almost a certainty that at least one of the Tsarnaev brothers had been exposed to at least one video game featuring some form of violence, and that's usually enough for a sensationalist news article). Fortunately, though, it seems that video games are only a plausible scapegoat until the T-word is used.

Regardless of which (if any) crimes can be linked to the consumption of video games, politicians are once again trying to fix the apparent epidemic of violent crime (i.e., a few high-profile cases) by campaigning for tighter restrictions on the medium. This is happening now in my home state of New Jersey, perhaps most notable today for hosting awful reality TV shows and having many of its tourist attractions ravaged by Hurricane Sandy. Am I worried? Maybe I would be if I were 12 years old, but as an adult, I'm outside the scope of any realistic attempt at regulation. Should anyone be worried? Not yet, since all of the proposed legislation I've seen is useless and inconsequential, as if government officials are just trying to look busy without rocking the boat too much. (And I guess that's normal.)

Earlier this month, for example, we heard of an assemblywoman who wants to ban playable M-rated and AO-rated games from public places. While such a proposal isn't by any means outrageous, someone clearly goofed up the details, because the idea as written is little more than a nuisance and a waste of tax money. Such a law, pertaining specifically to video games that are playable in public, could only affect arcade games and those console set-ups in video game stores. But the ESRB — creator of the M and AO ratings — doesn't even rate arcade games, and as for the playable console games in retail stores, I just couldn't care less if I tried. Last time I went to Best Buy, the games on display were kid-friendly platformers and Kinect nonsense.

To get arcade games back on the chopping block, they could just remove the references to ESRB ratings from the bill and apply the restrictions more broadly to any game featuring violence, but the popularity of arcade games is so low that passing the law would hardly be worth the effort. There are a few arcade machines at my local movie theater but nobody plays them. (And when the price of a single play has gone from $0.25 to $0.50 and sometimes $1.00, why should they? We all have video games in our homes now, and we can play them all day without losing a bunch of quarters.) There are still some standalone video arcades along the boardwalk (assuming they weren't all washed away when that hurricane blew through the Northeast), but they don't tend to have more than a few violent games. At worst, they'd have to toss the latest installment of Time Crisis or House of the Dead.

Meanwhile, New Jersey governor Chris Christie (whose high approval ratings have made him somewhat of a big deal) wants to prohibit the sale of M-rated and AO-rated games to minors without parental consent. This idea actually makes some sense, if you believe in the ESRB rating system. Of course, such a law would run afoul of a Supreme Court decision that overturned a similar law in California on the grounds that video games (like other creative works) are a protected form of free speech. For this reason, Christie's plan is likely to fail. But, hypothetically, what if a law restricting the sale of violent games were passed anyway? And what if it weren't immediately overturned by a higher court? I've composed a list of all the things that might change in my life as a direct result:

• There might be fewer underage brats in the online games that I play.
• I might need to bring my driver's license when I drive to the local video game store.

... That's all I've got.

Whenever we hear of possible restrictions on the sale of games to minors, there are those who act as if an outright ban on violent video games is in the works, and listening to all the unwarranted outrage is really tiring. Whether it's all a kneejerk reaction by people who jump to conclusions without carefully reading the news, or a genuine fear of a "slippery slope" that ends with blatant censorship, such an alarmist response is just as unnecessary and unhelpful as the actual legislation that's being proposed.

With a law in place, not much would change for most retailers and consumers, since the industry's self-imposed standards are almost identical to what our elected officials want to enforce. The ESRB recommends that M-rated games not be sold directly to anyone under 17 years old, and most retail stores already go along with this. In fact, on average, game retailers are doing pretty well at keeping these adult-oriented games out of children's hands. According to the FTC, it's easier for a minor to buy a ticket to an R-rated movie than to buy an M-rated game, so it's nothing short of ironic that my governor thinks we should be looking to R-rated films as an example of proper regulation and then "setting the same standard" for video games.

Compliance with this standard would surely be even higher if it became a legal issue, but parents would still be able to buy the games for their kids, which is exactly what they're doing now. Most young kids who play Call of Duty: Black Ops II didn't sneak out of the house and take a bus to the nearest GameStop to buy it. They got it from mommy for Christmas. The fact that so many minors are playing violent video games, while so few are actually buying them, means a lot of parents have no problem with providing the consent that the proposed law would require.

Meanwhile, parents who don't want their kids playing violent video games can easily enforce this decision at home, and this is already happening too. A kid who buys an M-rated game without an accompanying adult isn't necessarily doing it without parental permission; in fact, he or she probably does have that permission, implied or explicit, because otherwise the game might end up in the trash soon after entering the house. Some parents, of course, are just neglectful and stupid, but that's not the government's business. There's no need for state legislators to step in and raise everyone's children.

For all these reasons, passing a law to enforce age restrictions would be little more than another waste of time and money, regardless of whether video games have anything to do with violent behavior in children. On the other hand, for all the same reasons, I'm finding it hard to care whether this or any similar law is passed, now or in the future. Do violent video games cause violent behavior? Almost certainly not. Does this mean adult-oriented games are appropriate for kids? Not necessarily. Although the government might not have the right to enforce it, parents should decide what their kids play and I applaud game retailers for enforcing the age restrictions even when no law is in place. You won't hear me complaining if the government spoils the fun for a relatively small number of kids who actually manage to buy Grand Theft Auto behind their parents' backs without being stopped at the counter.