I'm sure that no one out there needs me to tell them that there is something of an economic crisis going on. We hear on a daily basis about corporate layoffs, consumer insecurity, and global markets in flux to the point that governments across the world are doing anything and everything they can just to avoid a fundamental collapse of their respective monetary systems. After a long period of world leaders trusting in the invisible hand of the market to protect us all, we are now seeing a worldwide shift to governments bailing out various industries in order to maintain social stability. It would seem that most of the world agrees that there is no more important issue in our time.

Most of the world, that is, except for California's Democratic Representative Joe Baca. Baca, who has a history of attempting to legislate against the horrors of video gaming, has proposed a bill in Congress that would require certain games to come with warning labels similar to those seen on cigarettes, alcohol, or other controlled substances. The resolution, H.R. 231, would require any game the ESRB has rated T (13 and older) or over to have the following wording:

"WARNING: Excessive exposure to violent video games and other violent media has been linked to aggressive behavior."

Let's put aside for now the fact that the ESRB ratings already impart more information to parents than this label would. Granted, there are bodies of work and several studies that show that this warning label may in fact have some factual basis. However, there are an equal, if not larger number, of studies that exist that show that connecting game playing to true aggressive behavior is simply not valid. We're not talking about the proof that cigarettes cause fatal lung cancer, nor that alcohol can lead to terminal psorosis of the liver; this bill attempts to create a link that simply has not been proven to exist.

Although I have little faith that this bill will ever become law, this is the kind of story that really gets my blood boiling. While the rest of the world is scrambling to make sure that peoples' bank accounts will still be there tomorrow, our elected representatives spend time and money debating meaningless issues like warning labels on games. Am I alone in my anger and frustration?

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