Dr. Jerald Block is a head shrinker from Portland. So he's probably well qualified to say that Jack Thompson is a gibbering lunatic and proposed game laws are absolutely nutso.

Beware! You can be sent to Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola for selling a computer game to a teenager if that game appeals to a kid's "morbid interest in violence"... Applying a strict reading of Louisiana's law, you can earn jail time by selling "Pac Man" to a 17-year-old. After all, what is Pac Man but a fight between the player and four pixilated ghosts, each doing nothing but consuming each other and their surrounding landscape. That sounds like violence to me.

That's a rather obvious point, but it deserves repeating. I am most interested in his subtler point that online Internet sales and digital distribution means that publishers who choose to follow ESRB ratings under such arbitrary jackass laws will actually be being punished for trying to advise retailers of their games' content, not vice versa. Florian Eckhardt

Dr. Jerald Block: Are we ready to give jail time for selling 'Pac Man' to a 17-year-old? [Shreveport Times]

Contact information for this author is not available.