Surely the quiet absence of a high point of geekdom becomes news at some point!
Maybe too many geeks moved on to something else.
agreement should not have an age restriction
I might be misunderstanding you here, so apologies if I am.
Agreement absolutely should have an age restriction, because it comes down to the ability of the person making the agreement to make an informed decision. This is important because if the person making the agreement cannot make an informed decision, then we can't really be sure that noone is going to be hurt.
Is a 14 year old capable of making an informed decision? What about an 8 year old? Maybe, but as a society we've pretty much agreed that 18 is a reasonable place to set the bar.
We might ask who, if not the individual, is in a position to make such a decision on their behalf - I'd say here parents or guardians serve in that role until the child is old enough to make informed decisions.
I agree with the statement that the government is not our moral compass, but in this case I don't think this is about governments acting as a moral compass. I think it's about offering some protection to minors.
Democracy isn't about using the government to force your opinions on other people.
No, it's not. And I didn't say that. Please feel free to invent straw men and knock them down, but don't quote me when you do it. kthanxbye.
You don't have a choice with the government - you do what they say or they throw you in jail.
Hold on. Don't you elect your government in the US? When did the US become a dictatorship!? If you've elected a government that throws you in jail because you don't do what they say, then vote them out. If the rest of the people disagree with you and vote for the government you don't want, well, that's not a problem with government, is it? If the system's so broken you can't vote for the right people, change it. That's what democracy is all about.
Most people aren't significantly above average.
Erm, yes. In fact, half the population are below average. But it's OK; the other half are above average.
Different societies have different value systems, and so different countries regulate different media in different ways.
What's important is that games get treated fairly against other media and regulated for what they are, not what scared, ignorant people worry they might be. The problem is that governments and legislators don't yet "get" games, and so fear and ignorance reign supreme.
As an example, in Australia, the government has a Classification Board that rates books, TV, movies and games. The Board is supposed to represent the values of the community and it generally does a pretty good job. Very few movies are refused classification (eg: banned).
Not so with video games. Games are regularly refused classification in Australia, largely because the highest classification for games is MA15+ - so if a game is considered only suitable for adults, then it can't be classified.
Yes, this is ludicrous and there's been a huge response from the local industry and a lot of local gamers. You can read more about it here if you are interested.
The point I'm trying to make, though, is that games are not treated on the same level as other forms of media in Australia, because they're poorly understood by government as a medium - mainly because the people in government didn't grow up playing games. I'd bet there are similar issues to varying degrees in other countries.
Give it a decade or so and things will be different. Until then, we're going to have to keep putting up with emotive comments and costly ineffective legislation from politicians looking for cheap popularity amongst their ignorant and fearful dull-eyed constituents.
The thing is, you seem to parse the words and glean some meaning, but the thing is, you miss the point entirely.
Not entirely unlike human genomic research
To the systems programmer, users and applications serve only to provide a test load.