The online video-gaming accounts of more than 3,500 convicted New York sex offenders have been abruptly yanked, state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced yesterday.
Under Operation: Game Over, the manufacturers of online video-game networks are cross-checking their customer lists with the state Sex Offender Registry to keep pervs from trolling sites in hopes of luring kids into personal encounters.
Participating companies include Apple;Blizzard Entertainment; Disney; Electronic Arts; Microsoft; Sony and Warner Bros.
Parents might want to make note of those companies and make sure their kid’s games are made by one or more of them.
Back when I first started gaming, we used Kali, which was a sort of locus for joining others online to play some of the early games, which back then were mostly board-type games as they appeared on your desktop. Those evolved into 3-D effect games like Descent and Duke Nukem, then to the subscription games like Dark Age of Camelot and World of Warcraft.
During all this, every once in a while in pretty much every different game I played, someone would come along trying to get me to talk about sex. The first time, I honestly thought it was some teenager, but it soon became apparent that these people were trolling the games looking for young victims. I was a Guildmaster in a few games and took pleasure in booting the trolls from my guilds, as well as spreading the word to other guilds to keep them moving on until they finally gave up and left.
So I’m happy to see the next stage of evolution in online gaming. It’s way past time this action was taken, but better late than never. Now we need the same thing in social networking sites, to clean out not just the pedophiles and perverts but also the bullies. That latter can be easily accomplished by adding a Bully Review Board to all social networking sites where people can post their complaints. I’m all for cleaning up the sites that kids use so much. No one has a right to be on these sites and restrictions can be legally applied. Like a driver’s license. Too many tickets and you lose it, and the same should apply here.