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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

And another thing …

The Spokesman-Review

Entertainment pioneer. Game-playing, personal-computer style, has come a long way since Oregon Trail.

On the old Apple IIe or Commodore 64, whether to buy bullets or food for the trek west depended on how confident you were about bagging a deer or two when the family was starving out around, say, Chimney Rock. Many kids found it addictive, but that was OK because so did some parents. And they called it educational.

Barely a generation later, gunning down a deer has given way to gunning down a cop. Learning history has been displaced by sexual fantasy. As with movies, rating categories are necessary to control who can buy today’s video games and to warn parents about violence and so-called “adult” content.

To complicate matters, sophisticated game players (a population in which kids are probably better represented than their parents) have ways of tapping into levels of questionable content that aren’t advertised by the game maker. By downloading certain software, players of the highly popular “Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas,” for example, can access explicit sex themes that go beyond what the game’s M (for “mature”) rating would permit. A more appropriate AO (“adults only”) rating would cut into sales, however.

Predictably, some voices are crying for federal controls to get violent and sexually explicit games off the market. Obviously, game producers should be expected to provide frank, honest labeling, but as with movies and magazines, the real responsibility lies with parents to make sure they know what their kids are playing and to set boundaries they deem fitting.

Beyond that, asking government to be the entertainment gatekeeper is a risky trail to follow – and not because deer are scarce near Chimney Rock.

Guess who’s not coming to dinner. Not everyone is disappointed that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is behind schedule in releasing a Hanford Reach management plan for public comment. Seven-hundred elk are delighted.

It may be another nine months before the plan for the last free-flowing stretch of the Columbia River near Richland is circulated. And that means that the elk herd can keep using the Hanford Reach National Monument as refuge from hunters, slipping away at times to munch on nearby farmers’ crops.

Fish and Wildlife has no plan for the animals. No state or tribal agency has a home for them. One loose-knit citizen group would be happy to step in, though, if the elk don’t mind close, cold quarters wrapped in freezer paper.