Some people will be amused by this. Some won't care. Some will roll their eyes.
Personally, I agree with Absath .
If you play Everquest 2, you can now order a pizza in real life through an in game command.
This is not a joke.
I use this story as a means of introduction. Today on Air America radio, it was said (I believe it was on Majority Report) that the FCC and watchdog groups only seem to be enforcing obscenity restrictions, and not truthfullness or violence regulations.
This isn't quite true. violence in television seems to be ignored, true. On the other hand, violence in video games as a scapegoat is still doing quite well, and I'm actually afraid of the fuel that this move by Sony will add to the fire.
Two years ago, there was a publicized story about a kid who killed himself over Everquest. The story made Dateline, blah blah blah. After that, Sony put an in-game timer in the game interface so that you could tell how long you'd been playing. The story mostly went away, but the stigma that MMORPGs (that is, Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) contribute to suicide, violence, depression and social dysfunction remain, despite the fact that what studies there are tend to tell a quite different story than what Common Wisdom would suggest.
Two years later, "concerned mothers" are still campeigning to get video games, especially MMOGs, censored. These are the same mothers, for the most part, who complain about sex on TV and violence on their VCR.
The point of this being that when you get riled up about censorship in the media, don't forget about TVs little brother, video games. They aren't just for kids, and yes, I'll admit that not only do I play them, I like a little bit of tits and a little bit of violence in them. That big M on the boxes I buy is for Mature, after all.
I don't watch enough television to really care about censorship there, but hey, if you help me fight my battles, I'll help you fight yours.