Thompson’s Utah Legislation Is One Sentence And May Have No Impact

Advertises that a good or service will not be sold to a certain age group when it is.

Above, that single sentence, is the entirety of the proposed legislation Jack Thompson has put forward in Utah. It’s a minor alteration to Utah’s Truth in Advertising law and is being sponsored by Mike Morley.

Morley doesn’t seem too optimistic about the impact this new legislation will have however. Partly because it will only be relevant to those retailers who actively advertise the fact they don’t sell games to under-age kids. If they don’t have any signs up, they wont be effected.

As GamePolitics report, Morley has spoken to a number of news outlets about the new legislation and doesn’t sound too confident in it. The Deseret news reports:

[Morley] acknowledged that his proposal was relatively limited in scope and would have little to no effect on some segments of the video game industry.

“If they’re one of those places that thinks, ‘Well, as long as they have a heartbeat and some money we’ll sell to them,’ then this won’t have any impact on them,” Morley said.

Now that it’s clear what this legislation is; that stores can’t lie about the age of customers they sell games too, I must say I happily support it. If we can stop just one annoying 12 year old from failing at Left 4 Dead and ruing it for their team, we have achieved a noble goal.