It's tough out there for a convicted sex offender: New York State Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman has "purged" over 3,500 pervs who had online video game accounts. In what the A.G. is calling "Operation: Game Over," Microsoft, Apple, Blizzard Entertainment, Electronic Arts, Disney Interactive Media Group, Warner Brothers and Sony all agreed to block sex offenders from playing online. No more Farmville for you, Creepy Farmer Bob!
For those of you who haven't touched a joystick since you mastered Missile Command, many video games these days are designed so that players must interact and play with each other via the World Wide Web (or "Internet"). As a result, children and adults are intermingling, and some of those adults are creepy sick bastards who are not supposed to be around children.
The A.G. says that earlier this month, a 19-year-old man from Monroe County "pled guilty to sexual abuse charges after meeting a 12-year-old boy on the popular online video game system Xbox LIVE. The man gained the boy’s trust over a period of three months, and then invited the boy over to his house where the abuse occurred, according to police."
“We must ensure online video game systems do not become a digital playground for dangerous predators," Schneiderman said in a statement. "That means doing everything possible to block sex offenders from using gaming networks as a vehicle to prey on underage victims." As of yesterday, a total of 3,580 New York state sex offenders have had their gaming accounts suspended. So the online gaming world is finally safe for kids—assuming of course that sex offenders from neighboring states don't use the Internet to cross state lines.
