Modern Game Consoles: Glorified Sex Machines?
By Tom Zeller Jr. January 12, 2007
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/
Is the Nintendo Wii innocent fun, or is it just waiting for an opportunity to lure young children to online smut? Techsperts are deconstructing a report from a Dallas/Fort Worth television station, which held up Nintendo’s popular Wii and other gaming consoles as potential mother lodes of smut for little Johnny and Susie. The story goes on to say that pornographers are programming their sites to specifically recognize and tailor content to visitors arriving from a game-console browser, adding, “Young kids get it.” In a blog, one child boasted, “The first thing I thought of when I downloaded the Wii browser was also porn.”
But as Mike Masnick of Techdirt points out, “the story fails to inform the reader that the Wii comes with fairly robust parental controls, which allow parents to limit browsing to just the Nintendo channels, or disable browsing entirely.” Mr. Masnick also suggests that the WFAA story should have noted that, setting aside any philosophical or legal discussions of porn peddling online, it makes good business sense to expand the browsing experience to include visitors using gaming consoles, given that a significant number of gamers are adults. ■
