FLORIDA- Lawmakers in Florida have instituted a ban on video game players using avatars that do not align with their assigned gender at birth, sources confirmed.
“Are you a boy or a girl?” asks Elias Smith, a disgruntled GameStop employee to a child while setting up a custom Floridian gender lock GameShark on a new copy of Pokèmon Scarlett. “All gamers need to show a drivers license or birth certificate or else their game will be prevented from saving any progress.”
A fringe group of concerned parents, Parents Opinions Regarding Nonconformity (PORN), were at the forefront of lobbying for this law.
“I noticed my son Brayden choosing Cammy when we played Street Fighter together and I didn’t want him getting any ideas,” said concerned father Zachery Frederick, current secretary of PORN. “It’s bad enough he can’t take a hit like a man in real life. Now he wants to fight like a lady in Street Fighter? PORN was thankfully able to enact a law to fight his perversions.”
The new law clarifies that games with sections which require playing briefly as a secondary character of the opposite sex will need to make use of a buddy system to prevent breaking the law. Grayson Bradford, a gamer from Gainesville, is currently awaiting trial after he was reported for playing as Ellie for a short mission in The Last of Us.
“My roommate was pissed I wouldn’t let him on my Playstation. I didn’t see him recording me during the Ellie mission. He’s been trying to catch me since police have started offering a reward for any tips resulting in an arrest. The bastard got me out of the house for my PS5, and got $500 for doing it.” Bradford explains.
When asked how the law would apply to life simulation games like the popular virtual dollhouse The Sims series, where a player has control of everything, an official PORN newsletter clarified that in a context where the gamer is by all intents and purposes “God” only males are qualified to play citing that in the state of Florida God is canonically a man.
