I do agree that games like GTA4 and other games with strong references or violence should be allowed only to those who understand the difference, but the government's concept of those people is way underestimated. If 16 year olds are intelligent enough to be in high school, reading books about violence, emotions, killing, etc and reporting on what they read, they most certainly should know the difference between a game and reality. Before 16 I had seem many violent movies and had to write papers on controversial topics IN SCHOOL, FOR A GRADE. If the government thinks it's OK to FORCE high school kids to take in this violence and "mature content" through books and films shown in class, why do they feel the need to restrict its out of school access? Consider the Holocaust, it was a horrible event that killed millions of innocent people, wasted all of those lives for no real reason. However, as early as 7th or 8th grade you are exposed to it and shown violent pictures of it. Senior year (as in, just a few months ago) we watched Schindler's List, a movie about the Holocaust filled with graphic violent shootings, gore, blood, guns, all kinds of horrors that are "too mature for you school kids" and banned from games. Also, the people in the movies are real, even if they're actors, they're real people. They look real, act realistically, etc. The characters in games look like models in a virtual world. Maybe come the Xbox 1080 or the PS5 or whatever we'll have photo-realistic graphics, but as of now we don't, being all the more distinguishable from real life. The main difference is the control portion, where watching a movie you're just an observer while in a game you participate, but either way, you're still exposed to it and it can still affect you. So, to the government/ESRB/censorship board, I ask, if violence is so bad that we must restrict its use in video games to only people over 17, why do you insist that we teach the horrors of history (which include a lot of violence by the way) to our innocent, "unintelligent", "irresponsible" children?