Bill 1179 targets games in which you "virtually inflict serious injury upon images of humans or characters with substantially human characteristics in a manner which is especially heinous, cruel or depraved in that it involves torture or serious physical abuse to the victim."

Does any of this actually describe what goes on in a violent game? To find out, I played The Suffering with the specific intent of violating the law as badly as possible. (In spirit only, of course: I'm not a minor and I live in New York.)

My first question is -- what exactly is a character with "substantially human characteristics?" Most of the villains in The Suffering are mutant weirdos. At one point, I fight these gun-wielding dudes who have no heads, but do have entire bodies attached to six massive spider legs. Then there are some dog-like things with human faces. Are these "substantially human"? One reason mutants have historically been so popular -- from H.G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau to The Fly -- is that they're intended to make us meditate on what "human" really means.

Later on, the bill defines "depraved" violence to mean that in which "the player relishes the virtual killing." The problem here is, who precisely is doing this relishing? I threw the onscreen avatar -- Torque -- into some utterly nasty bloodbaths, but as soon as the battle was over and we walked onwards, he'd remain pretty impassive. (It's probably even more sociopathically creepier than relishing it, when you think about it.)

As for me? Sure, I "relish" each kill -- but mostly because my life is constantly in danger and I'm exuberant when I escape, rather like a running back escaping a huge tackle. It's true that I often take prurient delight in the enormously huge gibs of flesh that spray around when you use a rocket launcher on an enemy, but again, it's mostly because I find the art direction so intentionally cartoonish.

In other words, the law is so vaguely written as to be useless in addressing the real content of actual games -- and the behavior of gamers. This is probably because it was fashioned by people who neither play any games themselves, nor talk with those who do. This law is a classic example of "I don't know what pornography is, but I know it when I see it."

A similar law signed in Michigan targets "ultraviolent" video games, a phrase that is even more histrionically bereft of serious meaning. These laws are really just political point-scoring: The more vaguely you define your threat, the more easily you can claim that it remains ever present, and that you are the only beacon of rightness.

Now, let's be clear: I absolutely support parents who want to keep their young children away from violent entertainment. I also think it's great that our politicians want to grapple with the moral content of violent games. But they're not going to succeed by remaining so willfully clueless about them. Even the anti-porn boards of the 1980s watched hundreds of hours of smut to educate themselves.

Interestingly, the one moment of genuine clarity in the California law is when it frets about games where you can "torture" someone. The legislators define torture as when you intentionally cause someone else suffering -- "mental as well as physical" -- that is quite apart from the cut-and-thrust of battle. The language is suddenly much crisper here, and I wondered why.

Then it hit me: Because this is the one area of law where our governments have deep, recent experience. Three years ago, the federal government was painstakingly crafting legal memos about torture -- not so they could ban it, but so they could perform it. Who could forget White House counsel Alberto Gonzales' intricately crafted prose, saying that torture "must cause pain equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function or even death"?

Consider that your final irony: Politicians work hard to ban virtual torture -- while working just as hard to allow it in real life.