It's DOT ORG! .org!

By Rachelle Bowden in News on Dec 20, 2004 12:51PM

In a great big "OOPS!" move, the governor's office accidentally promoted the wrong website in its crusade against violent and sexually explicit video games. At the announcement last week, state school officials mistakenly promoted a website that rediculed Gov. Blagojevich and his crusade. Why the mixup? The governor's site is www.safegamesillinois.org and the site promoted was www.safegamesillinois.com. So easy! So brilliant. Chicagoist is a techie-nerd so we can't understand when this happens and why they didn't shell out the extra $100 to buy a few more URLS, like safegamesillinois.com, safegamesillinois.net, safegamesillinois.gov, etc. Half the novice internet users on this planet automatically put .com at the end of anything they hear anyway, including staff at the gov's office, it seems. They left themselves wide open.

For the record, Chicagoist pretty much agrees with the .org .com site that ridicules the Governor. On the site they point out that video games already have a rating system to help consumers choose games that are appropriate for their families, similar to movie ratings, except even more helpful. The 2-part ratings use sumbols to suggest which age group the game is best for and content descriptors that indicate what things in a game may have triggered that rating and may be of concern. You don't see the video store refusing to sell an R-rated Old School to a 16-year-old, do you?