The government is spying on you to help the kids.

And the videogame industry seems pleased with the results.

The Federal Trade Commission sends out “mystery shoppers” to try and trick stores into doing the wrong thing and then reports the results. Think about it as a sort of civic minded "Candid Camera".

In the last round of mystery shopping, 80% of kids under 17 were turned away when they tried to buy or rent an M rated game.

The Entertainment Software Rating Board seems pretty happy with this, considering that’s a higher number of turn-a-ways compared to last year’s 76% and the 65% rate the year before.

The game people love these numbers because they can point with some confidence to the fact that most of the time kids can’t just walk into a store and buy mature videogames. What the study has not disclosed, however, is just what clever techniques youngsters use to score that copy of Grand Theft Auto IV the other 20% of the time.

My guess—fake mustaches.

Last night I spent some time talking to Gary Rosenzweig of Mac Most about the iPhone.

Now Gary and I don’t see eye-to-eye about Apple. He runs a popular Mac fan site. I have a grudge with Apple that goes back to their crappy support for games 15 years ago when the Mac was the best multimedia machine on the planet, includes the time that the morons at the Apple store refused to install memory in my machine purchased at the store that they’d promised to put in for free, on through charging me $100 bucks a year to patch their feline-inspired operating systems and for Steve Jobs just generally being annoying.

I’m a reformed Mac convert. Left the Mac fold a few years ago and haven’t looked back.

I also have been critical of the iPhone and what I see as Apple’s greedy desire to be the next Sony rather than take care of improving the personal computer.

But Gary convinced me that I might be wrong this time and that the iPhone just might unlock a whole new world of portable gaming.

With a big, bright touch screen, a tilt sensor and a decent graphics processor, the iPhone looks a lot like a game machine. But Gary’s point was that Apple was promising an open application environment and a lot of cool multimedia tools that look to make the iPhone into a target platform for game developers.

I tend to believe Gary about this sort of thing because he’s a successful author and game developer. He knows a lot about making games. And when he gets excited about a development environment, well, that’s a reason to think there’s something going on.

Plus, I got to play a little game where you tilt the iPhone and roll a marble through a maze. It was some simple little download and wasn’t that exciting on its own. But it did show that the Apple device could be a pretty cool game environment.

Still, I’m not holding my breath. To really make the iPhone a viable game platform, a few things need to happen:

1. Apple needs to make good on its promise to open up iPhone development to a wide range of developers.  Sure, the bigs can port their portable products. Big deal. Innovation and growth is going to come from small shops and indies willing to take a risk and come up with cool new gaming apps, specially designed for the iPhone.
2. Apple needs to make good on its promise to sell all this new software through iTunes, and make it easy for people to buy stuff and even download games for free
3. Apple needs to make good on a profit sharing that doesn’t gouge the little developer.
4. Apple needs not to get in bed with a few select publishers and choke off everyone else.
5. Steve Jobs needs to stay out of the way. It’s hard to deny his skill and insight in certain product areas. But Jobs does not get gaming. Not even a little bit.

Science marches on.

1.       You pout when she tells you it is her turn to play Peach In Super Smash Bros. Brawl .

2.       You pout when she pounds the stuffing out of you in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.

3.       You pout when she frags you again in Halo 3.

4.       You pout when she points out her GamerScore is higher than yours.

5.       Remember that look she gave you when you introduced her to your co-workers as, “This is my girlfriend. I totally got her into games.” That look tells you everything you need to know.

This is my last post about Grand Theft Auto IV.

At least for a while. Before that, I want to talk about kids—my kids.

Based on some very articulate comments on the GTA posts so far, I wanted to respond and talk a little about parenting and gaming.

I have two boys, 6 and 10. I let them play games. And in my house, they have access to lots of games. And by lots I mean when we stroll past the Game Stop at the local mall and the kids ask to go in and look around I always ask, “Why?” We have a lot of games.

What I rarely do, is let them play games unless I’m around and know what they are playing.

Their game diet consists mainly of E and T rated games. When they shoot to kill, it’s usually in the acceptable genres of WWI and space aliens. Since they are boys, I figure they need to shoot something sometimes.  Beside, I’d rather they hit each other in Super Smash Bros. than in Real Life:  Smack Your Brother. If they want to skip school and throw stink bombs and hide in the girls locker room, I’d much rather they get their jollies playing Bully than trying it out at school.

I’ve even let them play the odd M game once in a while. A little Halo never hurt anyone that wasn’t a Covenant warrior. And while Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune is a little bit more bloody than Hanna Montana, the narrative is no less banal or interesting to my guys.

But I have no plans to let them play GTA. Oh, they’ve asked. Asked to play GTA III. Asked to Play GTA: San Andreas. And I imagine it’s only a matter of time until they ask to play IV.

But I won’t let them. And why? Well, part of the answer is that they have plenty of other games to play. And by plenty I mean if they played every game we have on the shelf to completion, they would probably wake up Rip Van Winkle- style 50 years in the future.

That’s not the only or most important reason. Because the main reason I don’t let them play GTA IV is that I just don’t think they are mature enough to understand the context, get the jokes and sort out the very ambivalent, say post-modern, feelings that I always get from playing that kind of game. What I mean is, as their dad, I can’t handle them playing the game.

If I can’t explain to them what’s going on, how they should think about it or anticipate what they might feel when playing it, then it’s off limits. That goes for GTA IV. That goes for Internet porn. That goes for horror movies. That goes for Joel-Peter Witkin’s awesome fine art photography.

I think GTA IV is something like great art because it is complex and because I can’t simply boil it down to a simple message for my kids. I can’t just say, “It’s just a game.” Nor can I say, “That’s naughty. Stay away from it.” Nope. It’s more complex than that.

They’ll get older and we will be able to have conversations on an order of complexity such that I will let them play GTA, oh, I dunno, GTA 6. For now, I’m happy to help them understand the meanings in Mario and Call of Duty and figure out how the hell to deal with the fact that they want to surf You Tube 24 hours a day.