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Violent Video Game Law Struck Down
The Importance of writes "Washington State banned the sale of violent videogames depicting violence against 'law enforcement officers' to minors under age 17. When challenged, the law was blocked by a preliminary injunction. Yesterday, a federal district court decided that the law was unconstitutional because it failed the strict scrutiny test and was also void for vagueness. Read the 15-page decision [PDF]. A summary of the case's holdings with quotations here."
I think they let members of society get out thier frustrations without physically acting them out.
And it rendered on, until the end of its days.
... if a cop is killed in a movie, then ban the movie?
And possibly all future productions by those involved in it?
http://efil.blogspot.com/
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"Do the Roman centurions of 'Age of Empires' ... qualify as 'public law enforcement officers'?"
Shows just how laws like that could be misinterpreted...
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
Drugs became illegal in the US because of these exact types of stupid legislators. Now, it's part of our culture. Walk down the street and you can find zillions of people who actually believe that pot kills. Same with video games. Once they ban them, it's easy to "educate" people with PR campaigns. Eventually, hardly anyone will remember the days when a 10 year old could play space invaders. Zillions of people will actually believe that videogames cause violence. Truth won't matter. Science won't matter. Research won't matter. They will believe it because they don't think about it, and are afraid to take a minority stand.
Let's not forget that one can hate his government, but love his country.
It's a good sign that free speech and common sense has largely won out in this circumstance; it's been some time since I've seen a legal issue on here that actually followed the principles of freedom granted by the constitution, rather than blatantly ignoring it ;P
One thing that I did notice though, was:
Which suggests that as expected, the debate over violent/explicit video games is long from over, and more restrictions may well be brought in over time.
...are most cops that get injured in the line of duty attacked by people under the age of 18? I'm glad the law has been stopped--this is, IMO, the duty of the parent not the gov't.
Graphic depictions of depraved acts of violence, suc as the murder, decapitation, and robbery of women in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, fall well within the more general definition of obscenity. Nevertheless, the Supreme Court has found that, when used in the context of the First Amendment, the word "obscenity" means material that deals with sex. Only "works which depict or describe sexual conduct" are considered obscene and therefore unprotected.
Why exactly is sex deemed to be worse than violence? Why are violent portrayals protected but sexual portrayals not?
Technoli
Maybe. However i don't know anyone who thinks pot kills, everyone knows that pot just makes you stupid. In fact, I would argue that most people think alcohol is far more dangerous to your health. Drinking too much can kill you, smoking too much pot can't.
Drugs like heroin can kill. It's a good thing that heroin is illegal. So comparing video games which don't hurt anyone, to drugs, seems to be doing an injustice to video games.
Yet again, we teach our kids and everyone playing games that pretend death is fine, but pretend love is not... and they wonder why everyone's weird!
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One of the most interesting example, at least in the U.S., was the ban on the smoking of opium. Opium was still widely and legally available, but smoking, a habit favored by chinese immigrants, was criminalized
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Banning titles is indeed a bad idea, but (as previously stated by another person) restricting them is fine by me. Parents do need to work at raising their children, but the government needs to give them the tools to do so. If a law requires people to be 18 to buy "Cop Killah" games, then it gets my vote. But, banning such games is indeed against how I interpret the constitution. Let parents choose how to raise their children while stopping children from choosing how to raise themselves. As always a happy medium shows good results. Sometimes, adults also need to vent. Requiring credentials doesn't impact freedom (if you play your cards right, you will someday be 18 too). Washington took it too far, seems it is getting on the right track again.
There's only one thing I'm allergic to... Sudden Death. (Danger Mouse)
There is such a huge moral difference between a game that has, for instance, an unavoidable in-game cutscene or scripted sequence that is terribly violent, or that offers such as part of the story -- and a game that just models a world, and you can CHOOSE to pick up a gun and shoot someone.
After a while, the GTA-esque games will have such advanced simulations for every part of the gameplay experience -- better vehicle physics, better AI, better "flocking" crowd behavior, etc -- because it becomes physically impossible to create all of the content by hand. We saw this is GTA3 already; mix-and-match, swappable body components to create random citizens, etc.
Already, easily half of the time you spend playing GTA 3 -- maybe much more than half -- is spent interacting independently with the simulations entirely apart from the presented story of the game.
Thus, it is really unfair to judge GTA-esque games on anything other than the material that they explicitly *present* to you. The fact that their physics subsystems may eventually make it possible to hit someone at 120mph and actually see their limbs separate from their body (soft-body physics to display the rippling and approximate tearing, but with much simpler joint systems in place that build on already existing ragdoll code) -- this should not weigh in the rating one way or another. Only what the game explicitly presents. Including perhaps the default violence the game depicts as you play it.
After all, what the fuck were you doing driving 120mph?
I would love to see GTA take a completely new turn, take a page from Postal (which sucked) and put a "job" into your next game. The idea being -- hey, criminals exist, and you COULD get involved with organized crime. That's always out there, and we've written plausible dialogue and a gripping, gritty story. But that is NOT WHAT OUR GAME IS ABOUT. Our game is a life simulator, and we never trap the player into things -- we even give him moments of revelation where he makes up his mind to just walk away, go back to his day job, and run errands for his genuinely loving girlfriend. She will send you to get milk, ask you to take her for a drive, and so forth. Every day, you drive to work, and we have an engaging "Worktris" minigame to simulate exciting cubicle life, where all the blocks are the same size and color: plain!
Outside is a dangerous world -- guns, corruption, and cocaine just waiting to be snorted off of the clitoris of a Cuban hooker -- and that is TERRIBLE and exciting. Our game is about the American Dream of a normal life, and we strongly urge our players at every point in the video game NOT TO CONTINUE to do what they are doing! There are heartfelt cutscenes where your family members cry and ask you to please step away from the darkness, to return to the joys of job and family!
God . . . God . . . . what beautiful, wonderful, tearfully poigniant irony! I can even see the game cover; it would look like a Christian Youth Rock Band poster, with a young man in wholesome khakis and a polo shirt, with a plain wholesome pregnant wife in the background wearing a plain wholesome unappealing Adidas sweatsuit . . . and in the shadows of the lower right-hand side, the dark reminders of the depths of depravity and sin that lie in wait for all of us!
GRAND THEFT AUTO: SAN SUNSHINE (San Diego)
The Flight From Temptation
I could not agree more.
:P
The reaction of people like your mother is a very, very visceral one -- and it's visceral because AT THE TIME, you really WERE stupid! You were a retard.
I was in exactly your shoes, and I agree totally. I got around it by (thanks to my voracious reading) being more informed than my mom, who was an asolutely amazing airhead-savant artist who painted naked chicks on a 16-foot canvas and hung it behind our huge living room window on the one hand, and on the other hand sent me to my room because the word "vagina" is just inherently bad to say if you're a kid. She was so cheerful about it, so good-heartedly oblivious, that I never begrudged her trying to shield me from violent video games. Or trying to 'artistically' discolor my jeans with bleach when I was in 5th grade, to make me cool. Or wrapping my sack-lunch sandwich in a Panty Hose bag (thank god the whole thing was in a brown paper bag . . . gah).
So, I hear you. I was smart enough at age 10 to acquire whatever media and video games I wanted, without my mom being any the wiser, which worked out surprisingly well. And I turned out to be a really smart, well-adjusted dude.
But the legitimate concern that really DOES exist is that in between the time that you're 5 and the time that you're about 15, you can be a total effing lunatic retard.
A lot of the kids I know whose parents let them have all of the video games they wanted ("Doom 2", ooooh, "GoldenEye", oooooh, Mortal Kombat, "oooooh") and watch whatever martial arts movies they wanted -- these guys didn't end up being bad adults, but they were absolutely retarded as young adults, and a menace to society. I knew this one chunk/fat white kid that took his social cues from what he saw of urban culture as depicted by video games, so he would say things like "G money" and have a serious -- EXTREMELY serious -- expression on his face. Also, he one time was joking with a girl and when she dissed him, brought his palms down to the side of his crotch, said "Suck it bitch!", and they threw his hands out, flyaway style. He later received one of the most beautiful beatings I have ever seen delivered, at the hands of that girl's boyfriend.
And the miniature retards are even worse. GTA3 would actually scare me more because of the bad driving habits it encourages, the unrealistic expectations it creates, than I am about some hypothetical offspring of mine trying to beat a hooker to death and stealing her money in some dark alley.
Video games, even violent and explicit ones, don't have a twentieth the long-term negative effect that television and movies have. Shit, put the effects of those two together, and you've got the explanation for why we have so many insecure slutty girls with daddy issues.
So it's not that it will make you a worse person in the long run, it's that it can make you even more of a dangerous retard when you're going through the time in life where you're practically Timmah with an AK.
i don't understand. i don't see how being 18 really gives you more rights. it gives you more restrictions if anything else.
when you are under 18 you had many more rights, a whole lot of laws just didn't apply to you then, you had many more freedoms at that time.
turn 18, and suddenly you have to register for the selective service, you have to buy a fishing/hunting license, there are more restrictions on what you can or can't do that will get you arrested. under 18 you just don't exist, you fall under the radar, you are just a stupid pain in the ass kid, what does a kid know? they are to stupid and immature to be responsible for their own actions...
what do i get in return for losing these "freedoms"? i get the lousy right to vote for either bush or kerry for president...i don't like either of the bastards, but i suppose i have to vote for the lesser of two evils.
Seeing the extended suffering would be so much more fulfilling! It would equate to bonus frags!
Would I get more points for killing someone with a larger extended family than for killing someone that was single, with no children?
What if you killed a single parent, denying the children the support of their sole provider? That should count triple, in my book.
(Get a grip... They're just pixels. Troll.)
For those that would die defending it, Freedom
has a sweet taste that the protected will never know.
What kind of idiot uses violent metaphors to describe their initiatives against violence?
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