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Illinois Videogame Law Struck Down
Big_Al_B writes "CNN reports that a federal judge ruled against the state of Illinois law that banned the sale of some games to minors." From the article: "The Illinois law, which also was to go into effect January 1, would have barred stores from selling or renting extremely violent or sexual games to minors, and allowed $1,000 fines for violators. Kennelly said the law would interfere with the First Amendment and there wasn't a compelling enough reason, such as preventing imminent violence, to allow that." Triumphantly, GamePolitics offers up the ESA's reaction to the decision. The Governor has vowed to appeal, so this isn't over yet.
Amidst all the cries of regulating violence and sexual content, this law seems rather moderate. Parents can still buy the stuff for their kids if they want to - nothing is banned. Too bad the more sane laws get struck down while extreme and harmful ones pass inspection.
With Freedom comes responsibilities. It is about time parents took some responsibility for what goes on in their home and not defer their parental responsibilities to the State. The sad fact is, too many parents don't take any responsibility for what their kids watch, read or play.
Pick a standard and stick with it - kids should either be allowed to purchase sexual images or they shouldn't. Just because one particular format sells more than others isn't a valid reason to allow it but exclude everything else.
If the g'vt kept the data on you that google does you'd better believe you'd be calling it "doing evil"
Does this mean that it's unconstitutional to ban the sale of Playboys to minors?
Honestly, I'm confused here. I'm all for freedom of speech and all that, but this was a ban on selling "extremely violent or sexual games" to minors. I'm guessing this is AO rated stuff, which could be comparable to nudie mags (Playboy Mansion?). What's the big deal?
The way this law looks now it's more of a patchwork, and a kind of "let's do something so it looks like we care and are actually giving value back to the tax payers" law which should be shot down and replaced with something better. Or ignored.
Would it not also be helpfull to expose a kid to all the things in life, but explain to the kid what is morale and what is not. Looking at extremist behaviour, it is mainly because of taboos that they get worse than necessary. No taboos, but just a good sense of what is normal and what is less normal (or plain abnormal) works a lot better.
So next time when you think of forbidding something because it is bad, maybe you should allow it and educate on it.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
The emphasis is put back right where it should be - on the parents.
Don't like video games? Don't allow them in your house, the same way you forbid MTV.
I was under the impression (from over here in the UK) that the rating on a game means that no-one under a certain age should be sold it. The article suggests that such a thing is against the First Amendment, WTF?
Over here in the UK, games are rated in the same way that movies, alcohol, tobacco etc are in that if you are caught supplying them to anyone underage you can get prosecuted.
I'm against censorship in that an adult should not be censored from what they wish to see/do, but ratings are a good thing IMO. This kind of court decision just seems back-asswards to me. Does this ruling mean that a child can go to an adult rated film, and if they get denied entry claim it breaches their First Amendment rights?
Bob
Listen to my latest album here
As a parent and a grandfather, I would not want my kids partaking in this sort of degenerate filth. It's garbage.
So be a responsible parent and grandfather then, and restrict those things from your kids yourself. Don't take the easy, selfish route of asking the State to do your parenting for you. Your temporary convenience is not worth your freedom, nor the freedom of your neighbours.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
"...to ensure that children have access to violent and or filthy materials?
Do you think that it's GOOD that kids should be seeing this sort of trash?"
Obviously, you don't believe YOUR children shouldn't. Doesn't mean everyone should automatically agree with you.
The reason this is being fought tooth and nail is because it's a stepping stone to greater losses of the so-called freedoms you americans face (note, author of this post not american)
"As a parent and a grandfather, I would not want my kids partaking in this sort of degenerate filth. It's garbage."
By your reasoning, so's most of shakespear's work.. oh. so that's written on paper, so that's okay? Right, double-standard much? May as well burn every library and start again with fresh culture.
"And don't get all excited. I'm an atheist so I'm not some religious right wing zealot.."
*blink* so that means you're just a right wing zealot? You don't have to be religious to be a moral crusader, it just seems to be common.
"I'm an adult and I know what's bad for kids. I've raised two kids myself, they are adults now and I'm happy to say I think they turned out pretty good and I had strict rules on this sort of thing in my home. I absolutely forbid MTV and such trash under my roof and it was NOT a problem, as a matter of fact my son came home from college last year and told me that he was glad that I had forbidden MTV type trash in the home.."
A sample of two is not a valid experiment. Come back and talk to me when you've raised about 30-thousand children, AND when you have a valid cross-section of lifestyles, living areas, etc. Your experiment is also loaded with bias. Read http://www.badscience.net/ for examples of bias in experiments.
Millions of children grow up with video games, MTV, books, porn, the internet, and none of them turn out to be serial killers, gang members, murderers, rapists, drug users, etc.
Some kids who have no contact with any of the above media still commit crimes of these nature, hell, they were committing these crimes before the media existed at all!
Statistically speaking, the fact that there's an intersection at some point between violent crimes and these types of media is just a proof that both exist in a random selection of people!
ash
PS, I find it entertaingly co-incidental (aka, an alanis-morriset style ironicism) that i was asked to reproduce the word 'gunned' to verify my humanity.
Where can anyone now draw the line? The judge ruled that there wasn't a compelling enough reason, such as preventing imminent violence The Illinois law, would have barred stores from selling or renting extremely violent or sexual games to minors.
Deeper into the ruling the judge makes an interesting statement:
"The First Amendment embodies a principle that is at the core of our political system and our national ethos: "each person should decide for himself or herself the ideas and beliefs deserving of expression, consideration, and adherence." A law that restricts speech because of its message "contravenes this essential right. For this reason, content-based regulations are presumptively invalid."
Couldn't the same argument be made for anything? Movies? Porn? If you get specific about what constitutes imminent violence even guns qualify. In essence, you cannot stop someone from selling anything to anyone because you cannot prove it creates or produces an immanent threat to anyone.
If I were the porn industry, the focus would change to video games. Why not, since I can now sell to anyone, regardless of age. They cannot do that with magazines and online.
For the posters who said - it is up to parents. I agree to a point. I watch my children, however I still expect the police to arrest drug dealers, child molesters, etc. While I can watch mine, who knows if you are watching yours. Sure, you buy them Super Mario Brothers XXVIII, but they took the birthday money from grandma and bought Leisure Suit Larry does Las Vegas. It is also a contiguous fight with game manufactures to really explain what is going on in the game. While I would have passed on GTA for the violence, I must have missed the "Contains explicit sexual acts" statement on the game - oh wait, it wasn't on the game.
From http://www.theesa.com/archives/2005/07/video_game_ indu_1.php
"It's illogical that video games would be treated more harshly than R-rated movies or music CDs with parental warning labels, both of which can be legally viewed and sold to minors. We should be treated the same way as those industries." - Douglas Lowenstein, president of the ESA
It is NOT illegal to sell rated R movies to kids. Most retailers have methods to prevent this from happening. The video game companies aren't trying to get special treatment but rather semi-equal treatment.
Japanese media is full of sex, violence and swearing and it isn't kept away from children, yet the violence rate there is far lower than the US or the UK where I live which suggests to me that there's something else wrong with our culture than media excess. I personally wouldn't want my nephews playing realistically violent video games but on the other hand I doubt it would affect them unless they have psychological problems already.
Does a Christian soccer team even need a goalkeeper?
Remember when you were a teenager & you wanted to buy Mortal Kombat for your Sega Genesis/SNES? Imagine if the guy behind the counter would tell you that you can't: "you're too young". You're 16, you're allowed to drive in some places, but you can't play Mortal Kombat... I know I have played ultra-violent games, I grew up playing them, I enjoyed them. But I also played games like Civ, Transport Tycoon, Populous etc... I graduated from high school and university with the highest honors. Yet I enjoy blood in games.
For all of you above 20 who probably did play these games just as much as me, remember, you were a teenager once too, and I don't think you would've appreciated it if a law would ban you from playing such games. It's so ironic that parents do the dumbest things when they are young (i.e smoke pot, play lame games with no educational value whatsoever) and grow up to become uptight pricks. "We don't want them to do the same mistakes we did...". I'm not condoning the "everything goes" attitude of some parents today, but focus on the things that are actually IMPORTANT, like pushing him to excel in school, grow up to be a respectable and responsible adult, not to avoid "the fruits of the devil" or whatever you feel like calling these things...
Besides, if you're THAT concerned about your child's safety, by him a Ninendo :D [yes I know, flamebait].
The answer, of course, is the parents. An outright ban on the sale of violent or "filthy" materials to children ignores the fact that different parents have differing levels of comfort with what their children are exposed to. As long as the material in question isn't going to harm the child (i.e. showing real snuff videos to kindergartners or some such) then the parents should be allowed to make that decision.
The question is, do you ban everything and require specific parental consent for exceptions, or do you permit everything and rely on the parents to keep track of what their kids are doing? Personally, I'm in favor of the latter, and for that to work, children must have access to materials that some parents find offensive.
Very true. I live in a country where alcoholism is negligible, yet we can drink since we're 16. We can also smoke when we are 16, and we DO have a problem with smoke addiction. This goes to show how such limits are not really related to the problems being discussed.
Global warming is a cube.
As a good Christian parent I say fine - don't buy them for your kids. And teach your kids why you don't think they are appropriate. That's what *I* have done with regard to games like GTA: San Andreas. It is absolutely, positively NOT the government's job to determine what my kids can and can't see, read, etc. That's MY job. The First Amandment says they can't pass laws limiting freedom of speech. And I agree. The one exception is providing obscene material to children, and I have no problem with that restriction.
The limits you want to set for YOUR kids are between you, your kids, your church (possibly) and God. Period. I will set the limits for MY children, thank you very much.
Just so we're clear, my church is very conservative, and I'm an ordained minister. But I believe in the First Amemdment and that it's the parents' duty to monitor and control their kids - not the government's.
Not in this part of Europe! In the UK, sales of cigs and booze to under-agers is a serious offence. The police have recently been cracking down on this sort of thing with assorted sting operations in pubs and shops.
The right for kids to buy beer stops and my puke-covered pavement.
The problem is that while you may feel you are making the right choices, and you may feel that the government is making the right choices, not everyone agrees with you. If I choose to read a particular book and I feel it's the right book for me to read, for whatever reason, at whatever my age might be, it's MY choice to make and not yours and not the government's. People are up in arms about it because the choice has been taken away from the person who is best fit to make it -- the individual themself -- and put into someone else's hands, someone who doesn't know me or what's fit for me. No one knows you better than yourself.
... and play first-person shooters and watch movies like the Terminator series. I also don't drink much (I don't like the taste of wine or beer, and I keep to stuff like Bailey's and Godiva liqueurs and eggnog-with-brandy).
...
I'm 30 years old but I was a minor once (we all were) and I was a responsible person and I have never been in trouble with the law. Yet I have played "violent" games before while a minor, such as Doom and Quake and games like them, because they were what I wanted to play and I enjoyed playing them. These games involve shooting things and the use of firearms. I have also watched films that involve a lot of gun battles and the like (Terminator, Terminator 2 etc) and enjoyed them.
Yet my experience with guns so far is limited to safe use, under supervision, on a firing range; I wore safety goggles and followed all gun safety rules and before I consider purchasing a gun (what kind I do not yet know -- a shotgun might be best for home defense) for home defense or concealed carry, I will enroll in a safety course as required by local law and will be sure to wear safety goggles and ear protection during training.
In short, I am a responsible individual who enjoys some things you might ban because you feel they're unsuitable without knowing a thing about me. I know how to be safe and I take steps to ensure that I am.
The best way to handle such things is to ensure that people are educated about the subject material at hand. My parents never restricted me from drinking alcohol (the alcohol is actually kept at floor level in their house and always has been) and never monitored what games I played (admittedly largely flight sims; I'm an aviation geek, but they never nitpicked what I brought home) or the books I read. They trusted me to know what I was doing.
And it worked. To this day I play flight sims, Civilization-type strategy games, read all sorts of sci-fi and science books
Now, would you say it was bad for me to be able to access the food, movies, games, and books that I did? Did I turn out to be a bad person? No. Because my family knew I was responsible, a smart person, and unlikely to do anything stupid. They didn't need government nannies to do their job for them. They taught me the wisdom of educating yourself and to do the smart thing.
You have no right to say what is "trash" and "garbage" for anyone other than yourself. If someone not you wants to watch that stuff, that's not your judgment call to make. And if you make it, you just get people angry at you for intruding in on their lives. That's the problem the goverment faces when they start whining about what's on TV (people see a lot more sex elsewhere than they do on TV, and a lot more swearing), when they ban drinking (kids don't wait til 21 to take their first drink, believe me, no matter what you or the government wants to believe) or sex (same).
If the government would relax and try to educate people on how to live safely instead of arbitrarily banning sex, drugs, alcohol, etc. till some magic "wow, they'll be careful after this day but not before it" age (or in the case of drugs, NEVER allow them) they'd probably find that people have a hell of a lot more common sense than they think, and the "it's forbidden, I must defy authority by partaking in it because they have no right to tell me what not to do" protesting would die down. After all, the drinking age is a lot lower in Europe and you don't hear as many insane "drunk college kids" stories from over there
i am a soviet space shuttle
I don't want to argue against this, but the same argument, if valid, should also allow kids to buy porn in other forms such as videos and magazines.
... except when in cases when the game is porn believe. Pornographic games are regulated just like a Playboy, so no new law is required.
... they want to try porn that will kill you.
They have tried to compare video games to porn in the past, but it didn't pass the ethical/moral muster to be classified as such
Essentially video games are a form of expression and therefore free speech. Instituting potential financial harm on people who might sell these games causes market pressure to make less risky game. Hence, a violation of free speech.
So they aren't framing this as a free speech issue, or at least they are trying not to frame it as such. They are framing it as a public health issue. In recent interview with old Rob B, he directly compared video games to cigarretes and alcohol (as well as pornography). So basically, having failed the porn test
No kidding. The argument is that violent video games will make violent children who will turn to violent crime, so that it is in the society's best interest to curtail this at the source.
The fact that there is no scientific basis for that argument hasn't stopped the supporters from saying there is. This is equivalent of banning cell phones for kids because they might get brain damage when they are thirty. It makes perfect sense, except it's completely wrong.
Not to mention that this is a solution for a problem that does not exist. There is no epidemic of children buying violent games. There is a trend of parents buying violent games for their kids. So even if this law had logic and facts on it's side, which it doesn't, it would do no good at to solving the problem.
The only thing this law does is pay some lawyers and get some politicians some press to indicate that they care about kids.