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Video Games, the First Amendment, and Obscenity
An anonymous reader writes with an excerpt from an article about how obscenity laws and the first amendment relate to modern games:
"This question is a tough one, for the very good reason that no video game developer or publisher has ever been prosecuted for obscenity related to video games. As we have seen, if the medium of video games are held to the same standard as literature and film then, presumably, they can also be held to be obscene. One of the reasons for the lack of obscenity prosecution against video game developers and publishers is that the courts have limited obscenity to sexual content only. In fact, the courts have gone so far as to specifically reject calls to alter the definition of 'obscenity' to include violent content in video games. The other major reason is the vast majority of video games sold in the United States have only small amounts of sexual content thanks to the Electronic Software Rating Board."
So games don't have much potentially obscene content because of existing censorship and fear of further censorship if they included sexual content? Talk about a chilling effect...
Declaration of Independence. Three inalienable rights. It shocks the hell out of me that people don't understand everyone's entitled to these. If what I'm doing doesn't deprive other people of these three rights, I should be able to do it. Yes, that's a libertarian viewpoint but it's in the Declaration of Independence. If I want to play Left 4 Dead in my home, what do you care? It's not depriving you of any of these three things and I enjoy it. Should I start saying that you sitting at home all night reading The Holy Bible is bothering me? Because it's about the same damn thing with Lazarus and the whipping and the lashing and the begetting and the Mary Magdalene and the apocalypse ... See how stupid this argument is? It's a waste of time. It has been this way with books and movies and it will be that way with video games. Get over it and move on to target things worth your time censoring and prosecuting like child pornography.
My work here is dung.
Many countries, even in the English-speaking world, still have official censorship bodies which won't let you publish content without state approval. That's general content, not particular content niches like pornography. Games have been effectively banned in Europe or Australia from being sold for being too violent or "mature." By comparison, the United States has no effective apparatus of censorship. The most that can happen is that a prosecutor brings you up on charges of violating local obscenities laws, but then the prosecutor has to show that your sexual content is gratuitous and has no independent (artistic, literary, etc.) merit. If you had a map where a character walks through a realistic strip club, and gets into a shoot out, that content is likely to be protected under the same precedents that protect R-rated movies with similar content.
Now, if you create a sex simulator, even one like Hot Coffee, well, you're up shit creek. That aside, our system is significantly freer and more in line with "let adults be adults and let parents be responsible" than the majority of the industrial world on content in general.
That would be Miller v. California and is know as the Miller test. For something to be considered obscene, it needs to meet 3 criteria.
1. The average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest.
2. the work depicts/describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law.
3. the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
The lack of sex has little to do with first amendment as its pretty much all based on the self censorship the industry is doing via the ESRB.
A game that contains sex gets rated AO by the ESRB and AO means that it won't be allowed to make it on either Nintendo's, Sony's or Microsoft's console. There is still the PC market, but Walmart and other shops won't carry AO either. So AO pretty much results in a game that you can't sell, so everybody avoids it as good as they can, meaning no sex in games.
Dude, WE KNOW.
We're waiting on the AARP crowd to die off so we can take control. There's a shit-ton of baby boomers out there, they're active and they vote.
Once they're all dead, we'll "relax" more as a country.
But yeah, I agree, I'd rather see a delicious breast than some dude get blown to pieces by a gun in a movie.
Don't kid yourself though, Europe is just as screwed up as the US is, just in slightly different ways.
Sent from your iPad.
Skinnerian radical behaviorism has all but been completely thrown out the window in modern psychology. These days, cognitive psychology is all the rage. Even more modern post-Skinnerian behaviorists like Tolman had began thinking along more cognitive lines.
Thing is that I, along with many others, including my wife who self-identifies as a bevaviorist, believe that Skinnerian radical behaviorism is far too simplistic a view and that with advances in modern technology we have to look beyond simple operant conditioning as causes of human behavior, because at this point, quite frankly, we can.
My blog
If anything, the strategy of hiding sex in the US media during the last 2 decades did backfire: teenage pregancy rates are the highest among the "developed" countries. Spain for example is second lowest, I lived there during my teens, and the TV program there was very, let's say, educating (after 10pm).
I guess that openess and explanation works better than obfuscation, as always.