

Supreme Court: first amendment allows mature video games to be sold to minors - headShrinker
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/06/us-supreme-court-strikes-down-video-game-law-on-first-amendment-grounds.ars

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niels_olson
I understand how quite a few game hackers would be in favor of a ruling like
this, but if these are truly your convictions, I would like to see some video
(not screencast, video) of your 12 year-old son playing some game with his
mostly nude, thoroughly adult female character slavishly hacking on the
corpses of other characters. Is that normal?

I was in an ethics discussion in my military surgical program and started to
see how the effects of these policies. Full disclosure: a number of my friends
have died in the current conflicts, starting with the Pentagon on 9/11. One of
the situations we were posed with, by staff who were there, was this:

CIA officers approach you, as a doctor, in Kandahar, with a captured
informant-turned-double-agent. They want you to give him Ativan so he'll talk.
They tell you he knows where a weapons cache is that could be used against
Americans. You say no, there's no medical indication. They say, if you don't,
they'll torture him and get the information anyway. You're role will only
cause him more pain or less.

The overwhelming consensus of medical students, interns, and residents was to
give him the Ativan. Three of us took the opposite position: you can't let
people cajole you into making moral decisions based on threats. Then your just
complicit.

The irony was that the majority consisted of essentially everyone who hadn't
thought about these problems before. In the minority of three were two of us
with prior service, and the philosophy major.

Here's the point: video game violence develop a shitty moral compass. It's
just shit. I don't care if it points in the right direction or the wrong
direction. I, your comrade in arms, don't know where it's going to point next
time. And that's not the guy I want be sharing a tent with.

So enjoy your expanded access to an audience willing to pretend they
understand violence. Moral consistency matters. Reliability matters. You can
look forward to further international embarrassment when they grow up to make
the wrong, randomly wrong, decisions behind the trigger or, worse, at the
voting booth.

Edit: Look, I'm all for the first amendment. I took an oath to defend it, and
I carry a copy of the Constitution with me everywhere. I read it regularly.
Genuinely, I support the ideas in the opinion. My concern is that waiting in
the wings around this particular opinion, there's a lot of unscrupulous adults
salivating over the opportunity to take money from my kids in exchange for
making my job as a parent, doctor, military officer, etc, harder.

Edit 2: For those asking for evidence: here is the American Academy of
Pediatrics Policy Statement on Media Violence, which includes abundant (3500)
references if you would like to dig deeper:
[http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/108/5/1222.ful...](http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/108/5/1222.full)

Preview of that statement: "The strength of the correlation between media
violence and aggressive behavior found on meta-analysis is greater than that
of calcium intake and bone mass, lead ingestion and lower IQ, condom nonuse
and sexually acquired human immunodeficiency virus infection, or environmental
tobacco smoke and lung cancer."

Edit 3: I would like to point out that here is a thread full of programmers
justifying, essentially to themselves, why their industry is best off with
less regulation. Do you extend your arguments to other industries gray areas?
Meat processing? Tobacco? Defense? Isn't "corporate self-regulation" best for
everyone?

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thecoffman
While your point may or may not be true - I fail to see how this pertains to
whether the state should be involved in legislating morality? I feel that if
you picked some other moral issue - say gay marriage for instance - the
majority of us would be of the opinion that the government has no business
telling gays that they can't get married because its "immoral." But on this
issue its okay for the government to dictate what's moral because you happen
to agree with it?

How easily we seem to be willing to trade freedom for comfort when we agree
with what's traded. Certainly I wouldn't want a 12 year old's perception of
reality to be entirely shaped by video games, but that falls to sound
parenting and not the government.

That being said - I'm not entirely sure I even agree with your premise, I grew
up on Doom, Wolfenstein, etc which were graphically violent for their time and
have turned into a successful well rounded "moral" person.

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niels_olson
I love the number of replies who have claim to be well-rounded "moral"
persons. A little bit of selection bias there, eh? Granted I must be victim to
the same bias. Thus the anecdote. The point is that if you haven't been faced
with the actual situation, a video game can only be a bad substitute.

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thecoffman
Ya, that is why I put it in quotes. Who is to say what truly is moral? I'm
sure there are some things which we can universally agree on, but others maybe
not so much. Morality is a relative thing. Personally I tend to follow the
non-aggression principle which I feel puts me on fairly solid (though not
infallible) ethical grounds.

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portman
I found it interesting that Scalia, who is the most conservative/religious
member of the Court, not only voted with the majority but even wrote the
opinion.

My guess is that as a father of 9 kids and a grand-father of even more, he's
seen firsthand how nominal an impact video games have on minors.

In my experience, the most vocal opponents of violence in video games don't
actually have any video-game playing children of their own.

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jacoblyles
It's more simple than that: Scalia is a constitutional originalist. He belongs
to the right-wing judicial camp that believes the constitution means what it
says. Sometimes he gets it wrong and I have no doubt his personal life and
culture influences his decisions. But a strong first amendment stance is
consistent with originalism.

Outsiders might not realize it but not all "conservatives" are cut from the
same cloth. There is a rich and diverse right-wing ideological taxonomy.

~~~
enjo
Although I don't understand how he reconciles that with his rather strict
views on "obscenity" and how that can be strictly regulated.

The constitution doesn't specifically address either, yet nudity can
absolutely be regulated (or according to Scalia completely banned) while
violence is just fine.

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nokcha
Justice Scalia considers historical exceptions that were accepted at the time
that the First Amendment was ratified. His view is that there was such an
exception for "obscenity", but not for violence.

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jakewalker
I posted a link a PDF of the opinion, but I wanted to highlight this quote
from Scalia, writing for the majority:

"Reading Dante is unquestionably more cultured and intellectually edifying
than playing Mortal Kombat. But these cultural and intellectual differences
are not constitutional ones."

Opinion (direct link):
<http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/08-1448.pdf> [PDF]

~~~
andylei
another good one:

7One study, for example, found that children who had just finishedplaying
violent video games were more likely to fill in the blank letter in “explo_e”
with a “d” (so that it reads “explode”) than with an “r” (“explore”). App.
496, 506 (internal quotation marks omitted). The prevention of this
phenomenon, which might have been anticipated with common sense, is not a
compelling state interest.

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mrcharles
This pretty much solidifies games as a protected art form. I couldn't be
happier with this decision. There's some choice bits in there as well,
slapping down California.

This is good for everyone, now games can avoid becoming comic books all over
again.

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mahyarm
Can kids buy R rated movies?

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commandar
If the seller chooses to. The MPAA rating system is voluntary, not a
government mandate.

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Shenglong
I was actually puzzled as to why pornography doesn't fall under First
Amendment rights. After googling it, I found an interesting piece on the wiki
article talking about the guidelines used to discern an _exception_ from the
rule:

 _Instead, the Roth test for obscenity was "whether to the average person,
applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material,
taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest"_

I find it disgusting that after all this time, we're still using a moral-
ethics based approach to determine whether a broad ranging law can apply to a
specific form of media. It is not that I particular agree or disagree with
whether minors should have access to this - but I do disagree on how this
decision has been made.

I'm hoping that with this decision, we'll be forced to reconsider how
expressions are perceived.

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billybob
Yes, the standard is vague. But at some level, all laws come back to moral
judgments of one kind or another. Even if you start with practical concerns,
you end with moral values.

For instance, why do we value free speech? Because we believe that free speech
is a human right. This is a moral belief. If a dictator says "I don't believe
free speech is a right," I might argue that society functions better with it.

But the dictator doesn't care how well society functions, in terms of outcomes
for other people; he only cares about his own power. In the end, my argument
would be that people have rights that "shouldn't", in a moral sense, be
violated.

And that is exactly what the United States' founders said - "that all men are
created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights..."

~~~
lutorm
I don't think the moral judgement is always so easy to find, though. Look at
the second amendment, for example:

 _A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,
the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed._

It should be pretty clear to any strict constitutionalist that what's being
laid out there is not a moral, inherent right to carry arms but a means to an
end. Yes, there is a moral judgement in that it's worth doing things to
preserve a free state, but it's several times removed from the actual question
being addressed.

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jarin
I can understand why some parents are outraged about this. Despite my parents'
best efforts, I managed to watch Terminator with some friends at a sleepover.
That's why I grew up to be a homicidal cyborg.

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fecklessyouth
Last fall I did my uni moot court competition, and the case was a (simplified)
version of this.

What the case came down to was whether violence can be treated the same way as
sex. Ginsberg v. NY, a case from the 60s, gave an exception to the normal
obscenity test--media could be regulated if it depicted sex and was sold to
minors. Ginsberg v. NY, however, didn't touch on violence, and the issue was
whether Ginsberg v. NY is content-specific, and only limited to sex, or
whether the fact that that decision hinges upon harm done to youth means that
other media that harm youth, ie, through exposure to violence, can be included
in the exception. And, as you guys may guess, the trouble comes from the fact
that damage can't really be shown.

That being said, if it was ruled Constitutional, I wouldn't have a problem
with this law. Community values should reinforce parental values. There is a
reach to what parents can do and control, everyone knows that.

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ltamake
I agree that mature video games are no worse for kids than any other form of
suggestive media. Teens are exposed to a lot of violence in the world, and
banning just one type of it isn't going to do anything to protect them.
Parents are going to bring their kids to suggestive movies, and buy their kids
mature games. Restrictions will do nothing to stop that, and that's something
we're going to have to deal with.

Just my opinion.

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int3rnaut
I like how this passes just a few years after it no longer applies to me...

Growing up in the heart of this ESRB rating era, I can honestly say I was
rarely if at all effected. Like a lot of kids, if I wanted a Mature game, I'd
get an adult to buy it in the same way kids buy booze. It wasn't a real
deterrent and at the end of the day I was still playing the games that I
wasn't supposed to. Right or wrong, doing dumb things, and seeing the world
that you're not supposed to is just another rite of childhood and growing up.
The only thing this new amendment really does is it makes things easier for
kids--psh the kids today have it so easy.

~~~
int3rnaut
"In my day when we wanted some mature video game, we'd pay a hobo to walk into
gamestop for us"

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kenjackson
_Like protected books, plays, and movies, they communicate ideas through
familiar literary devices and features distinctive to the medium_

I don't know much about 1st ammendment law, but aren't mature books and movies
regularly prohibited to be sold to minors? I thought porn couldn't be sold to
kids? Or is it merely a suggestion?

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JeremyBanks
For movies it's like the ESRB for video games: a voluntary system, but pretty
universally adhered to.

I'm not sure about porn, but I skimmed this ruling and it makes frequent
reference to how obscenity laws are a special case where speech may be
prohibited, so it might be different.

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peapicker
It will be interesting to see if the video game stores of the world, like the
movie theaters and 'R' ratings, decide to self-regulate and prohibit minors
from buying 'M' games anyway as corporate policy.

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jra101
Almost all stores (Walmart, Best Buy, Gamestop, etc...) already do this and
have for years.

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wccrawford
What does this mean for the sale or showing of movies to minors?

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CamperBob
That was never illegal to begin with, in the US.

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slifty
I thought kids couldn't see R-rated movies in theaters without parent
supervision.

I remember being turned away from a ticket counter for that.

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Lewisham
I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm fairly sure you legally
_can_ watch an R-rated movie, it's just the policy of the theater that you
don't.

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king_jester
This is correct. This is also the reason why you would be hard pressed to find
a venue that would show an NC-17 rated title in some places since most major
theater chains refuse to show NC-17 rated films as policy.

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almightygod
guess I'll need to send them some tornadoes. Hope I don't miss and hit Kansas

