Most Laws Attempting Limits of Violent Videogames Fail

[wraggster]

via /. (http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/21/1946216)

Good news for common sense: the New York Times examines the track record of state laws attempting to put additional limits on violent videogames, and finds that the courts have struck almost all of them down as unconstitutional. Especially notable is this gem of a quote, from Judge Richard A. Posner: 'Violence has always been and remains a central interest of humankind and a recurrent, even obsessive theme of culture both high and low ... It engages the interest of children from an early age, as anyone familiar with the classic fairy tales collected by Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault are aware. To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it.

[Broadus]

Hooray! Score one for justice. People try to make it seem like having violent games means that they're 100% directed at children.
Maybe kids should start off with violent games that don't let them directly interact with the bloody violence... Like RTSs. Every time I let my little brother play an action game, he spits and makes a sound effect and jumps up every time he kills something, but that doesn't happen when he plays games like Command and Conquer: Generals and Warhammer: Dawn of War.

[Sterist]

quixotic? wtf? wheres a dictionary

lol woah... that's like a whole page in 1 word

that is a good quote :D

[koiulpoi]

Coolest Judge ever.

[wolfpack]

damn right its unconstitutional, its a way of life, without even one bit of violence... the world would not be right.

[Harshboy]

Not only that, but without Cartoon Violence or Video Game Violence there would probably be more Real World Violence.

[XDelusion]

Fear not, freedom of speech will die "more". Martial law will become commen practice, privacy a thing of the past, global taxation a reality, so on and so forth. Unless of course people actually resist, but then again when in history has humanity actually fought for the natural freedoms...
...then not blindly handed control to someone else.

[Eyedunno]

There's a reason Richard Posner is such a famous judge. He's a really bright and sensible guy.

There's something to be said for shielding children from depictions of violence; small children in particular have a tendency to copy things they think look cool (without having good judgement to know otherwise), but the idea that violent games breed violent adults is ludicrous (no Latin pun intended :D ).

I remember how much of a fuss there was over Mortal Kombat when I was a kid. Seems plenty of adults couldn't understand the difference between games and reality, even though it could easily be pointed out that in reality, people don't jump multiples of their height, breathe fire that instantly skeletonizes other people, shoot fireballs from their hands, perform decapitation uppercuts, or have the potential to shed their own body weight in blood, and without dying, to boot.

[XDelusion]

You are correct children's mind do absorb very much so. Infact it is no wonder the nation is mad, just look at the main stream media we are force fed, the violence, the lies, the complacency, the detatchment, and body/ego worship.

Video games are the last thing we have to worry about, at least the less non-main stream ones. ;)

[Basil Zero]

Finally someone in the justice system isnt a idiot.

[Eyedunno]

Well, it's not really kids' minds "absorbing" anything, and I didn't want to get on a political soapbox. All I'm saying is that if kids watch a Ninja Turtles movie (I use that example because it's a memory from my own childhood), most of them will start playfighting afterwards. My concern is mainly that we don't want kids to break each others' necks because they don't know any better, and good parental supervision seems a better solution than cutbacks in freedom.

And it's TOTAL nonsense that video games have some unique potential to generate mass murderers and so on, as some of the media would have had us believe with regard to the Columbine shootings and other violent acts. I wonder what violent video games were played by Jack the Ripper, Albert Fish, and Vlad the Impaler. ;)

Now bad parenting and low-quality education DO contribute to criminality, but for politicians, those are tough eggs to crack, and don't really help to get votes. It's much easier to attack video games, movies, music, and books.

[VampDude]

What fun would non-violent VideoGames be? I for one vote that no violence or a restriction of violence in VideoGames would be a bad thing in the long run as people will turn to real violence, I have always turned to VideoGames when I'm in a pissed off state of mind (and I'm sure many others do too). I would rather take my temper out on a computer generated person than on a real person, because at least in a VideoGame no one dies or gets hurt in real life.

[mcdougall57]

man that last quote shows how ****ed up our world is

[acn010]

hey mcdougall57... that is how humans live and have their mind set..... meh... its better off on computer generated things to destroy rather than destroy the real thing