Today, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that video games, and by extension the video game industry, are indeed protected by the First Amendment, ending a six-year legal battle between the industry and the state of California. In the state, lawmakers hoped to make it a crime to sell violent video games to minors.
In a 7-2 ruling, Justice Anton Scalia stated that the proposed law did not hold with the First Amendment. He was joined by Justice Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts, who at this time last year seemed more sympathetic to California’s claims. Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, Anthony Kennedy and Ruth Ginsburg also concurred.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer, each from opposite sides of the political spectrum, joined in the dissent.
The case, specifically The State of California vs. The Entertainment Merchants Association and the Entertainment Software Association, features the latter party representing the entire video game industry. The ESA puts on the annual E3 trade expo, which is a key news event for gaming each year. The ESA’s lawyers have argued against the state of California since November of last year, arguing that video games deserve the same amount of First Amendment protections as movies and books. As it happens, today’s ruling is the first time the Supreme Court has ruled on video games in any manner.
The law, as written, would have made it a crime to sell violent video games to minors in the state of California, was ruled unconstitutional in lower courts. Attempts to enact similar in states including Illinois and Michigan were also ruled unconstitutional, though it is California’s law that has seen the most progress. Each of these laws, usually championed by Democrats, have in some way come up against the nation’s Constitutional protection for free speech, though have also run aground on other measures including the government promotion of a private enterprise, such as the Entertainment Software Ratings Board.
The debate over the effects of video games on kids has gone on for nearly 30 years, growing in the 1990s with the advent of games like Doom and Mortal Kombat.
Written by California assemblyman and child psychologist Leland Yee and signed by then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, the law utilized language of the Miller Test – a set of criteria established in 1973 by the Supreme Court to determine whether a form of speech is obscene and therefore not valid for protection by the First Amendment. To date, this addresses the sale of pornography and media with pornographic content – illegal when sold to children, but still okay for consenting adults. Yee’s law would have built on this precedent, ultimately creating a class of obscene video games and equating a large swath of the industry with pornography.
Games that violated Yee’s law would be any that:
(A) Comes within all of the following descriptions:
(i) A reasonable person, considering the game as a whole, would find appeals to deviant or morbid interest of minors.
(ii) It is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the community as to what is suitable for minors.
(iii) It causes the game, as a whole, to lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.
(B) Enables the player to virtually inflict serious injury upon images of human beings or characters with substantially human characteristics in a manner which is especially heinous, cruel, or depraved in that it involves torture or serious physical abuse to the victim.
In a statement to reporters, Yee stated that he was very disappointed. The Supreme Court has “decided that it is going to side with corporate America and Wal-Mart against our children,” he said.
In a written statement for a plurality of justices, Justice Anton Scalia wrote that California’s arguments “would fare better if there were a longstanding tradition in this country of specially restricting children’s access to depictions of violence, but there is none.”
He also cited numerous examples of violence in literature, including Dante’s Inferno, Homer’s Odysseus and Grimm’s Fairy Tales. “Reading Dante is unquestionably more cultured and intellectually edifying than playing Mortal Kombat. But these cultural and intellectual differences are not constitutional.”
“The basic principles of freedom of speech,” Scalia wrote, “do not vary with a new and different communication medium.”
Of the two dissenters, each sided with the State of California for different reasons. Justice Stephen Breyer focused on the double standard between sex and violence. He posited that it did not make sense to forbid selling a minor “a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting the sale to that 13 year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively, but virtually, binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her?”
“What kind of First Amendment would permit the government to protect children by restrict-ing sales of that extremely violent video game only when the woman-bound, gagged, tortured and killed- is also topless?”
Justice Clarence Thomas, on the other hand, focused on his understanding that the framers of the U.S. Constitution did not believe children enjoyed the same access to Free Speech as adults. “The history clearly shows,” he writes, “A founding generation that believed parents to have complete authority over their minor children and expected parents to direct the development of those children.”
Reaction from the video game industry is enthusiastic. “This is a historic and complete win for the First Amendment and the creative freedom of artists and storytellers everywhere,” said Michael Gallagher, head of the ESA. “Today the Supreme Court affirmed what we have always known – that free speech protections apply every bit as much to video games as they do to other forms of creative expression like books, movies and music.”
Ken Levine, creative director of Bioshock today puts it best:
“Today, the Court brought the medium we love fully into that circle of freedom. And we move forward empowered, but also with a sense of responsibility that words have meaning. So we as creators will choose our words with respect, understanding their power. But no law will have the authority to choose them for us.”
This story will be updated throughout the day.
This is such a big deal.
What I found particularly noteworthy were the opinions of the dissenters, Justices Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer. While I get Breyer's opinion that the double standard between sex and violence creates a confusing message to send; I'm puzzled over Thomas' ideas that because the founding fathers thought that kids should be completely under the control of their parents, sales violent games should be criminalized.
Both justices use some pretty silly hyperbole to make their points, and I think the results of that are shown pretty clearly in this ruling. In this case, the arguments from the various justices utilize some strong logic and make clear-headed points that I for one, applaud. Even the cautionary Justice Roberts who believes that a more narrow and focused bill might find traction is probably on the right track, especially as the technology evolves.
But for right now, this is a pretty big win for gamers, game developers, and people who just plain like to see the Constitution get upheld.
I'm torn on this. While I don't think kids should be playing games like GTA, I also believe that it should be up to the parent to direct what his children are exposed to. That means being involved in your child's life and not allowing them to retreat to their room every day behind locked doors doing who knows what. I know growing up I was prevented from seeing a lot of movies and listening to certain rap groups. And I will do the same with my children. However if I as a parent think Halo is harmless and feel my 11 year old can handle a little co-op with his old man than that should be my right.
Nice to see the supreme court codify hypocrisy in media. Let your kids blow up a thousand virtual heads and hey that's freedom.
Show a kid a picture of a vagina and go to jail as a sex offender.
This was a great decision by the Supreme Court, though I'm horrified that two of the justices think that free speech should be limited based on the medium. Get fucked, you guys.
Guaranteed if CA implemented this law with the stated intent to protect children from nudity and 'pornographic imagery' in games most people wouldn't have given a shit and if it went to the supreme court it would have been upheld. The problem isn't justices thinking free speech should be limited based on medium, the problem is justices, throughout history, limiting free speech based on their own personal morality. That's exactly what happened again today when the courts said ultraviolence is cool, and something deserving of protection as speech, yet we still censor the shit out of sex and language.
"What sense does it make to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting the sale to that 13-year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively, but virtually, binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her?" Breyer said.
I agree with the decision, based mostly on the reasoning that video games shouldn't be singled out compared to movies or music. Breyer does make a salient point, but using the sex/violence double standard to single out video games versus other more sensibly treated mediums is like reasoning it's ok to outlaw blowjobs in Texas because sodomy was already illegal (prior to 2003, I mean). Personally I find our double standard when it comes to sex and violence to be silly and backwards, but that's a whole nother nut to crack.
this brown guy needs to quit being versus everything
jesus christ
first he's against education, now he's against entertainment
come on dude what the hell man
Dear Diary,
Tonight I fucked several women at once, punched god in the face, killed five thousand zombies and watched their heads explode. I set some girl on fire, ripped the head off another, then destroyed an entire alien civilization.
I used a UNSC Spartan Issue Laser to to it, then switched to twirling blades of 'chaos' to decapitate the bitches I didn't like. Fuck' 'em right. Their titties was hanging out but I took care of that. Then I jumped in a Warthog and blew up some aliens, but it's cool because they're not people, just like the bitch who blew me in the backseat of my car before I ran her over for money. I needed the health, see. Used that health to pay for a strip tease in a bar so I could get a location on a guy, then I followed him to a market where I blew him and everyone he ever knew to high fucking hell for the max points. I topped it off by fucking some more bitches in a brothel.
I'm only 13, though, please don't show me pictures of vagina. I am too frail for that.
Yeah I think we got our priorities straight.
3, or 4.
But it's cool, we don't let our kids look at Playboy while they blow up the world. Because FIRST AMENDMENT and shit. We can call dead soldiers FAGS and we can call them NIGGERS but DO NOT, under any circumstances in the history of the world, ever, EVER... do not show them genitals.
So glad we protected our first amendment rights today without looking at what they really are.
Holy shit the VU doesn't have filters in place for the N word, uh, I was kinda counting on that being automatically filtered out (no seriously).
The first amendment has no limits when it comes to MY GAMES.
Just when it comes to other stuff.
This is not to say I hate on the first amendment but let's be honest, here. You all are in favor of this because you think it protects your GAMES. Fight for porno for kids, and let's see what happens
(seriously though, he N word, totally counted on a filter)
I honestly hope what I I said bothers you people (it bothers me to say it).
Do you really protect freedom of speech when it matters, or just when it is convenient?
If you care about it in a constitutional sense, would you fight for what I said tonight... ALL of it?
Or are you just fighting for your games because that's what matters to you?
I'll enjoy being banned see you guys on the other side!
I have to say growing up my mom would let me watch movies like Revenge of he Nerds and Porkys but did not let me watch anything she deemed too violent. At the time I remember friends of mine having the opposite rules and I never understood whose parents had it right. Now it makes sense to me and I'll probably raise m boys the same way.
When i was a kid, I was allowed to watch Revenge of the Nerds (I didn't get a lot of the jokes at the time) and Rambo, but things like horror movies where it was all excessive gore and close-up visceral violence was off limits, as well as movies that got straight out-and-out sexual. Though in the latter case, I remember my folks would just cover my eyes, and I'd want to know what was going on.
I think they were just pretty confident that I was able to draw the line between not real and actually real, and behave accordingly.
Subsequently, I was disappointed when I went to college and did not rally my geeky friends together to defeat a jock fraternity and hook up with the cheerleader sorority.
Yeah well we did install cameras in all of the sorority houses and watched the chics take showers.
I think it's pretty much known that America fears one thing more than terrorists, and that thing is the vagina.
Sex scenes in movies were different. I could see all the boobs I wanted but she did draw the line on something graphic like that. It was more violent movies that I was forbidden to watch. Star Wars was about as violent as I got until I was 10-11 years old.
I got my first look of boobs the old fashioned all American way, by paging through my dad's Playboys when the parents weren't around. They were in the magazine rack by all the other magazines, unprotected and oh so easy to access.
But when it came to what I was allowed to watch, my parents more or less conformed to the double standard. The first R rated movies included Terminator and Robocop when I was around 12 or 13, and my parents (or at least my mom) were totally there when I watched them. It was kind of a big deal for me. But any movies that were focused on nudtiy were still off the radar for a while -- we had to stealthily watch my uncle's copied VHS of Porky's whenever we went to Grandma's house.
I've said this before some other places so I'll repeat my theory here:
Parents try to keep sex from their children rather than violence, because sex is more real to a parent. Violence is not as real.
For all of a child's life a parent tries their hardest to keep kids away from sex because they are afraid of their child becoming sexually active too young. A lot of parents fear that their kids will start too early and their daughters may end up pregnant as teens. Sex is something that a kids could see on a film and go out and try to imitate it.
Violence is accepted more readily because it isn't something that just happens every day - unless you live in a war zone. Kids can be taught that violence is "just a movie" or "just a game" and the kids can accept it more readily because they can see with their own eyes that violence and the "real world" don't mesh all that often. Violence can be turned cartoony or exciting for kids - sure it desensitizes them, but as long as they are brought up that violence belongs in the television and NOT in their lives its easier to forgive a kid seeing a violent action film.
If children can see sex on TV and be encouraged to imitate it, why would they not be encouraged to imitate the violence that is glorified in movies, TV, and hip hop? I honestly can't make any sense of what you're saying, here.
because everybody fucks
not everybody goes out and blows people up
Violence is not limited to blowing people up.
And my opinion is that you can't stop a kid from becoming sexual. It's natural for it to happen. Good parenting is not keeping things from your kids and hoping they don't discover it on their own, it's talking to your kids and explaining to them why they are too young for something when they get to that age.
My son, when he grows up will, no matter what I do, end up having sex with people. I can try as hard as I want to repress that instinct, but that won't help and could very easily make things worse, so trying to shield him completely from sex is not only futile but, IMO, bad parenting. Conversely, if I do a good job as a parent, Hunter will grow up well balanced enough to not want to hurt people unless it's in self defense. Stemming violent tendencies is not only possible, but something to strive for.
Yet somehow sex is obscene and kids can't be exposed to it at all, and gratuitous violence is now a child's first amendment right =\
Although I must admit that I DO live in a world where violence is not a part of my everyday life. I'm 37 years old and have never seen a violent crime, a murdered corpse, I've never seen a gun much less even heard a gunshot. I've never been involved in a physical fight, as either the target or the instigator. And in my neighborhood we rarely see police - and if we do it becomes something of a "thing", and its usually medically related when they do drive by. The only violence I ever experience is what I choose to witness on television.
Violence absolutely is an everyday thing for a significant part of our country.
they live in dumb places then
Like I said, compared to millions of other people my life has been a safety extravaganza of awesome luck despite the fact that I've almost been shot at least once. I just thought it was weird for you to say that violence is not a common thing in this country, especially when you live near Minneapolis, a city which barely misses the top 20 for violent crimes per capita in the US.
Man is a base, violent thing.
I could share war stories, but all I want is for my child to grow up feeling safe, and cartoon violence isn't a big deal.
Cute episode. Liked it a lot. Love me the spare use of Robot Devil.
this isn't the futurama thread
Faits, what's more interesting? Futurama, or a children's book called Everybody Fucks?
Fry joins the police academy next week, Jon. I am looking forward to it.
this isn't the futurama thread who cares how interesting futurama is
what does that have to do with video game first amendment rights
also the best animated tv show ever is probably the venture bros but I'd have to think about it to be sure
See now we're back on topic calm down.
It's not violent TV, film, or literature that concerns me when I lie awake at night. It's video games.
Though Jon Stewart did air one of the best (worst?) of the new Mortal Kombat fatalities on air. It's pretty grisly, but I would think even fans of MK can admit some of those fatalities are hard to watch.
the new mortal kombat game is fucking disgusting. someone linked me to a youtube of all the fatalities and after a couple I turned it off because it was just gross.
I want to grab that new MK game at some point. The more disgusting the fatalities the better. Of course kids should not be playing this game.
Kim and I have had fun with it but it can't be plays if Dean is around at all.
Just wanted to bump this thread to say last night's episode of Futurama was excellent. I actually think them parodying stuff like the iPhone and (last night) Minority Report years after the fact is a lot funnier than if they were to do it right when it was first popular. I hope they eventually go through with the parody of Gangs of New York they had planned before cancellation.
Does this look like the Futurama thread? Do you and Jon have to talk about that show in every thread??
;P
nothing to see here, just bio shitting up the supreme court thread some more
In the last two days in my metro area:
A guy was stabbed nearly to death by a 17 year old kid after he told him and his friends that they better not try to have a 'sleepover' with his 12-year-old niece, and an off-duty police officer got drunk and went around town beating people up and arresting them for no reason. Meanwhile, on the other side of the state, some dude goes on a rampage killing 7 people including his own 12-year-old daughter and another 10-year-old girl, having targeted exes and their families.
I dare proponents of the defeated bill to blame violent media for these atrocities. Using a convenient scapegoat instead of addressing the real causes do not "protect the children." This is no different than when lawmakers went after that there 'rock 'n roll devil music.'
michigan!
Yes, Welcome to M!ch!gan! indeed.
I'd blame mental illness, and the cocaine and alcohol, for that guy's sick shooting rampage.
Mostly cocaine, I think.
Games deserve the right to be artistic, if they succeeded is shutting down free speech here, there'd be no point to playin and making games in my opinion. shoot,do we really need thought police? I mean jeez it feels like some lawmakers just want control over everything
yes because if individual citizens or companies want to set policies, then the government should definitely take the ability to set those policies away and just make a law
The only point I was making is that this law in no way would have amounted to censorship. It might have been redundant and unnecessary since it was just attempting to codify already existing private policy, but that =/= censorship.
It's implied censorship. Making games is an expensive, commercial undertaking. If the government criminalizes the sale of your product, then that is a de facto censorship decision by disallowing you to make money on your product.
Now in this case, it is not a complete criminalization, but a ruling in the opposite from what was handed down would place video games in a subclass of media that is not protected by the first amendment, shared only with pornography. Whatever your feelings on pornography or the double standard that exists in this country on sex vs. violence, I think it stands to reason that being able to press buttons to forward the progress of your media as opposed to turning a page or simply passively watching does not make that media more corrosive to the moral fabric of our society than anything else out there.
Justice Anton Scalia has a great quote on the matter, which goes "Disgust is not a valid basis for restricting expression." There are things in games that I would never, EVER expose children to, but the same goes for movies and possibly some books if I thought about it long enough. But it is and should be within the creators' rights to produce and sell that media without shackles.
It's implied censorship. Making games is an expensive, commercial undertaking. If the government criminalizes the sale of your product, then that is a de facto censorship decision by disallowing you to make money on your product.
Now in this case, it is not a complete criminalization, but a ruling in the opposite from what was handed down would place video games in a subclass of media that is not protected by the first amendment, shared only with pornography. Whatever your feelings on pornography or the double standard that exists in this country on sex vs. violence, I think it stands to reason that being able to press buttons to forward the progress of your media as opposed to turning a page or simply passively watching does not make that media more corrosive to the moral fabric of our society than anything else out there.
Justice Anton Scalia has a great quote on the matter, which goes "Disgust is not a valid basis for restricting expression." There are things in games that I would never, EVER expose children to, but the same goes for movies and possibly some books if I thought about it long enough. But it is and should be within the creators' rights to produce and sell that media without shackles.
australia bans the sale of games that exceed their "MA15+" rating (and restricts the sale of MA15+ games) which is censorship by the government
wal-mart refusing to sell M rated games is not censorship.
these aren't difficult concepts here folks
But the second a state decides to make that line in the sand a little more official, it's Oh Noes Games Will Be Censored! IMO it's disingenuous and lame. There are plenty of respectable reasons to oppose this law (e.g. it's unnecessary, it establishes an inequality of regulation in entertainment media, it's nanny state bullshit, etc.), but "it's censorship" is not one of them.