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Supreme Court: first amendment allows mature video games to be sold to minors
- mrcharles 15y agoThis 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.
- wccrawford 15y agoWhat does this mean for the sale or showing of movies to minors?
- CamperBob 15y agoThat was never illegal to begin with, in the US.
- slifty 15y agoI thought kids couldn't see R-rated movies in theaters without parent supervision. I remember being turned away from a ticket counter for that.
- zachrose 15y agoVoluntary self-regulation by the film industry. The MPAA is to movies what the CCA used to be to comic books.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- Lewisham 15y agoI'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.
- king_jester 15y agoThis 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.
- wccrawford 15y agoIt wasn't, but it was my understanding that that self-policing was in effect because they didn't want the law to exist. Now that the law -can't- exist, will the self-policing continue?
- aamar 15y agoInitially, movies were not protected by U.S. free speech laws, but they've (generally) been protected since the 1950s[1]. So today's opinion may not change things meaningfully (I haven't read it yet). There is likely good business incentive to keep the policy. If parents can be confident their children will be barred from movies they'd want to forbid, they'll be more likely to send them to the theater, give them cash to see movies, etc. The MPAA probably gathers enough data & does enough market research to have some sense of whether or not this outweighs the increased revenue from teenagers seeing more adult fare. [1] Brief history: http://www.lehigh.edu/~infirst/moviecensorship.html http://www.lehigh.edu/~infirst/moviecensorship.html
- Shenglong 15y agoI 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.
- billybob 15y agoYes, 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 15y agoI 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.
- portman 15y agoI 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.
- andylei 15y agothe supreme court's "liberals" and "conservatives" aren't really divided along the lines that exist in the legislature. scalia is a pretty strict constitutional originalist and pretty consistently gives broad support to free speech.
- jacoblyles 15y agoIt'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 15y agoAlthough 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.
- nokcha 15y agoJustice 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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- jerf 15y agoWhen your mental model of a person fails to produce correct predictions, that's a sign that your mental model needs updating. People seem particularly prone to holding on to caricatures of political figures even after the evidence strongly suggests the caricatures are incorrect. I think most of the Supremes are not adequately captured by "conservative/liberal" or "dumbass/intelligent" (for suitably egocentric definitions of "intelligent"). In this particular case, I think you have a poor sense of what "original intent" argumentation is about. Original intent arguments don't actually center around what the founders "envisioned" in the sense of their ability to imagine the future. It's much more like, if we took the founders and educated them about the present, what would they think? It's a challenging thing to do, but perhaps not impossible. It's not hard to imagine them agreeing video games are a form of speech, given the diversity of forms speech had even in the late 1700s.
- peapicker 15y agoIt 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.
- jakewalker 15y agoI 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 http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/10pdf/08-1448.pdf [PDF]
- andylei 15y agoanother 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.
- niels_olson 15y agoI 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.full http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/108/5/1222.ful... 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?
- almightygod 15y agoguess I'll need to send them some tornadoes. Hope I don't miss and hit Kansas
- ltamake 15y agoI 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.
- kenjackson 15y agoLike 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?
- JeremyBanks 15y agoFor 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.
- jarin 15y agoI 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.
- fecklessyouth 15y agoLast 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.
- int3rnaut 15y agoI 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 15y ago"In my day when we wanted some mature video game, we'd pay a hobo to walk into gamestop for us"