Video Games, the First Amendment, and Obscenity 229
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."
Obligatory Tom Lehrer (Score:5, Funny)
"I do have a cause though. It is obscenity. I'm for it. Unfortunately the civil liberties types who are fighting this issue have to fight it owing to the nature of the laws as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression and so on but we know what's really involved: dirty books are fun. That's all there is to it. But you can't get up in a court and say that I suppose. It's simply a matter of freedom of pleasure, a right which is not guaranteed by the Constitution unfortunately."
(at which point he launched into this jaunty tune: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pva35TFiBfI [youtube.com])
Re:The main reason games don't have obscene conten (Score:5, Funny)
What movies have your generation produced like that? NONE.
Watchmen had a faithful reproduction of the amount of sex from the book. I seem to recall there were a run of movies like Zack and Mimi and others which were even more raunchy than Total Recall. To be more to the point though, I don't think censorship is necessarily the problem here. I think that the problem is that there is very little content being produced with anyone over the age of 20 in mind. Back in the old days, kids had cartoons and they had disney movies. Now that people realized that kids are the only demographic worth catering to, that's all that's made. Don't hate the baby boomers. Don't hate the "pepsi generation". Hate all those overbearing marketing assholes who decided to prey on children with their inability to differentiate content from advertisement. Now that this is the standard operating procedure for anyone looking to make a buck, that's all you'll see anymore. Me personally, I just solve the problem by downloading kids movies, splicing in individual frames of sex scenes, and then posting them back out there for download.
Re:The main reason games don't have obscene conten (Score:3, Funny)
Kid's need to be exposed to sex and along with the good, show them the bad, like how sex will never last as long as a woman's ability to nag and spend money like it grows on trees.
Re:The main reason games don't have obscene conten (Score:3, Funny)
The boomers may have had their hippies for a brief period, but I think in reality most of them grew up with Ward and June Cleaver as role models for what's "normal" and "acceptable". By contrast, my generation grew up with Peg and Al Bundy.