Video Games, the First Amendment, and Obscenity 229
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Soulskill
from the making-people-explode-is-fine-but-no-gettin'-loved-up dept.
from the making-people-explode-is-fine-but-no-gettin'-loved-up dept.
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."
BF Skinner was right (Score:0, Interesting)
Environment affects behavior. If you provide no balance to the violence of video games, the outcome can only be violent behavior.
Still more "progressive" than most countries (Score:5, Interesting)
Many countries, even in the English-speaking world, still have official censorship bodies which won't let you publish content without state approval. That's general content, not particular content niches like pornography. Games have been effectively banned in Europe or Australia from being sold for being too violent or "mature." By comparison, the United States has no effective apparatus of censorship. The most that can happen is that a prosecutor brings you up on charges of violating local obscenities laws, but then the prosecutor has to show that your sexual content is gratuitous and has no independent (artistic, literary, etc.) merit. If you had a map where a character walks through a realistic strip club, and gets into a shoot out, that content is likely to be protected under the same precedents that protect R-rated movies with similar content.
Now, if you create a sex simulator, even one like Hot Coffee, well, you're up shit creek. That aside, our system is significantly freer and more in line with "let adults be adults and let parents be responsible" than the majority of the industrial world on content in general.
There is good reason it hasn't happened (Score:3, Interesting)
And not just because Jack Thompson keeps failing on the civil side.
Getting video game violence declared obscene is well prevented by the movie/tv industries' efforts in the motion-picture realm. They've been working for decades to keep visual depictions of violence in the "OK for young children" realm. You can punch somebody on television and it'll be ok for anyone over the age of 8. Add some blood and it pops you up into the low teens, on par with a bit of side-boob.
The interactive aspect is too narrow a distinction for the rest of the entertainment industry to risk getting drawn in and censored, so it'll never happen until somebody comes up with a .9 r^2 correlation [wikipedia.org] between violent games and homosexuality.
Re:What about Japanese imports? (Score:3, Interesting)
TOS clauses rule out real obscenity... (Score:2, Interesting)
TOS clauses of most ISPs rules out the distribution of genuinely obscene content. It is censorship, and in fact, many governments actually do censor this stuff as well.
I mean, if you go by the old rules of what is obscene, sex and violence, obviously, that's not too bad these days and won't get you into trouble. But if you put together a cartoon swastika game for children that features a character running around tossing minorities into concentration camps where you can dehumanize, torture and exterminate them, all while beating the crap out of its wife until she creates babies for the fatherland and streudel for the tummy, that might get you into some trouble.
In Germany, you would go to jail, for sure. In the USA, I think you would probably be banned by most ISPs, be put on a number of terrorist watch lists by the government, get sued by the ACLU, ripped by Al Sharpton, and worst of all, you would get modded as a troll on Slashdot. In the UK, you would probably find a dozen cameras in your house, and a ton of condemnation from the BBC and parliament, unless you were islamic, in which case, it would be ok. In Iran they would probably cheer you and in Israel Mossad would probably have more than a word with you. For some reason, I think Canada would argue you had the right to host but they would probably bend over backwards to paint you as an American.
People that actually had the game would suddenly find themselves subject to any sort of hate crimes laws. So, if you punched someone in the face, without the game, it might be a simple assault. But, if you had the game and punched someone else in the face, that would likely be a hate crime and you would wind up in prison.
So.... in reality, there's still tough anti-obscenity laws out there. It's just that, liberal nations have made it taboo to hate people, just as much as conservative regimes once made it taboo to talk about gratuitous violence and sexuality. If you really wanted to make sure you covered all the bases, you could probably make the swastika concentration camp game into an ultra violent porno. That way, liberals and conservatives would be thoroughly offended, and yes, you would be obscene by anyone's definition!
Re:The main reason games don't have obscene conten (Score:5, Interesting)
You Americans need to relax a little bit concerning sex. I think violence is a lot worse than sex.
It's OK for kids to see people being machinegunned into pieces, blood and flesh everywhere, but a boobie is simply too outrageous. WTF!?!
Here in Europe, most movies have nudity in them but in a Hollywood movie, if you see some boobs for a fraction of a second, it's outrageous. The leg-crossing of Sharon Stone in Fatal Instinct was deemed as the sexiest thing on cinema, but truly, it's pretty standard in European movies. Of course, in American movies and series, violence is rampant, even in family-rated stuff.
On American TV, I've seen boobs blurred out in movies, music videos, etc. I've even seen something incredible, Naomi Watts was masturbating in Mulholland Drive, but she was only filmed from the waist up, so you could only see her arm going up and down, suggesting what she was doing. They fucking blurred her arm! How stupid is this?
Re:BF Skinner was right (Score:5, Interesting)
Skinnerian radical behaviorism has all but been completely thrown out the window in modern psychology. These days, cognitive psychology is all the rage. Even more modern post-Skinnerian behaviorists like Tolman [wikipedia.org] had began thinking along more cognitive lines.
Thing is that I, along with many others, including my wife who self-identifies as a bevaviorist, believe that Skinnerian radical behaviorism is far too simplistic a view and that with advances in modern technology we have to look beyond simple operant conditioning as causes of human behavior, because at this point, quite frankly, we can.
Re:Obscene (Score:5, Interesting)
2. the work depicts/describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law.
I've always found it kind of amusing that it's basically all about sex and pooping. Of all the forms of speech that can be censored due to being offensive, of all the activities which we can't tolerate because they're too objectionable, we've picked out sex and pooping.
Re:The main reason games don't have obscene conten (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The main reason games don't have obscene conten (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The main reason games don't have obscene conten (Score:5, Interesting)
However, you can't directly compare it to violence. Explicit sex is media is frowned upon for entirely different reasons than violence. I'm not worried about my son, my daughter, or 99.9% of anybody else's kids wanting to go out and commit murder because they see it in a game. However, sex is a temptation. The kids would be weird if they DIDN'T want to go out and have sex... or lock themselves up in their bedroom and watch sex all day.
Yeah, I think it's too restrictive. I don't see anything wrong with a child seeing a breast. But in fairness, the current stigma is not because sex is considered WORSE than violence. It's considered more SEDUCTIVE than violence.
Integrating sex into gameplay (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is that sex in games usually doesn't provide good gameplay. If you just want to watch porn, that's easily available. Besides, simulated porn doesn't look that good.
That said, the big flap about the "hot coffee" scene in GTA was sort of silly. The GTA world ought to have sex in it. In fact, it's inconsistent that a game with strippers and hookers doesn't have sex in it. There's so much unrealized potential there, for seduction, power games, devious girlfriends - all the basic male/female drama elements.
The key is integrating sex into gameplay without having the sex dominate the game. That's a design challenge. It's not impossible. Second Life has sex, but it's not primarily a sex-oriented MMORPG. What we need are R-rated video games, dramas where sex plays a role in the plot. That could be fun.
awww they're gonna cancel it (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The main reason games don't have obscene conten (Score:3, Interesting)
This is marked as interesting, but isn't this the exact line of thinking that we endlessly mock? Violence doesn't bother you because, well, no one is going to kill anyone hurr, that never happens.But OMG KIDS MIGHT WANT TO HAVE SEX THIS IS TERRIBLE WE HAVE TO STOP THEM SEEING THIS.
It's still about control then, surely. Sex is considered more 'seductive' than violence because it's not overtly illegal. Yet. You can't go out and hit/shoot/kill someone because that's against the law, so sure, let people watch people murder other people because that's fine, they aren't actually allowed to do it anyway. But let them watch sex? But ... but, that might make them curious about what it's like and then they might actually go have sex and that would be ... bad? I guess? Because we can't directly control that, maybe?I don't know, it's not my own stupid point I'm trying to back up here.
Then there is the awesome logic that I've heard where violence is okay because violence is a fact of life and kids need to be exposed to what can happen. But sex isn't?
I really do have trouble getting my head around all this crap.