Cert Granted – Supreme Court Rules Video Games Covered by First Amendment

I have, so far, had one “argument” IRL regarding the recent Brown v. EMA decision, with some friend of a friend at a friend’s house (since I stopped raiding I occasionally can be seen at friends’ houses, although they can’t come inside mine until I do something about that floor).

It ended quickly. The FOAF said something along the lines of “so, do you approve of little children buying pornography?” I looked him right in his aging ‘70s-kid eyes and said “buy pornography?” With my eyebrow raised (see illustration above) in its default position. As in, c’mon, it’s 2011, most people don’t buy pornography, or violent imagery either for that matter. I’m pretty sure that you know how to find all that stuff, since you can figure out how to access a blog. The convenience store might have all its copies of Playboy hidden on a special rack that might obscure any scary cleavage on the front cover, to protect children, but any kid that knows how to run around on the internet, or has a friend that does, has already seen plenty.

A lot of people against the decision seem to be mainly concerned about how the US restricts access to sexual imagery more than violent imagery. The motion picture ratings boards will indeed put a higher age restriction on films showing nekked people performing the old in and out (that’s a Clockwork Orange reference, regarding a film that was rated X for violence when it first came out) than they will on films showing mean people committing creative forms of murder. The ESRB, I think, is a little bit more balanced, as well as being fully voluntary. Parents who don’t want their kids playing anything naughty can screen the games their kid buys. Negligent lazy parents can continue drinking beer while their kids watch porn and death on youtube. Nobody is obliged to step in for the lazy parents and say “I’m sorry child, you may not purchase this media for six more years, at which time you will be psychologically equipped to handle it.”

I read a history book recently where there was an account of some kids orphaned under gruesome circumstances I won’t digress into, and the contemporary reporter said something like “thank heaven they are all so young, they’ll get over it, someone older might have been scarred for life.” Which is the opposite approach we take these days.

Regardless of the relationship between psychological resistance to shocking images and one’s 18th birthday, what this decision really represents is a solid, judicial, “No. That is incorrect.” with regard to the theory that video games are some kind of super duper new media with the mysterious power to turn law abiding kiddies into depraved serial killers. The Supremes found absolutely no truth to the theory that playing video games warps a child any more than various kinds of unregulated or laxly regulated media such as video, popular songs, comics, manga and novels. In fact, this whole anti-video game argument is taken right from the pages of the ‘50s crusade against unwholesome comic books, which were represented as also having super duper child corruption powers.

But the proponents of this super duper theory can’t prove it in court. The opinion mentions the junk science they introduced, noting a lot of it consists of correlation studies that have nothing to do with causation.

Now if only science could figure out why certain people are compelled to waste thousands of dollars worth of taxpayer money pursuing junk science claims under a concern troll halo, and why those people have such a tough time admitting they're wrong even in the face of overwhelming evidence of their wrongness.