I 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.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?
While your point may or may not be true - I fail to see how this pertains to whether the state should be involved in legislating morality? I feel that if you picked some other moral issue - say gay marriage for instance - the majority of us would be of the opinion that the government has no business telling gays that they can't get married because its "immoral." But on this issue its okay for the government to dictate what's moral because you happen to agree with it?
How easily we seem to be willing to trade freedom for comfort when we agree with what's traded. Certainly I wouldn't want a 12 year old's perception of reality to be entirely shaped by video games, but that falls to sound parenting and not the government.
That being said - I'm not entirely sure I even agree with your premise, I grew up on Doom, Wolfenstein, etc which were graphically violent for their time and have turned into a successful well rounded "moral" person.
Agreeing with this decision doesn't mean that you believe that one's own 12 year old should be able to play the game. You can certainly believe that a decision about what games are appropriate can be left to parental discretion without believing that its the role of the state to act in loco parentis on video game selection and supersede parenting decisions.
"video game violence develop a shitty moral compass"
Do you have any evidence of this (a study, etc)?
Having played video games in my youth (and still dabble), I don't believe that it's affected my "moral compass."
In fact many "violent" video games are chucked full of ethical dilemmas (e.g. Dragon's Age, Mass Effect, Fallout). You're confronted by choices that have consequences. As a 15 year old in America, how many complex moral/ethical choices do you really get?
So, to lump in all games into one category b/c of violence or sex or whatever is ridiculous.
I would like to see some video (not screencast, video) of your 12 year-old son
(Note I have raised children who now range in age from 30 to 11, so I have dealt with things like this for a few years)
I am cautiously in favor of people selling a video game as you described to whomever they wish. Or not selling, if they have moral qualms about it.
I am not in favor of my 12 year-old son playing a game such as you describe.
You do see the difference between a parent making a reasonable and informed choice, and having it made for them?
hey want you to give him the Ativan
I am not a doctor, this is a question honestly asked. Wiki claims Ativan is not addictive for short-term use.
From my POV, you give the guy the stuff to relax his inhibitions, he spills the beans. Or you don't and some deniable non-Americans torture him for the same information.
Can you explain your thinking on this? If not, that's cool, but I am honestly curious.
> Here's the point: video game violence develop a shitty moral compass.
No, shitty parents develop shitty moral compasses. Take your pick about shitty information sources: TV, video games, the internet, trashy magazines/newspapers. If that's where you learn about normalcy, you're going to have a shitty moral compass.
Yes, there are also cases of great parents having shitty kids, parenting is a complicated and messy business. My point is that if you can actually say one source (e.g. video games) is developing a child's moral compass, that's shitty parenting.
There is a big difference between having the freedom to do something, and actually exercising that freedom.
I find it extremely distasteful that the state thinks it can raise my children better than I can, and that it can decide what bad/good parenting is. That being said, obviously some parents are bad parents (by most standards), and would allow their kids to play very violent games, but a prohibition like this would do nothing to prevent this (bad parents would find innovative ways to raise their children in a bad way).
To give a similar example: from a very early age, I was taught how to properly consume alcohol by my parents (through moderation), not by the state (through prohibition). And I find such laws, e.g. in the US where kids are not allowed even to drink alcohol, ridiculous.
So if one agrees that drugs should be legalized then I should be excited about my 4 year old daughter using crack? They're not even connected things.
Games in particular would be easy for younger kids to get if they knew an older kid who could buy them. When I was 18 I would have bought anyone a game because I like games and don't seem them as harmful. Maybe that isn't the best thing to do (I wouldn't do it now probably) but I definitely would have done it at that age.
That's very interesting, Neils. I think medical ethics are the toughest I've ever been exposed to, exactly for situations like this.
I think that we could be doing everyone a favor if there was more education in ethics starting at a younger age. I don't necessary mean "philosophy" classes, discussing teleology and things like that, because I don't think that would have any effect and students would space out like they do in any other class. But I would want an education that directly addresses ethics: posit a situation to your students (preferably one that they can be familiar with at their age, at least to begin with), and then open a discussion. Young students are not very enthusiastic about class discussions, but I think by putting them in a situation like this, someone will say something because they disagree, and that will get the ball rolling.
I feel like adults making unethical decisions do so because they don't truly understand personhood, because they've never had an education in it. Because they don't understand why a captive has right not to be drugged, even if it could mean that they don't get tortured (or at least, why you as a doctor have the right and/or duty not to drug them).
I don't know that I agree that videogames mess up children's moral compasses and I don't think that restricting them would do any good (as an example, take the War on Drugs). But I think that a mandatory discussions in ethics every couple of years (as the children grow up and face new sets of problems) could do a world of good.
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.
That doesn't seem to be the point of your anecdote at all. You just magically created a correlation between the anecdote you started with and your suggestion that "video game violence develop a shitty moral compass".
If the human race is to develop anything it has to be the ability to create ethical and moral structures without some higher order whether that is religion or the state.
Your argument pales in comparison to what the state teaches.
Just to give you one example.
It's ok to mold truth into whatever your political needs are. I.e. how the western countries basically hand picked data to claim that Saddam had WMD
Games aren't isolated silos anymore. They are social spaces where the same issues we deal with in our every day life unfolds. To claim that the game mechanics or the game theme is the moral compass is simply missing the point.
> video game violence develop a shitty moral compass.
You know, I think it depends on the message, not the medium. Books as a whole are an unreliable source of training, but there are some that we take seriously. I think great literature is better training than experience, as it reflects great insight.
You could say the same thing about movies, to a lesser degree. Some are 007, and some are Shawshank Redemption. I've heard of college level ethics courses being taught by watching and discussing heavy movies, and I don't think that's inappropriate.
Gaming as a genre is pretty young; it's only just beginning to cross the threshold of serious art. I think it has the potential to be serious literature as well; the single player mode of Starcraft 2, for example, struck me as though it was attempting to actually grapple with serious issues related to warfare -- and unique to games, it did so by asking the player to make serious choices. I won't say it crossed the threshold of great literature, but I will say it was heading that way.
I agree with your point that video games can lead to improper unconscious decision making. This follows a lot of the thoughts in the works of Lt Col Grossman if you have read them. However, I believe that the answer is not removal of the video games but training in conscious decision making.
Like in your Ativan example. Those who chose to dope the subject didn't actually think about their action, but instead made a decision based on emotional response. Part of the purpose of the exercise was to teach them to consider the implications of their actions and then make a proper decision that could be defended at a later point in time.
If we spent more time teaching children subjects like philosophy they would be better prepared to consider their actions and the effects of media and peers would be greatly diminished. I think in the long run our society would be better served by this path than by a attempted (and most likely failed) removal of negative media.
Following your logic, books should be burnt as some of them are shitty moral compass and some certainly incite violence. Actually book burning had happened numerous times throughout history, indicating that this kind of thinking was prevailing.
Yes video game violence develop a shitty moral compass. So does Mein Kampf. So should we start banning books which we think develop a shitty moral compass?
How about parent permission cards that parents can apply for with shiny holographs and such. That would not be first amdendment per say, and could apply to an entire category of shopping.
I agree with you more than most people in this thread. It's easy to turn our noses at "community values," but their absence, I think, can explain a lot of problems in this country.
>I 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?
If it is normal to sedentarily stare at a pixellated screen, it does not matter what is on the screen; you may appeal to whichever emotions you choose. Conversely, I would not particularly want to see my child grow up without a healthy respect for other people's freedom, and this seems to represent a greater danger when they are going to join the ranks of the voting public. Is it not equally void that a child should be forced to grow up under the spectre of some cult such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints or similar nonsense? Violent video games and pornography pale in comparison.
>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."
From the article:
>Playing violent video games has been found to account for a 13% to 22% increase in adolescents' violent behavior; by comparison, smoking tobacco accounts for 14% of the increase in lung cancer.
This is one of the most misleading and intellectually dishonest statements I have ever had the misfortune of reading. It is true that an average tobacco smoker has approximately a 14% lifetime chance of developing lung cancer (it is closer to 17% for males and 12% for females), but this is absolutely not equivalent to a 14% increase in the chance of developing lung cancer. Rather, a nonsmoker has approximately a 1.5% chance of developing lung cancer: a smoker has nine times as large a chance to develop lung cancer as a nonsmoker. This is not a 14% "increase" in the same sense of a "13-22% increase in adolescents' violent behavior". It is an 800% increase! To assert that these risk factors are in any way similar is completely absurd and raises serious questions about your motivations.
>condom nonuse and sexually acquired human immunodeficiency virus infection
In reality, the chance of HIV transmission in the case of unprotected vaginal sex is 1 in 1000. Considering the severity of the disease, this is absolutely not an acceptable risk, but it is kind of laughable to see this phrase so wildly bandied about.
>[rambling story about the CIA]
>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.
I fail to see how your argument supports your conclusions. Rather, it seems to show that a lack of education is what leads to poor moral decisions, not exposure to violent video games. The people in your example were not stratified on the grounds of having played Grand Theft Auto, they were stratified on the grounds of having some knowledge of ethics and morality, the latter having basically nothing to do with Grand Theft Auto.
Let me tell you a story. It is an ancient story, and it is highly relevant.
In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6."What are you doing?" asked Minsky."I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe," Sussman replied."Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky."I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play," Sussman said.Minsky then shut his eyes."Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked his teacher."So that the room will be empty."
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
If you want a society of people that understands values, you have to teach values. You cannot hope for them to arise on their own by simply depriving them of whatever you consider a corrupting influence.
>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.
Hopefully they won't make the same mistakes as you.
> 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?
These two aren't even remotely related. Legislating morality is great for legislators, not for the citizens.
Just how do you develop a moral compass if you are denied access to more than a single viewpoint? I suspect you have only the most superficial understanding of of modern video games. Try to play Heavy Rain and not be moved. I honestly think that the point of these laws are to limit access to views and ideas. Your own post supports this.
Should we bad trashy romance novels because they give women impure thoughts? This patrician attitude is unethical. Blocking people from conflicting views will only stunt their ethical growth yet you and others would promote a single unexamined view.
Please note a major retail store refused to sell me Heavy Rain dispute being twice 18 with a ID. There is no excuse for this.
Parental figures anyone? Kids are going to see violence and sexual acts if they really want to do it; and just as with adults prohibition does not help the problem.
Spot on. This isn't about prudishly getting rid of all nudity and violence. It's not about believing that people who play violent games necessarily become violent people. It's about the fact that our brains are wired to seek order and identity in the actions that we do repeatedly, and game mechanics are a poor subset of the way the world really works. They are a poor way to train your conscience.
I 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.
It'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.
the 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.
I 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."
This 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.
I 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.
Yes, 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..."
Also, as vague as "community standards" are, it does seem to me that they have some value in regulation. For instance, would you be in favor of allowing pornographic billboards in your town? What if the porn was political in nature?
I would still say that in that case, freedom of expression must be balanced against the community's moral standards. That may be vague, but it's real; I think there would be a pretty broad consensus among parents of all religious stripes, for example, that they don't want such billboards up where their children would see them.
I 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.
Last 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.
I 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.
I 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.
Like 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?
It 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.
When 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.
[+] [-] niels_olson|14 years ago|reply
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.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?
[+] [-] thecoffman|14 years ago|reply
How easily we seem to be willing to trade freedom for comfort when we agree with what's traded. Certainly I wouldn't want a 12 year old's perception of reality to be entirely shaped by video games, but that falls to sound parenting and not the government.
That being said - I'm not entirely sure I even agree with your premise, I grew up on Doom, Wolfenstein, etc which were graphically violent for their time and have turned into a successful well rounded "moral" person.
[+] [-] yahelc|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pragmatic|14 years ago|reply
Do you have any evidence of this (a study, etc)?
Having played video games in my youth (and still dabble), I don't believe that it's affected my "moral compass."
In fact many "violent" video games are chucked full of ethical dilemmas (e.g. Dragon's Age, Mass Effect, Fallout). You're confronted by choices that have consequences. As a 15 year old in America, how many complex moral/ethical choices do you really get?
So, to lump in all games into one category b/c of violence or sex or whatever is ridiculous.
[+] [-] bdunbar|14 years ago|reply
(Note I have raised children who now range in age from 30 to 11, so I have dealt with things like this for a few years)
I am cautiously in favor of people selling a video game as you described to whomever they wish. Or not selling, if they have moral qualms about it.
I am not in favor of my 12 year-old son playing a game such as you describe.
You do see the difference between a parent making a reasonable and informed choice, and having it made for them?
hey want you to give him the Ativan
I am not a doctor, this is a question honestly asked. Wiki claims Ativan is not addictive for short-term use.
From my POV, you give the guy the stuff to relax his inhibitions, he spills the beans. Or you don't and some deniable non-Americans torture him for the same information.
Can you explain your thinking on this? If not, that's cool, but I am honestly curious.
video games develop a shitty moral compass.
That they do. But that's why we have parents.
[+] [-] jbondeson|14 years ago|reply
No, shitty parents develop shitty moral compasses. Take your pick about shitty information sources: TV, video games, the internet, trashy magazines/newspapers. If that's where you learn about normalcy, you're going to have a shitty moral compass.
Yes, there are also cases of great parents having shitty kids, parenting is a complicated and messy business. My point is that if you can actually say one source (e.g. video games) is developing a child's moral compass, that's shitty parenting.
[+] [-] tomp|14 years ago|reply
I find it extremely distasteful that the state thinks it can raise my children better than I can, and that it can decide what bad/good parenting is. That being said, obviously some parents are bad parents (by most standards), and would allow their kids to play very violent games, but a prohibition like this would do nothing to prevent this (bad parents would find innovative ways to raise their children in a bad way).
To give a similar example: from a very early age, I was taught how to properly consume alcohol by my parents (through moderation), not by the state (through prohibition). And I find such laws, e.g. in the US where kids are not allowed even to drink alcohol, ridiculous.
[+] [-] jswinghammer|14 years ago|reply
Games in particular would be easy for younger kids to get if they knew an older kid who could buy them. When I was 18 I would have bought anyone a game because I like games and don't seem them as harmful. Maybe that isn't the best thing to do (I wouldn't do it now probably) but I definitely would have done it at that age.
[+] [-] ja2ke|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brianleb|14 years ago|reply
I think that we could be doing everyone a favor if there was more education in ethics starting at a younger age. I don't necessary mean "philosophy" classes, discussing teleology and things like that, because I don't think that would have any effect and students would space out like they do in any other class. But I would want an education that directly addresses ethics: posit a situation to your students (preferably one that they can be familiar with at their age, at least to begin with), and then open a discussion. Young students are not very enthusiastic about class discussions, but I think by putting them in a situation like this, someone will say something because they disagree, and that will get the ball rolling.
I feel like adults making unethical decisions do so because they don't truly understand personhood, because they've never had an education in it. Because they don't understand why a captive has right not to be drugged, even if it could mean that they don't get tortured (or at least, why you as a doctor have the right and/or duty not to drug them).
I don't know that I agree that videogames mess up children's moral compasses and I don't think that restricting them would do any good (as an example, take the War on Drugs). But I think that a mandatory discussions in ethics every couple of years (as the children grow up and face new sets of problems) could do a world of good.
[+] [-] Goronmon|14 years ago|reply
That doesn't seem to be the point of your anecdote at all. You just magically created a correlation between the anecdote you started with and your suggestion that "video game violence develop a shitty moral compass".
[+] [-] jarin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ThomPete|14 years ago|reply
Your argument pales in comparison to what the state teaches.
Just to give you one example.
It's ok to mold truth into whatever your political needs are. I.e. how the western countries basically hand picked data to claim that Saddam had WMD
Games aren't isolated silos anymore. They are social spaces where the same issues we deal with in our every day life unfolds. To claim that the game mechanics or the game theme is the moral compass is simply missing the point.
[+] [-] Dove|14 years ago|reply
You know, I think it depends on the message, not the medium. Books as a whole are an unreliable source of training, but there are some that we take seriously. I think great literature is better training than experience, as it reflects great insight.
You could say the same thing about movies, to a lesser degree. Some are 007, and some are Shawshank Redemption. I've heard of college level ethics courses being taught by watching and discussing heavy movies, and I don't think that's inappropriate.
Gaming as a genre is pretty young; it's only just beginning to cross the threshold of serious art. I think it has the potential to be serious literature as well; the single player mode of Starcraft 2, for example, struck me as though it was attempting to actually grapple with serious issues related to warfare -- and unique to games, it did so by asking the player to make serious choices. I won't say it crossed the threshold of great literature, but I will say it was heading that way.
[+] [-] zcid|14 years ago|reply
Like in your Ativan example. Those who chose to dope the subject didn't actually think about their action, but instead made a decision based on emotional response. Part of the purpose of the exercise was to teach them to consider the implications of their actions and then make a proper decision that could be defended at a later point in time.
If we spent more time teaching children subjects like philosophy they would be better prepared to consider their actions and the effects of media and peers would be greatly diminished. I think in the long run our society would be better served by this path than by a attempted (and most likely failed) removal of negative media.
[+] [-] ww520|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdizdar|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] woodall|14 years ago|reply
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yU9toPHU2U0
[+] [-] mahyarm|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fecklessyouth|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scythe|14 years ago|reply
If it is normal to sedentarily stare at a pixellated screen, it does not matter what is on the screen; you may appeal to whichever emotions you choose. Conversely, I would not particularly want to see my child grow up without a healthy respect for other people's freedom, and this seems to represent a greater danger when they are going to join the ranks of the voting public. Is it not equally void that a child should be forced to grow up under the spectre of some cult such as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints or similar nonsense? Violent video games and pornography pale in comparison.
>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."
From the article:
>Playing violent video games has been found to account for a 13% to 22% increase in adolescents' violent behavior; by comparison, smoking tobacco accounts for 14% of the increase in lung cancer.
This is one of the most misleading and intellectually dishonest statements I have ever had the misfortune of reading. It is true that an average tobacco smoker has approximately a 14% lifetime chance of developing lung cancer (it is closer to 17% for males and 12% for females), but this is absolutely not equivalent to a 14% increase in the chance of developing lung cancer. Rather, a nonsmoker has approximately a 1.5% chance of developing lung cancer: a smoker has nine times as large a chance to develop lung cancer as a nonsmoker. This is not a 14% "increase" in the same sense of a "13-22% increase in adolescents' violent behavior". It is an 800% increase! To assert that these risk factors are in any way similar is completely absurd and raises serious questions about your motivations.
>condom nonuse and sexually acquired human immunodeficiency virus infection
In reality, the chance of HIV transmission in the case of unprotected vaginal sex is 1 in 1000. Considering the severity of the disease, this is absolutely not an acceptable risk, but it is kind of laughable to see this phrase so wildly bandied about.
>[rambling story about the CIA]
>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.
I fail to see how your argument supports your conclusions. Rather, it seems to show that a lack of education is what leads to poor moral decisions, not exposure to violent video games. The people in your example were not stratified on the grounds of having played Grand Theft Auto, they were stratified on the grounds of having some knowledge of ethics and morality, the latter having basically nothing to do with Grand Theft Auto.
Let me tell you a story. It is an ancient story, and it is highly relevant.
In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6. "What are you doing?" asked Minsky. "I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-tac-toe," Sussman replied. "Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky. "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play," Sussman said. Minsky then shut his eyes. "Why do you close your eyes?" Sussman asked his teacher. "So that the room will be empty."
At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
If you want a society of people that understands values, you have to teach values. You cannot hope for them to arise on their own by simply depriving them of whatever you consider a corrupting influence.
>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.
Hopefully they won't make the same mistakes as you.
[+] [-] cheez|14 years ago|reply
These two aren't even remotely related. Legislating morality is great for legislators, not for the citizens.
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] Ihavenoname|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AltIvan|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asolove|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] portman|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jacoblyles|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] andylei|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enjo|14 years ago|reply
http://www.lawsofplay.com/articles/justice-scalias-opinion-o...
[+] [-] jakewalker|14 years ago|reply
"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 [PDF]
[+] [-] mrcharles|14 years ago|reply
This is good for everyone, now games can avoid becoming comic books all over again.
[+] [-] Shenglong|14 years ago|reply
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|14 years ago|reply
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..."
[+] [-] billybob|14 years ago|reply
I would still say that in that case, freedom of expression must be balanced against the community's moral standards. That may be vague, but it's real; I think there would be a pretty broad consensus among parents of all religious stripes, for example, that they don't want such billboards up where their children would see them.
[+] [-] andylei|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jarin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fecklessyouth|14 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] ltamake|14 years ago|reply
Just my opinion.
[+] [-] int3rnaut|14 years ago|reply
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|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kenjackson|14 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] peapicker|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jra101|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wccrawford|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CamperBob|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] almightygod|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jerf|14 years ago|reply
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.