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[Vucar Fikodastesh]

Or will it mean I don't have to whip out my ID card to buy Halo any more?

In the here and now, it means the ESRB ect... have an uphill battle in trying to further restrict people's access to video games.

This decision doesn't have anything to do with whether or not stores can choose not to sell certain video games to minors. Rather, it is striking down, once and for all, the idea that the state or federal government can tell stores that they have too.

The stores have a first amendment right to sell video games to minors, but minors do not have a first amendment right purchase video games.

To be honest, I really couldn't have seen this ruling going any other way. Lower level courts have struck down identical legislation attempts numerous times. California was just the only state willing to waste enough taxpayer money to appeal all the way to the Supreme Court.

Since when is "Instead, the State wishes to create a wholly new category of content-based regulation that is permissible only for speech directed at children. That is unprecedented and mistaken. This country has no tradition of specially restricting children’s access to depictions of violence," a true statement?

As Nenjin pointed out, there is no law against movie theaters showing R rated movies to minors. Like the old comics code and the ESRB, movie ratings and enforcement is entirely the decision of the producers, theaters and stores.

[G-Flex]

Video Games qualify for the first amendment!

How is this, in itself, news? This is baffling to me.

[Aqizzar]

Alright alright, I got it now.  This is the kind of thing that makes me leery about going to law school, it's easy to forget what's actually law and what's just a universal policy nobody ever asks about.  I should have known better on that one, I definitely have known about the industry-standard-vs-law thing, it just slipped my mind.

It is kind of worrying, or maybe insulting I don't know, that Scalia's fundamental grounding for the protection of violent videogames stems from comparison to a case regarding the sale of depictions of animal cruelty.  What a wonderful crowd to be in, the socially-maligned-but-legally-protected speech convention.

[RedKing]

“Reading Dante is unquestionably more cultured and intellectually edifying than playing Mortal Kombat,” Justice Scalia points out in his majority opinion. “But these cultural and intellectual differences are not constitutional ones.”

Scalia is going to cry tears of blood if he ever finds out what vidjagames did to The Inferno.

I think making your opponent cry tears of blood might have been a hidden power in Dante's Inferno.

And as to the age restriction thing, it has to be some seriously gratuitous violence to get an R rating these days. Versus showing a couple of tits or saying 'fuck' 3 or 4 times.

[nenjin]

This decision doesn't have anything to do with whether or not stores can choose not to sell certain video games to minors. Rather, it is striking down, once and for all, the idea that the state or federal government can tell stores that they have too.

Without the power of the state and federal government to legislate on their behalf (and on behalf of teh childrenz), all the decency police have left now is compliance of retailers and the outrage of stupid parents. This ruling has answered the question of whether or not we really have to worry about state governments or the Fed holding hearings on the amount of blood spilled in something we want to play. It's not just generally accepted truth, it's now precedent. It's now firmly in the arena of the market and public opinion where it belongs. I think that's worth being happy about. I'm usually pro-regulation for most industries, but vidya games are one place where I think parents have all the power they need to protect their kids and passive entertainment is hard to qualify as a threat. The government doesn't need to standing watch on this one. Ever since Tipper got involved in this debate back in the 90s, the specter of government involvement has been there.

To be honest, I really couldn't have seen this ruling going any other way.

In the back of my mind I was worried that the conservatives were all going to hold the opposite of the portion Aqizzar quoted, that children do need special protection from violence and that retailers should, in effect, be surrogate parents when kids want to buy video games, by being the ones that have to tell them no. The last spate of SC rulings I read had a conservative flavor to them, and I was worried it was going to prevail in this decision. But it didn't.

It is kind of worrying, or maybe insulting I don't know, that Scalia's fundamental grounding for the protection of violent videogames stems from comparison to a case regarding the sale of depictions of animal cruelty.

I didn't read it that way, so much as the SC necessarily has to use to the basest, worst examples to make the point beyond debate. Then again, it's Scalia so I'm not saying you're wrong.

As an aside, I'm sure the Nether Realm guys are THRILLED their IP is still considered noteworthy by SCOTUS for its violence

[Aqizzar]

In the back of my mind I was worried that the conservatives were all going to hold the opposite of the portion Aqizzar quoted, that children do need special protection from violence and that retailers should, in effect, be surrogate parents when kids want to buy video games, by being the ones that have to tell them no. The last spate of SC rulings I read had a conservative flavor to them, and I was worried it was going to prevail in this decision. But it didn't.

The footnotes have an interesting interpretation of the idea, that The State can and does have grounding to legally empower parental judgment, just not proactively without a compelling interest to the legislature.  A parent can ask a particular retailer not to sell a product to their particular child, and that retailer would be within their legal right to honor that request, because it would not constitute discrimination.  But in order to forbid the sale of a product entirely, especially a purely-idea based product, the state must demonstrate a interest in doing so (at least, by the time it reaches the Supreme Court - technically unconstitutional laws and practices can stand for as long as they're not challenged).

I did find Scalia's grounding in that "compelling interest" very interesting, because he acknowledges that "corrupting morality" is indeed a substantive legislative interest, just that in America, it has a particular definition.  It is entirely permissible for the state to restrict minors' (and only minors') access to "obscenity" - specifically sexual material and foul language - because of an unscientific societal belief in the power of obscenity to corrupt a minor's mind.  (Indeed, a unscientific ground that could never be disproved, because it would illegal to rigorously test to the satisfaction of the court.)  And as he pointed out, essentially every legislative attempt to restrict the sale of media materials other than obscenity draws on the obscenity exception as grounding in a state interest to protect the morals of children.  Scalia wants that to be a difference of kind and not degree, even as the Supreme Court acknowledges that there is not and can never be such thing as an objective definition of obscenity, but for as long as that universally accepted facet of American legislative philosophy exists, the same argument will never stop coming up.

That said, it is as he also remembers an exception that stubbornly refuses to extend outside of obscenity, and I for one see no reason that will ever change.  I just thought it was amusing to hear his extemporize on.  I dunno, it reminds me of the old saw that Americans are terrified of sex and totally cool with violence, while Europe is the opposite, and it occurred to me that it's an essentially ungrounded moral standard enforced in law that, precisely because it's enshrined in law, could never be challenged.  Interesting to me that it turns out to be sex of all things.

[RedKing]

That's America for you. Procreating is filth, but blowing someone's head off is just good clean fun.

[Bdthemag]

Today First Amendment protection, tommorow the world!

[ein]

My glee is tempered only be remembering there are those "Auschwitz Tycoon" games out there. Omelettes and eggs, I guess.

Funnily enough, I actually asked about this a while ago.  Luckily for all of us, shock games have universally poor quality and production values, so nobody wants to play them anyway.

I Have Candy Get In The Van.

[nenjin]

Yes, thank you for reminding us of that :| Someone tell Scalia he needs to spend more time on the 'net.

[RedKing]

Or just 4chan. Actually, I somehow get the feeling that Scalia would find 4chan immensely amusing. He's just that big of a dick.

As for shock games, that Lee Harvey Oswald simulator was morbidly compelling. Although it's interesting that its' supposed point was to show that the lone shooter theory was plausible, when in fact it seems to do the opposite. It's a f**king bitch and a half to get anywhere close to "perfect" in that game.

[Servant Corps]

Wait, wait, wait....Scalia and Thomas were on opposite sides??

So did Breyer, which leads to me asking how often do "cross-overing" occur in Supreme Court cases. We do have 4 conservative, 4 liberal, and one swing-voter (who leans conservative), but how often do one side (either liberal or conservative) cross-over to vote on the other side?

[G-Flex]

Or just 4chan. Actually, I somehow get the feeling that Scalia would find 4chan immensely amusing. He's just that big of a dick.

As for shock games, that Lee Harvey Oswald simulator was morbidly compelling. Although it's interesting that its' supposed point was to show that the lone shooter theory was plausible, when in fact it seems to do the opposite. It's a f**king bitch and a half to get anywhere close to "perfect" in that game.

To be fair, that's not a good argument against it either. I mean, if I throw a rock down a hill and every single minor perturbation of the environment that it causes is recorded, then a rock-throwing simulator is unlikely to ever get those exact same results due to sheer improbability of it. It doesn't make the original event implausible.

But yeah, I remember JFK: Reloaded from when I was in... seventh grade? It was actually kind of fun to cause ridiculous vehicular behavior by, say, knocking off a bus driver.

[Neonivek]

As far as I know (I do not know the laws of all fifty states, but I know it's true in Ohio and every state Ohio borders) no such law exists. It is a purely voluntary policy on the part of the theatres

There have been cases where people have been charged, but they are charged under a much more broad term then just "Showing movies to minors" such as "Luring" or traumatizing children.

Though cases like that arn't too common since for the most part you want to please the customer and most people would find it silly. Most of the time these cases happen because of a misunderstanding and because of a horrible miscarriage of justice.

[Sensei]

I'm in Washington state, and I coulda sworn there was some sort of legal provision against selling games rated by ESRB as 'M' to minors. At any rate if there wasn't, I'd be surprised that retailers picked the rule up in as much of a hurry as they did.