A Blurry (but at least you can kinda see) Lawrence Walters
A nice overview of the problems, and possible future problems in censorship – mainly America, but also other locations are covered for the past year.
Notes
Jack Thompson has tried to hold games legally responsible and ban them.
The difficulty for parents and lawmakers to not accept the mature themes of newer games – they think it should be gold coins 🙂
The industry has not coordinated in any PR effort.
First amendment protection to videogames has been upheld. There is a new enemy – political correctness – racial groups, feminist groups. This trend can be just as damaging as law censorship.
Opponents of videogames haven’t stopped trying to pass laws. It might only be a matter of time
history of this – early videogames were only marketed to children. Nintendo dominated and imposed “Game Content Guidelines”. Nintendo did this in America generally, Japan didn’t have a similar thing – the games there were marketed to adults too.
The problem is extending the sex to violence when it comes to Harmful to Minors – only really applies to hardcore pornography. Violence is ingrained in the media compared to sex, so it doesn’t work and it is tossed out by the courts.
Hard to provide evidence for a negative link – harder to prove that something doesn’t happen.