Gamertell

The New York Times reported Tuesday (August 21, 2007) that attempts by state legislatures to restrict sales of certain videogames uniformly fail:

Citing the Constitution’s protection of free speech, federal judges have rejected attempts to regulate video games in eight cities and states since 2001. The judge in a ninth place, Oklahoma, has temporarily blocked a law pending a final decision. No such laws have been upheld.

It’s worth noting the following quote from 2001 by Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard A. Posner, author of the majority opinion for the first major case against videogames:

Violence has always been and remains a central interest of humankind and a recurrent, even obsessive theme of culture both high and low,” he wrote. “It engages the interest of children from an early age, as anyone familiar with the classic fairy tales collected by Grimm, Andersen, and Perrault are aware. To shield children right up to the age of 18 from exposure to violent descriptions and images would not only be quixotic, but deforming; it would leave them unequipped to cope with the world as we know it.

And here I’ve been picking on baby boomers all week long. Apologies to the elderly! Rarely will you find such an eloquent exposition on the ludicrous ideology that suggests an absence of violence in media will somehow translate into an absence of violence in all mankind.

Posner’s final point that shielding children from violence can in some ways be harmful, must be lost on the Jack Thompsons of the world (roundly excluded from my earlier apology) who continue to rail against storytellers for providing safe venues in which they can engage the oldest of human fallibilities—the urge to deconstruct. 

We’ve all had this urge. It’s inherent to the human condition, and whether you’ve knocked over your little brother’s sand castle on the beach or punched that bully who’d been giving you such a hard time, you’re not immune to it. As long as you can find a safe and proactive way of dealing with violence (like a book or a video game) you shouldn’t be made to feel guilty for it. It’s only natural, after all.

Read [New York Times] via [Slashdot]