Extremely Lame

Election time? Check. Legislators a bit down in the polls? Check. It’s time for another installment of “Let’s blame pop culture for all of society’s ills and cash some quick percentage points!”

Today’s installment is courtesy of the state of Massachusetts. No, not the Dropkick Murphys song, the actual state. We have HB 1423 in the Massachusetts state legislature, wanting to ban the sale of mature rated video games to minors. Okay, so they can go see a splatterfest such as Saw because you only have to be seventeen to see that, but in order to see pixelated aliens getting shot up, you have to be the same age you would be to join the military, vote, and own a firearm.

The beauty of this bill is that it’s using the same language to describe violent video games that they use to describe pornography. No, seriously. The language for the bill to discern which video games are harmful to minors is pretty much lifted directly from Justice Warren Burger’s definition of obscenity from Miller v. California in 1973. Here’s the language in HB 1423 (pdf) (emphasis mine):

“Harmful to minors”, matter is harmful to minors if it is obscene
or, if taken as a whole, it (1) describes or represents nudity, sexual
conduct or sexual excitement, so as to appeal predominantly to the
prurient interest of minors; (2) depicts violence in a manner patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community, so as to appeal predominantly to the morbid interest in violence of minors; (3) is patently contrary to prevailing standards of adults in the county where the offense was committed as to suitable material for such minors; and (4) lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value for minors.”

Now here’s the language used by Justice Burger in 1973 (emphasis mine):

“The basic guidelines for the trier of fact must be: (a) whether “the average person, applying contemporary community standards” would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest, Roth, supra, at 489, (b) whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by the applicable state law, and (c) whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.“

Well, how do you like that? I especially like that first part. According to this, pixellated boobage is considered identical to the most vile of scheiße porn. And to think that only a couple decades ago, one could see on occasion frontal nudity in movies rated PG. Hell, Barbarella is PG, and it has Jane Fonda naked during the opening credits!

The entire “prevailing standards of the adult community” nonsense really gets one nervous since those standards are localized to the county. When you think how crazy some people can be in localized rural areas, it can get pretty frightening. It is very easy to imagine a situation where a game rated T for Teens could be seen as “patently offensive to the prevailing standards of the adult community.” The Final Fantasy games reward you with experience points and money by being violent towards and killing creatures that look different than you. You are given the option of retreating, but you don’t get any gold or experience. Doesn’t this teach our children to beat up kids who look funny and take their lunch money?