Listening to the latest Save vs Frostbite podcast today and they talked about the recent Supreme Court decision on video games. I had avoided talking about this because of the recent LOTFP cluster-fuck, but the insane caricature descriptions of who could possibly be opposed to the ruling was just too much for me to stomach.
Video games present a unique free speech problem because their content is not as easily accessible to someone who is making a purchase decision as other media. For a lot of games, a parent would have to invest hundreds of hours of play to experience the entire game, compared to say two hours for a movie or a few minutes flipping through a book looking for anything really disturbing. I don't think it is reasonable to expect the parent to be able to personally review the content, considering the extended form it takes.
Even if they did review the whole game first, if they didn't like the content, they could never return it because of open-box policies. You can't wait for the game to come out in a quasi-free format like you can for a movie either. You can't flip through it like a book. For many parents, they are not playing any video games themselves and thus the ratings are less meaningful to them.
So either you are on the hook for a $50 purchase with very little chance to review it, or you don't buy it. Those are your choices. So I think the ability to adequately monitor it is just a lot harder for video games than for other media.
So for that reason, I think there is a reasonable argument for restraining certain purchases to minors. I don't think you have to be Sheila Broflovski to see that there is a fair case there. There is an established industry rating system that does a decent job, a regulation that simply highlights a few of those ratings as being unacceptable to sell to minors, I think there is a case to be made that is a fair law to have. The parent should have to positively choose to bring it into the home, rather than just let the minor buy whatever they want from the store.
Now maybe the California legislature did a piss-poor job of writing the law, I have heard that in several places, and maybe the people pushing the law are misguided if they argue that video game violence causes real violence (I don't think it does). But I think the idea of having a law like what is being discussed is pretty fair.
And I want to note that I found the commentary by the Save vs Frostbite guys that was extremely derogatory towards stay-at-home mothers to be a bit crass. "Go get a job and contribute to society?" Spoken like someone truly ignorant of real life choices. Get a clue.
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Just to be clear, I don't think that there is a case for restricting sales to adults for any reason. I don't think there is a speech issue with video games at all. Make whatever you want. It should be treated like movies in this respect. I am just talking about sales to minors.