Thomas Denby chats with Tom Bissell, author of Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, about the recent Supreme Court decision striking down California's ban against selling violent video games to children. Bissell:
When “Transformers 3” came out we didn’t call it the death of film. The fact that you can throw poop around in Duke Nukem is a corollary of more dark and twisted games being protected. It’s a concession you have to make in a free society—if you want a legitimately fascinating, dark, violent game to be available, you have to let Duke Nukem throw his feces around.
From Lyle Denniston's analysis:
The Scalia opinion drew an exceedingly bright constitutional line between obscenity and violence, with obscenity outside the First Amendment and violent expression within it. The majority commented that the Court has never taken violent expression out from under the First Amendment’s protection. The new ruling, in fact, was said to be a direct outgrowth of the Court’s decision the prior Term, striking down a federal law that banned video or other depictions of animal cruelty, on the premise that violent displays were a form of protected free speech. That was the ruling in U.S. v. Stevens.
The Dish 