Al gore games are the new normal

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Scalia, chiming in, simply seemed to be a good sport. Here is an excerpt, as the Justices quizzed an attorney representing the state of California, which was trying to make the sale of ultra-violent video games to minors illegal:. Morazzini: I believe it's a candidate, Your Honor, but I haven't played the game and been exposed to it sufficiently to judge for myself. Kagan: It's a candidate, meaning, yes, a reasonable jury could find that Mortal Kombat , which is an iconic game, which I am sure half of the clerks who work for us spend considerable amounts of time in their adolescence playing.

Scalia: I don't know what she's talking about. Morazzini: Justice Kagan, by candidate, I meant that the video game industry should look at it, should take a long look at it. But I don't know off the top of my head. I'm willing to state right here in open court that the video game Postal II, yes, would be covered by this act.

I'm willing to guess that games we describe in our brief such as MadWorld would be covered by the act. Note the quip from Scalia and the comfort Justice Kagan, at least, seems to take with her belief that people she knows have played video games. Our Justices don't sound like gamers, though they do sound like people who have crossed paths with them—or crossed paths with people who have crossed paths with them, perhaps.

In the Court's decision Scalia dismisses the state of California's concern that, in his words, "video games video games present special problems because they are 'interactive,' in that the player participates in the violent action on screen and determines its outcome. A person who has played Mortal Kombat and never ripped someone's spine out in real life—nor even kicked someone! Video games aren't so interactive that they inspire copycat behavior, the gamer might argue.

But, in his next line, Scalia contextualizes games' interactivity as follows: "The latter feature is nothing new: Since at least the publication of 'The Adventures of You: Sugarcane Island' in , young readers of choose-your-own adventure stories have been able to make decisions that determine the plot by following instructions about which page to turn to.

As for the argument that video games enable participation in the violent action, that seems to us more a matter of degree than of kind. Remember, Scalia, who downplays gaming's exceptional, unique qualities, is on the side of gaming in this paradigm. Justice Samuel Alito, who sided with the gaming industry against California because of problems he had with California's proposed law is far more skeptical of video games.

He's the one, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, who, despite ruling against California, believes a law against violent video games could be crafted and might need to be. On Scalia's dismissal that the interactivity of games is a special thing, he writes:. To take an example, think of a person who reads the passage in Crime and Punishment in which Raskolnikov kills the old pawn broker with an axe. Compare that reader with a video-game player who creates an avatar that bears his own image; who sees a realistic image of the victim and the scene of the killing in high definition and in three dimensions; who is forced to decide whether or not to kill the victim and decides to do so; who then pretends to grasp an axe, to raise it above the head of the victim, and then to bring it down; who hears the thud of the axe hitting her head and her cry of pain; who sees her split skull and feels the sensation of blood on his face and hands.

For most people, the two experiences will not be the same. Will the players of violent video games disagree with Alito that a murder executed by a gamer in a video game is more vivid than the murder a reader reads about in a book? Will they not see in Alito, who, remember, sided with the gaming industry, a distinction between books and games that feels real?

In his gaming-skeptical opinion, Alito was the one citing motion controls and force feedback as gaming technologies that will further emphasize video games' distinction from other forms of entertainment. He is the one who drops in a link showing how parental controls on a gaming console can be bypassed. I get a lot of my national news from the PBS NewsHour , whose co-anchor, Gwen Ifill, sighed in disgust when, during the program's segment on the Supreme Court decision, she was told about the violent video game content that would remain legal for kids to buy.

Yet neither she nor the program's Supreme Court expert, the National Law Journal's Marcia Coyle, went down the path of suggesting that maybe the Supreme Court's decision was off. Credit that to the NewsHour's approach to opinion-light journalism but also to the fact that neither Ifill nor Coyle betrayed much familiarity with video games. On the other hand, the Daily Show 's Jon Stewart mocked the Court's decision , echoing dissenter Breyer that there was a double-standard in making it legal for a kid to buy a Mortal Kombat that is full of bloody limb-ripping, so long as it doesn't show any nipple the Court allows States ti ban the sale of sexual content to kids.

Stewart does admit to playing video games. I've seen him talk on his show about staying up late playing video games. He gets it, and he's the one who is alarmed—either about under-legislating violent video games or over-legislating sexual content, it's not clear. Everyone likes to play. We also like to make social connections, especially in this golden age of mobility. The dynamic intersection of entertainment and social impact is an action waiting to happen.

While Gore did ask anyone who had ideas on how to turn An Inconvenient Truth into a great game to come forward, his message was far from self-serving. In truth, he was the message. Because, yes, he was the medium. Kudos to Al Gore for putting himself on the line once again. The Games For Change Festival highlighted numerous new and evolving games for social change.

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