Violent video games banned or restricted in USA

What would the gaming landscape be like today if moral crusaders like Jack Thompson or LT Col Dave Grossman got the government to ban or at least got the government to pass a restriction that would discourage the big publishers from making violent games.

Imagine a world where Mass Effect is a Sims like dating or social sim or a text based adventure.

Would casual games be more popular? Would dating sims, sports games, and vacation games make up a larger share of the video game market? Imagine a world where gaming is considered more of a girl thing.
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What would you think of a world where female gamers with dating or social sims make as big of a share of the gaming population as Halo and CoD dudebro gamers? Is such a timeline possible?

Would we see games of AAA quality that are like Disney or Pixar movies?
 
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Define violent. Are we talking guns, gore, and genocide of faceless mooks only, or is even abstracted violence (Say, strategy games) also banned? When does this restriction come into place as well; the era is important.
 
Define violent. Are we talking guns, gore, and genocide of faceless mooks only, or is even abstracted violence (Say, strategy games) also banned? When does this restriction come into place as well; the era is important.

Would Brown vs EMA make any difference?

The California law describes a “violent” game as a game where a player inflicts any harm on a character that is human or has human like characteristics.
 
I think OP is referring to games such as GTA, COD, God of War, etc.

Well I think such a POD might happen by around the 90s, specifically the late 90s when violent video games for the PlayStation were becoming popular in OTL. Maybe if Sony fails really hard and loses the Console War, allowing Nintendo and Sega to become more successful and create more consoles? A pattern of failures amongst violent video games in terms of sales might cause people to think that it's directly to do with the violence in video games?
 
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Depending on the interpretation of that law, you could see the big publishers opening ''sisters company'' in Canada and Mexico to make their ''violent'' games and these ''foreign company'' then ship them to be sold in the USA.
 

Geon

Donor
Also, I suspect the game manufacturers and gaming fans would start a legal war in every state legislature that would rage from federal district courts up to and including the Supreme Court.

There would be demonstrations (and crazier things have happened) of gaming fans in every major city and candidates for state and U.S. congress might find themselves either defending the first amendment rights of the gamers or defending the right to restrict some content depending on the state's political persuasion.

On a religious angle you would probably see many conservative evangelical churches praising the restrictions - and at the same time bemoaning a loss of their younger members who would be leaving over such legalism.
 
Had something like this happen in my Who's The Doctor TL where a death was attributed to video game playing, albeit inaccurately. As a result, the TL's equivalent of the ERSB is much, much stricter with the Street Fighter II stand in being made a Teen title, despite heavy editing of graphics, story and characters.
 
Would Brown vs EMA make any difference?

The California law describes a “violent” game as a game where a player inflicts any harm on a character that is human or has human like characteristics.

Yah... in that case it's too late. By 2011 the gaming culture is too deeply ingrained for the community to just yield to those laws, and the internet is on their side. I expect to see a massive uptick in the use of "illegal" servers, spoofed accounts/addresses, ect., and gaming to shift from consoles to computers much faster than it already is. You need a change in the late 80's, at the latest.
 
Maybe have the D&D controversies of 1980s be larger and spread to video games and other similar media with major political figures such as Reagans speaking out for banning or restricting video games
 

Philip

Donor
Maybe have the D&D controversies of 1980s be larger and spread to video games and other similar media with major political figures such as Reagans speaking out for banning or restricting video games

Tying it to Tipper Gore's Parents Music Resource Center is likely to have more success.
 
The big issue would the First Amendment. Remember the moral panic in the late 1940s through the mid 1950s over comic books? Because of the First Amendment, the US federal government could not officially censor or outlaw comic books. (Read the book The Ten Cent Plague for more details.) Where would the authority come from in outlawing video games or having a censorship bureau to monitor & enforce regulations?

There's also what happened with Prohibition and the War on Drugs - violent video games would be driven underground; bought, sold and/or distributed in back alleys; and require both money & resources on the part of police, courts, prisons, etc. to crack down on. That in turn could lead to backlash from taxpayers as well as those in favor of personal freedoms bringing up the age old "you can't legislate morality" adage.
 

no one

Banned
how would foreign countries react to this? I know Germany and especially Australia would implement their own censorship laws
 
how would foreign countries react to this? I know Germany and especially Australia would implement their own censorship laws
Australia already had some of the most arcane and heavy handed laws anyway, so probably a lot less influence - in fact it’s more lucky to be taken as the example of how to do it.

If it did then it causes to things. It shifts major development dollar focus to outside of the US, of which many studios already had multi nation offices anyway.

It also creates a huge incentive for everyone to just pirate games content, as it’s seen as being totally acceptable to most people - all but the most are core culture warriors.

When digital distribution comes along it becomes impossible to enforce in any way effectively.

It’s possible it’ll end up the same way region locking on DVDs went.
 
Australia already had some of the most arcane and heavy handed laws anyway, so probably a lot less influence - in fact it’s more lucky to be taken as the example of how to do it.

I'd say the same is possible with Canada, where the house-brand liberalism tends to have a somewhat censorious, pseudo-feminist streak, especially when it comes to "Think About The Children!!" issues. As far as I know, it's the only country in the world where the courts have incorporated the MacKinnon/Dworkin view into the official definition of obscenity, for example.

So, let's say it's the early-90s, when "therapeutic feminism" still held more sway than it does now over establismment thinking. If there's a big moral panic over video games in the USA, that's gonna filter up across the border(like Satanic Ritual Abuse did), and if it manages to stay aloof from fundamentalist Xtian influence(which would turn off a lot of Canadians, especially liberals), and focus on things like gun-violence and the degradation of women in games, a significiant section of Canadians could be enthralled to the same panic as Americans are. Then, if the makers get kicked out of the USA and try to relocate to Canada, you get a redoubled panic.

It might not be something that the entire House Of Commons would legislate against, though there would probably some push to make that happen, and local actors and media types could raise a lot of fuss as well. Though I suppose that, in the absence of actual laws, there's be nothing really to stop the relocation.

And in case anyone thinks I'm exaggerating the priggish nature of early 90s Canadian liberalism...

After one term in office, Rowlands lost to Barbara Hall in 1994.


Her re-election chances suffered a blow early in her mandate when emerging Toronto pop group Barenaked Ladies was barred from performing at Toronto’s annual New Year’s Eve show in front of City Hall on the grounds that the group’s name objectified women.

Granted, Rowlands ended up getting pretty widely mocked for that, but the fact that her office could even think that that would be accepted as a legitimate viewpoint kind of shows you what the overall political culture was like. (Sorta like we can draw conclusions about early-80s US conservativism from James Watt trying to bar the Beach Boys from the White House, even though Reagan eventually overruled him.)

link

EDIT: Sorry, whe I wrote this response, I thought Col. Grubb was responding to the idea of game companies moving to other countries(including Canada), which was mentioned in Post 6 of this thread. The bulk of this post can be read as a reply to Post 6.
 
So, going by that post sounds like mainstream US liberalism(including certain #nevertrumper moderates/conservatives) in the late 2010s resembles Canadian liberalism significantly more than it did even a generation or so ago.
 
So, going by that post sounds like mainstream US liberalism(including certain #nevertrumper moderates/conservatives) in the late 2010s resembles Canadian liberalism significantly more than it did even a generation or so ago.

Without getting into any specific events, yes, there is a strong cultural overlap between Canadian and American liberalism on certain issues in the general vicinity of feminism.

I should say, though, that the actual effect of all this do-goodism fell somewhat short of what its proponents would have hoped for. There is very little newsstand porn from the US, for example, that isn't available in Canada, and as far as I can tell, R V. Butler did almost nothing to thwart even the raunchiest stuff from getting in, though customs-agents would often black out offending pictures or cartoons. (And of course, the internet has now made a lot of this issue moot.)

I don't think there were as many SRA prosecutions in Canada as in the US, though there were a few notable ones, of equally dubious veracity(maybe having appointed rather than elected judicial officials made the difference there?)
 

kholieken

Banned
I think the result is less blood (or other colored fluid, perhaps enemy glowing when injured?) and less human-like aliens as enemy (more insects and animal part, horn and wings, and robotic enemy).

Spreading games to girls is really difficult, limitations is not Violence's, but societal dislike for girls to participate in non-social and non-productive hobbies/activity.
 
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