WI: Video Games (or at least shooters) Banned in US or Beyond

What would it take to override the corporate interests, fan outcry, and in some countries free speech guarantees and, in the words of some, "ban this sick filth?"

Not a scenario I'd like to see happen OTL, mind you.
 
You'd have to ban them early enough before you get enough corporate interests or fan outcry to really matter. And then when it does happen, we're all left wondering why equivalents of Death Race or Custers Revenge are bad enough to ban an entire medium for when you can see far worse things in movies or on TV (or best of all, on the evening news). Well, maybe not in the case of Custer's Revenge, but pornography is legal after all. So I'd guess you'd need a far, far more moralistic and conservative climate in the 1970s and 1980s, which probably also means that porn is effectively banned and so are violent slasher films and such.

Video games would just come back in the form of text adventures or even visual novels which would be much easier to protect using the same free speech rules that apply to novels.
 
I was thinking more of a modern ban: a rash of highly-publicized mass shootings whose perpetrators said they were in league with game companies to give them publicity or were inspired by ultraviolent games, would cause sensationalized outcry from the people and media, leading to the ban. An earlier POD could be a greater number of Congressmembers being against gaming.
 
I was thinking more of a modern ban: a rash of highly-publicized mass shootings whose perpetrators said they were in league with game companies to give them publicity or were inspired by ultraviolent games, would cause sensationalized outcry from the people and media, leading to the ban.

The difficulty with this scenario is, the paranoid-libertarian types who would buy into that sort of conspiracy are also going to be the kind of people who distrust government the most, and hence would be unlikely to demand that the government launch a crackdown on video games. If anything, they would think that the confessions of the mass-shooters have been staged by the government itself, in order to scapegoat the gaming industry and the supposed rugged individualism it represents.

I think a MADD or PMRC-type parents group with a social-welfare ideology would be the people most likely to react against video games, but they're generally not the kind to jump onto conspiracy bandwagons.
 
Another thing...

Why would the shooters claim to be in league with the game manufacturers? My impression of those guys is that they want to be remembered as fearless hell-raisers who took a stand against a stifling, conformist society, not the hapless dupes of big business.

The closest you could probably get is some mass-shooter gets sent to prison, has a jailhouse conversion to Christianity, and then tries to "redeem" himself by claiming that he was manipulated into his killings by the video game industry(similar to David Berkowitz's later claims of satanic inspiration). But by that point, he's gonna have been out of the media spotlight for a while, and no one's gonna be paying much attention to what he says, just dismiss him as a crank.

I'll admit that your scenario is an intriguing one, might make a good movie.
 
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