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	Re: Court Ruling!
	Posted By: Mazilurik	Date: 4/27/02 7:30 a.m.
	In Response To: Court Ruling! (Tynskel) I am given to wonder how someone with such mediocre reasoning capability could hold a job, much less become a judge in a U.S. district court. Not only is this little diatribe of his based strictly on his limited experience of video games (Doom, Mortal Kombat, et al), but it is so obviously contrary to the First Amendment that he really ought to be disbarred for ignorance of the most basic legal principles. As another example of this ignorance, he adds that "Even if [the IDSA] could establish that ... video games are a form of expression, their ... argument still fails...", which is not necessarily true; if the IDSA can convince another court that this part of the judge's ruling is untrue, then that casts a shadow of doubt over the whole thing, preventing a higher court from using any of the information in it against the IDSA without first independently verifying it. The judge then goes on to say that the story of a game is "totally divorced from [the] purpose of expressing ideas, feelings, or information unrelated to the game itself". Either I'm misinterpreting the quote somehow, or he's saying that nothing can be considered protected speech unless it contains information completely unrelated to itself. By extension this means that paintings cannot be protected speech, since all of their elements are part of a whole, and that Ulysses isn't protected speech because it doesn't mention the nesting habits of double-crested cormorants. I don't think I really need to explain what's wrong with that mode of thinking. One could also interpret this quote as saying that the story is simply a way of advancing the game, which is really true of any medium. The story for a movie, regardless of quality, serves to advance the movie, and the story of a book serves to advance the book. Of course, to say that this is the only task of a story, that it isn't there to cause an emotional response or to make the player think about something, is patently false. Take, for instance, the adventure game The Last Express: not only does it have an absolutely brilliant story, but it also has incredibly strong characterization. The player can actually develop an emotional connection to the characters, which makes the events of the story even more powerful. What is interesting, though, is that the game could not be translated into another medium without much of the plot and characterization being lost in the process. It may be good to also note that every single one of the games that the judge cites in his argument are gory action games where the player's only purpose is to kill things. He doesn't mention any Final Fantasy games, he doesn't mention The Last Express, he merely dismisses an entire artistic medium based on its most vapid members. To again translate this into a more widely accepted medium, this would be akin to judging Citizen Kane or 2001: A Space Odyssey based on Independence Day. And now we come to the single greatest reason why video games should be considered protected speech: Marathon. I don't think any further explanation is necessary.

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Replies:

	Court Ruling!	Tynskel	4/26/02 10:01 p.m.
	Re: Court Ruling!	Sisgmund	4/27/02 4:11 a.m.
	Re: Court Ruling!	Inverted Sock Puppet	4/27/02 5:28 a.m.
	Re: Court Ruling!	Sisgmund	4/27/02 6:58 a.m.
	Re: Court Ruling!	archon	4/27/02 5:59 p.m.
	Re: Court Ruling!	Sisgmund	4/27/02 9:18 p.m.
	Re: Court Ruling!	Tru7h	4/27/02 6:06 a.m.
	Re: Court Ruling!	Sisgmund	4/27/02 7:01 a.m.
	Re: Court Ruling!	Mazilurik	4/27/02 7:30 a.m.
	Re: Court Ruling!	Sisgmund	4/27/02 8:24 a.m.
	Re: Court Ruling!	Rincewind MoG	4/27/02 11:57 a.m.
	Re: Court Ruling!	Alfred Mordeir	4/28/02 8:09 a.m.
	Wow! Thanks for posting *N/T* *NM*	Dan Johnson	4/30/02 10:41 p.m.

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