Where Politics And Video Games Collide

A bit unnerving but i would not be to worried... afterall, the industry could appeal and bring the issue to higher court if necessary... and as we've seen, the courts tend to side with Game industry on this issue. Frankly, i find that concluding statements to show how little the court understands those studies... it's pretty damn obvious how flawed those studies are and how weak the evidence is to support regulation. Really, saying that the violent games will damage a minors mind is more assumption than common sense... common sense tells us that if violent video games were making people violent we would have A LOT more violence in this country(not a gradual decrease since the early 1990's), and that showing off a dozen people who played video games and did something horrible means NOTHING when compared to the millions of others that go undamaged; especially when you take into account that dozen of people they could name have about a dozen other things wrong with their lives that were more likely the cause of their horrible acts...

Really, its good that the court is up to the job of holding up the laws, but its seems that its full understanding of the evidence is lacking compared to other courts... and their common sense is terribly off if they can't see that the youth violence would be a MUCH bigger problem if games really did have a such damaging effects

@vasudean
I'd call it a victory for the justice system... they did this ruling purely by the book... they did not give a judgment based upon their feeligns but by the evidence presented (or lack there of), and the laws that say that those studies did not show enough evidence...

If this was a case of common sense winning, the victory would have been more one sided and been more of reflection of previous judgments, as those studies would have been reconized as being very erroneous and that the state failed to prove their point... cause really, we've seen those studies and other courts have seen them, and in the end, they all fall flat hard... in fact, if you read the PDF, the final paragragh says that "common sense" says that the law should have passed...

@Uh...
Unlikely... the only way an accurate study could be done on this matter is if it's done over a very long period of time; a study that spans out like 5-10 years or something like that. Problem being ofcourse, The people that want these kinds of studies done are horribly impatiant and don't want to wait more than a few months to get a answer... to they commission short term studies that can't prove anything... The massive bit of irony, had they commissioned a long term study back when the issue of video game violence first started to really spark, the long term study would be just about done and we would get a damn good scientific answer on this whole issue...

What i find idiotic is how the same exact flaws pop up in a lot of studies... For one, they are all short term studies; you're gonna need a long term study to prove something is truly damaging... second, they look at ONLY videogames; even they proved somekind of problem with video games, that knowledge is worthless if the same amount of damage can be seen in other forms of media... if the study does not take other media into account, then video games can not automatically be singled out since other media could be just as bad, if not worst; Hell, it was a study conducted by the BBFC that gave the suggestion that Movies may be worse than video games... the third major flaw is the one you pointed out, that the people behind the studies approach these studies with a clear bias or agenda... they conduct these studies not to "see what the effects of violent games are on the mind" but to "prove that violent video games are damaging"... when you approach a study with such a bias, the results WILL become scewed in your favor, and we end up with a study that is unreliable; i recall that being one of the conclusions of that guy who analyzed all of the previous game studies.