Video games have "no conveyance of ideas, expression, or anything else that could possibly amount to speech"
This is according to Judge Stephen Limbaugh, who yesterday reviewed a whopping FOUR (!) games, and decided that video games have "no conveyance of ideas, expression, or anything else that could possibly amount to speech. The court finds that video games have more in common with board games and sports than they do with motion pictures." That's crap. This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Last I checked, games like (here comes the list!) Mortal Kombat, (Oh! That's a new one!) Fear Effect, (using that game as an example is like taking the most sexually explicit movie that's out, and assuming that all movies are just like it.) Doom, (Whoa! Looks like they worked hard to get the latest games, huh.) and finaly The Resident Of Evil Creek (Funny, last I checked, that one doesn't exsist), aren't at the fore-front of the video game industry and it's pathetic that this judge could even think to make a decision based on just four games. So games like Metal Gear Solid (complete with it's anti-nuke diatribes), and all the RPGs ever made are nothing more then fancy board games. That's absurd. you can't possibly compare games like Final Fantasy 7 (with almost more FMV then game play) to Backgammon (does anyone actually know how to play that game??).

Also brought up during the hearing was the school shooting stuff and how the kids involved in those were also involved with video games. Here's a news flash, the video game industry is bigger then the movie industry revenue wise, so the chances that these kids WOULDN'T be involved with video games are slim. That's like blaming football because some kid who liked football got in a fight or something.

Video games cannot influence normal people to shoot other people. If there are people who can be influenced by video games they obviously can't tell the difference between fantasy and reality, and should probably but put somewhere where they can't hurt anyone, because video games or not, if you're that unstable, you're going to hurt someone, with or without video games. In my opinion, video games probably stop more violence then they cause, I know that for me, they're great for relieving stress. Mad at someone? Instead of beating them up, play them in some good multi-player action!

Well that's it, I'm done. I need to go cool off with some video games.