Won't change anything... how many screaming 10-12 year old do you hear while playing every rated M online game these days? How many more do you think will add on to that? Its never been protected as far as I am concerned since the parents bought the games allowed them to play it.

Good decision, but I don't think this would've effected TES or any other BGS game in the future.

If you're below the Mature Rating requirments, you shouldn't be buying the damn thing anyway. If you want a game that's rated M, get an older person to buy it. I think they've seriously wasted time, money, and resources to try and ban this. It's complete BS. Even if you ban the selling of these mature games to minors, they'll get it from someone/somwhere else. People are starving, and they worry about such things wasting that money. BS.

How will it impact Skyrim? It won't.

You would do well to read things before you comment on them.

I don't feel like reading two pages. So sorry, but just voicing my opinion.

No, just the OP.

The right answer is none.

This is yet another unimportant issue that reached the Supreme Court because it was pushed by some religious group with the means to lobby for it, and the Supreme Court handling down a decision which changes nothing. With all the issues in the US, this is what the Supreme Court spends time on, video games... my tax dollars at work..

/rant

I have a feeling you didn't read the OP either.

rif.org

I live in the state next door to CA...and I have been teaching/coaxing my Nephew to play Oblivion since he was 8. He is now 12, and loves the game! Looks like I broke the law...NOT!

What did I do? Am I off topic?

The OP is about a law prohibiting minors from buying M games being repealed, meaning, it's no longer a law. This is good news, which I know is surprising and somewhat counter-intuitive considering "Supreme Court" is in the title of the thread, but, yay for progress.

The problem here: ESRB is not a government thing. Its something game companies started doing after a school shooting by kids who said it would be like a "Doom quest". The game companies were under scrutiny, and so they created ESRB. Now, businesses like game stop have started to take ESRB too seriously, and refused to sell M rated games to minors. This law says that they cant do that. but, as a business they can find a way around it... probably.

Ooooohhhhhh...
Well, my brain told me the exact opposite. I was never good at Law class anyway. In this case, then there's no problem, except for crazy phsyco toddlers stabbing everybody.

I posted my thoughts on this in the other thread on this topic but I also think what Pete Hines said in the Washington Post article was dead on.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/on-parenting/post/violent-video-games-and-minors-is-it-parents-fault/2011/06/27/AGOCOMoH_blog.html

The future alcoholics will be able to be drunk more of the time and posibly begin weeding themselves out, nothing against alcoholics but a particular thing against Drunk Drives.

Couldn't have put it better myself. The problem is lack of parental involvement, I speak from experience when I say my parents didn't ever really care about what games I played. They of course wanted to know about them, but they bought whatever games I wished for them to get me. I told them many a time that the game was rated M, explained what that meant, but they've always known I'm a mature fellow and wasn't going to go crazy after playing Fallout 3 or other violent titles. I've played many an M rated game before what would be considered an "appropriate" age, and I've turned out pretty damn well in my opinion. (My first M rated game was "Resident Evil Director's Cut" back in 1998.) :tops:

You know ESRB was created 5 years before Columbine, right?

The way I see it, the law would have reduced the levels of these things. Since it was canceled, things can continue on as they have. (i.e, previous game design wasn't based around the law's limits, so why should the law not going into effect make much of a difference?)

The danger of pissing off parent's groups, Family Councils, media watchdogs, and other similar folks is still there - they were never "the law" to begin with. So it's not like it's suddenly open season to spew AO-rated gorefests all over the place.

-------

Backing off a further step - ideally, this ruling should have no effect on game design - if developers were making the games they wanted to, with content matching the "vision" they had for their game, then there'd be no change. Because "hey, we can add more violence now! Let's do it!" isn't good design or "art" - it's pandering to the lowest common denominator & people's base instincts.

This is why I don't expect any change in what Bethesda would make - they're designing to what they want, not to "push the limits". (That's Rockstar's niche)


tl;dr - "More violence just because you can" is stupid. I don't expect non-stupid game companies to do this. And stupid companies.... who cares about what they make, it's stupid.

Not true. "Legal to sell a Mature Game to a minor" =/= "Illegal to prevent a minor from buying a Mature Game"

And the law said nothing about the ESRB. Technically, several games rated E (Such as Wii Boxing: Depiction of violence against a Human Figure) or Teen could have been interpreted as illegal to sell to minors because of the broadness/vagueness of the law... What bothers me about the issue is that the law tried to be phrased in a manner that was reasonable, but could be interpreted as unreasonable - usually, when a law uses the wording as in the California law, it's trying to say "Use common sense and discretion"... but neither of those terms can be legally defined.

Currently, vendors have the power to use their own discretion when it comes to selling a game to a minor. Similarly, an industrial company doesn't have to be ANSI-compliant in what they produce, and, in Right-To-Work states, a company doesn't have to be union-friendly. However, ESRB, ANSI, and Trade Unions are just modern forms of a medieval concept: Trade Guilds. They don't need the U.S. Law to keep industries in line.