April 22, 2003
Eugene Volokh responds to pending legislation in Washington state that would ban video games depicting violence against police. He quotes an opinion by Richard Posner which quickly debunks the only argument I can even anticipate in favor of the ban:
Maybe video games are different. They are, after all, interactive. But this point is superficial, in fact erroneous. All literature (here broadly defined to include movies, television, and the other photographic media, and popular as well as highbrow literature) is interactive; the better it is, the more interactive. Literature when it is successful draws the reader into the story, makes him identify with the characters, invites him to judge them and quarrel with them, to experience their joys and sufferings as the reader's own. Protests from readers caused Dickens to revise Great Expectations to give it a happy ending, and tourists visit sites in Dublin and its environs in which the fictitious events of Ulysses are imagined to have occurred. The cult of Sherlock Holmes is well known.It looks like the legislation will pass (all it needs now is the governor's signature), but I guess it won't be around long.
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