Violent video games

Violent video games teach and encourage the players -- typically children -- to engage in horrific virtual violence. Examples include:

• Postal 2: Apocalypse Weekend (M-rated) -- The ads for this game boast that new weapons will enable you "to hack your enemies to meaty bits!" It involves a game character who commits violent acts against unarmed civilians. Other features in the Postal series include: urinating on people to make them vomit in disgust, using cats as shotgun silencers, and playing fetch with dogs using human heads.

• The Punisher (M-rated) -- Game player is able to jam knives into victims' sternums and pull up to increase the damage, cut off heads, ram a character's open mouth onto a curb, run a character over with a forklift, rip a character's arms off with an industrial hook, and set a character on fire in an electric chair.

• Resident Evil: 4(M-rated) -- Game player uses a special blood-splattered chainsaw controller designed for playing the game, which includes chainsaw decapitations and impalements, and characters ripping off other character's throats and biting off their heads.

• Manhunt(M-rated) -- Game player's character is James Earl Cash, a convicted serial killer facing execution. The execution is ordered to be faked so that a character named "The Director" can use Cash as a star in a series of snuff films. As the Cash character kills other characters, by suffocating them with a plastic bag, slicing them up with a chainsaw, shooting them point blank with a nail gun, stabbing them in the eyeballs with a glass shard, or beheading them with a cleaver, The Director makes sexually vulgar comments. The game has two difficulty settings: fetish and hardcore.

• God of War(M-rated) -- Game features disembowelment, mouth-stabbing, eye-gouging, severed limbs, and human sacrifice.

The Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit declared this to be free speech and struck down a Minnesota law that prohibited minors from purchasing or renting video games bearing a "Mature" or "Adult Only" rating.

Sources

• Violent video games free speech?