[systemvoltage]

People need to read John Carmack and John Romero's epic adventures of Doom: https://www.amazon.com/Masters-of-Doom-David-Kushner-audiobo...

Even in the 90's they had to fight hordes and hordes of Californian nutjobs (Diane Feinstein et. al.) that wanted to ban violent video games. These people would be certainly cancelled in today's world, wouldn't hold a chance. Because, how dare you allow violence in video games to ...children!?

Our civilization depends on allowing wacko's do their thing as far as it is within limits of the law. Let them be offensive as fuck. These are the people that herald and propel society forward by their heterodox thinking. Society is going to decay fast, it already is.

[JaimeThompson]

>hordes of Californian nutjobs (Diane Feinstein et. al.)

Lots of people from other states, including Texas, in that list too. It wasn't just a California / Left issue.

[systemvoltage]

Yea definitely when they started a studio in Dallas, I don't remember the congress persons that were on similar stance as Diane. During the 90's, progressives played a larger role though. There was also Mortal Kombat fiasco:

> During the U.S. Congressional hearing on video game violence, Democratic Party Senator Herb Kohl, working with Senator Joe Lieberman, attempted to illustrate why government regulation of video games was needed by showing clips from 1992's Mortal Kombat and Night Trap (another game featuring digitized actors).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_United_States_Senate_hear...

[dahart]

> During the 90’s, progressives played a larger role though.

Could be true, maybe, but today conservatives have willingly taken over that seat, and the NRA is heavily involved and actively blaming video games after each mass shooting to deflect from the debate on gun rights. https://www.usgamer.net/articles/the-nras-long-incoherent-hi...

In terms of trying to moderate swearing and sexuality in games and music and movies, the religious right has long been and still is the group most vocally opposed to such free expression... if we’re talking about where to address censorship today.

[systemvoltage]

Why does this matter? Regardless of the party, my original message stands. It is an irrelevant detail. Not sure what's causing defensiveness everytime I bring up or criticize progressives. My bad I only remembered Diane Feinstein's name from the book, jeez.

[dahart]

Oh I thought you were suggesting we should stop censoring legal but offensive behavior? The issue of exactly who’s doing the censoring seems absolutely and completely relevant to the subject of censorship, no? If it’s irrelevant, then I don’t understand the point of your top comment. Why do we need to allow offensive wackos to do their thing, what offensive things are we talking about, and who needs to allow them?

Perhaps a more important discussion, if you do care about censorship, is to define more thoughtfully what you mean about “within the limits of the law”. In the US, the law, up to and including the constitution, makes clear that offensive behavior is anywhere from not protected free speech up to criminal activity. Politicians are debating what the limits of the law should be, and sometimes they blow hot air, and sometimes they write bills. Either way, the results of Congressional bills are establishing the limits of the law, and so define the acceptable legal bounds of offensive media & speech. Here’s one of the bi-partisan congressional sessions on games (it included Feinstein, among many others, but she didn’t testify). https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-109shrg28337/html/C...

[UncleMeat]

You made an explicit point of highlighting this "irrelevant detail" in multiple posts.

[systemvoltage]

In response to people jumping on to defending progressives of the 90's. The amount of defensiveness that's invoked here on HN for stating the facts is quite alarming.

I really should have left out the Diane Feinstein and "California nutjobs" in the original post. This is what happens when you mistakenly poke HN every single time when it comes to political one-sidedness.

The fault is mine.

[vintermann]

The original Doom had "Italian cannibal film" levels of gore, heavily pixelated of course (not as if they had a choice in 1992), but in such that you could see that it was scans. Plus of course a lot of over-the-top satanic cliches to tick off the fundamentalists. But nothing remotely sexual - that's a bridge too far in the US.

[daenz]

You make a great point... we can't stop the decay, so the growth has to outpace it.

[JohnHaugeland]

Dianne Feinstein never attempted to control video games or doom. She just said that she was worried about the impact once, in April 3 2013, and Fox News has been screaming her name ever since. She's never introduced any law about this at all.

Only one California politician has ever attempted to do much of anything to video games: republican Joe Baca who tried a dozen times, and is mostly famous for his attempt in 2009 to get a warning sentence on boxes. Calling that censorship is pearl clutching

The only genuine attempt to do something an adult would consider censorship to video games were Jack Thompson, now banned republican, or that brief 2018 thing with Trump.

Democrats have never attempted to censor video games. All three major attempts were Republican.

It's important to get the details right if you are going to build an intuition of who's actually doing this

[systemvoltage]

I’m sorry but none of what you said is true. At this point, the facts are indisputable. Check out my other replies that point to the congressional hearings.

[JohnHaugeland]

Respectfully, coming along and saying "nuh-uh, go find what I said somewhere else" isn't in any way compelling.

The evidence is easy to look up, and you didn't give me any.