For those who have not played one of these games, let's pause here to describe them. Postal 2 is the game that the state of California cites as the best example of why it wants to ban violent videos. The game invites players to burn people alive with gasoline, decapitate them with shovels, slaughter female zombies, beat people to death while they beg for mercy and worse, much worse.
But the figures are computer-generated, and the blood and gore is nothing like the grisly stuff you see on TV every night in prime time.
At the same time, many violent video games are based on Greek mythology, or great literature, like the Iliad and the Odyssey, or on epic World War II battles.
"If you look at the Lord of the Rings trilogy, something which I think is great and which people took their 8-year-olds to in vast numbers, there are huge battle scenes in which people's heads are chopped off and huge spears come crashing down on people, and thousands and thousands of characters are killed," says lawyer Paul Smith, who will represent the video game industry in the Supreme Court on Tuesday. "But everybody — because it's a fantasy — in our culture, thinks that is reasonably OK for most kids."
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130979773
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