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Demonstrating that while they oppose women and most of the Bill of Rights, the Justices of the Supreme Court retain some margin of respect for the First Amendment, the highest court in the United States has upheld the Ninth District ruling in Schwarzenegger Brown vs. Entertainment Merchants Association. It is officially Not Constitutional to penalize …

No one knows exactly when the United States Supreme Court will issue a ruling on Schwarzenegger vs. Entertainment Merchants Association, the first case on game censorship to reach the highest court in the U.S., but everyone is talking, and the talk is… Monday. A favorable ruling on this case will indicate – nationally – that punishing …

From the Land of Ill-Advised comes a report that the Entertainment Software Ratings Board, the official games rating system in North America, has decided to stop doing its job. Because its job is hard. Thus in what I deeply hope is an elaborate and belated April Fool’s trick, the ESRB is switching to a computer-based …

In a move sure to chap the ass of former South Australia Attorney General Michael Atkinson, the Aussie federal cabinet has approved the adoption of an R18+ classification for games down under, effectively eliminating the tacit ban on any games deemed unsuitable for an R15+ – formerly the highest rating. This still has to be …

Two things are happening in the United States tomorrow, both of sufficient gravity that watchers from beyond our borders should be at least somewhat interested. First, the mid-term election is going to go badly for the Democrats, which is unfortunate because Democrats are awesome. Second, oral arguments begin in Schwarzenegger vs. the Entertainment Merchants Association …

Adelaide Now reports that South Australia Attorney General and game-hater Michael Atkinson has announced that he will leave Parliament in 2014, the time of the next election. Apparently the international outrage over Atkinson’s proposal to require – under penalty of a fine – that any Australian posting anything to a comment, blog, or forum be …

You would not believe how many people – on a daily basis – assure me that videogames are no longer in serious jeopardy of being censored, content regulated, or banned outright. Tell that to Australia. Or, if you prefer, you can now tell it to Switzerland, which today passed long-feared legislation allowing Parliament to ban …

For those who don’t follow such things, a bring-you-up-to-speed: the land of Australia, which I will never visit on account of the Huntsman Spider, does not have a rating classification for “mature” games – what we in the States would call M-rated games, or what our PEGI-using friends in Grand Europa would call 18-rated, or …

Those with Showtime can check out tonight’s episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! at 10:00pm Eastern/Pacific. In this one, the duo of corpulent and silent will go out of their way to ridicule anti-game activists (including the disbarred but not forgotten Jack Thompson) convinced that videogames cause violence. The clip above was snagged from GamePolitics, …