Bibliographic record
Abstract
Video games are currently regulated in North America through an independent organization, the Entertainment Software Rating Board. The United States Supreme Court is currently considering whether to uphold a section of California’s Civil Code that bans the sale of violent video games to minors. California’s legislature created this regulation on the grounds that it protected minors from the harm and moral wrongs that playing violent video games allegedly cause. However, the Entertainment Merchants’ Association has strongly contested this law by contesting that violent video games cannot be proven to be harmful. From a harm perspective, regulations can be imposed to reduce harm to oneself (e.g. prescription of helmets), or harm to others (e.g. proscription of guns). Regulations can also be imposed to prevent actions that are considered moral wrongs, regardless of the harm they do (e.g. Section 163 of Canadian Criminal Code outlines "Offences tending to corrupt morals"). Therefore, this thesis asks the question, "Is there sufficient evidence that playing video games (a) causes harm or (b) constitutes a form of moral wrong to the gamer and/or the public at large that would justify a Supreme Court decision to uphold California’s Civil Code banning violent game sales to minors?" This thesis is divided into three chapters. Chapter 2 reviews the evidence for and against video games causing harm by examining experimental video game effects literature. Chapter 3 is an analysis of individual games that assesses whether playing them is a form of moral wrong to the player. The results of the first two chapters will provide the evidentiary basis for whether California’s law regulating games should be upheld. These two chapters showed inconclusive results in deciding whether video games are harmful and morally wrong to play. Chapter 4 explores improvements that could be made to the Entertainment Software Rating Board’s system if the current legislative measures are not upheld. Chapter 5 is general conclusions, discussion, and future directions for this stream of video game research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.029 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".