Supreme Court Gets It Right

It’s not often we get to use the words “Supreme Court” and “video games” in the same sentence, but we got the chance last week. On June 27, the US Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that California’s ban on the sale of violent video games to minors was unconstitutional. This was the right decision, and we’ll only see the full effects of this decision on our favorite medium in the years to come.

75-year old Justice Antonin Scalia showed his surprisingly cogent understanding of the medium in his majority opinion: “Like the protected books, plays, and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas—and even social messages—through many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialogue, plot, and music) and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player’s interaction with the virtual world). That suffices to confer First Amendment protection.” Has he played Grand Theft Auto IV?

In 2007, then-California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger voiced his support of the law: “We have a responsibility to our kids and our communities to protect against the effects of games that depict ultra-violent actions.” Actually, we don’t. It’s the responsibility of the parents to regulate their children’s entertainment, not the government’s. I’m getting a little sick of this nanny-state mentality. I already have a mother, thank you, and she did a swell job raising me. We don’t need the government deciding what types of material children can and can’t consume.

Scalia also made the obvious point that there is no long-standing tradition in this country of restricting children’s access to depictions of violence. Classic children’s literature like The Lord of the Flies and Grimm’s Fairy Tales contain gruesome violence, and California has yet to pass a law banning sale of those books to children. This is simply a case of people who have no experience with actually playing games making lots of assumptions about what games are like. The high court of this country easily saw through it.