GAMES GOLDEN AGE

The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled in favor of free speech for video games in the case of Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Association . The case had challenged a California law enacted in 2005 that banned the sale of certain violent video games to children without parental supervision.

The Supreme Court Held that “The Act does not comport with the First Amendment.  Pp. 2–18.(a) Video games qualify for First Amendment protection.  Like protected books, plays, and movies, they communicate ideas through familiar literary devices and features distinctive to the medium.  And “the basic principles of freedom of speech . . . do not vary” with a new and different communication medium.”

The most basic principle—that government lacks the power to restrict expression because of its message, ideas, subject  matter, or content,  Ashcroft v.  American Civil Liberties Union, 535 U. S. 564, 573—is subject to a few limited exceptions for historically unprotected speech, such as obscenity, incitement, and fighting words.   But a legislature cannot  create new categories ofunprotected speech simply by weighing the value of a particular category against its social  costs and  then punishing it if fails the test.  See United States v. Stevens, 559 U. S. Unlike the New York law upheld in Ginsberg v. New York, 390 U. S. 629, California’s Act does not adjust the boundaries of an existing category of unprotected speech to ensure that a definition designed for adults is not uncritically applied to children.  Instead, the State wishes to create a wholly new category of content-based regulation that is permissible only for speech directed at children. That is unprecedented and mistaken. This country has no tradition of specially restricting children’s access  to depictions  of violence.  And California’s claim  that “interactive” video games present special problems, in that the playerparticipates in the violent action  on screen and determines its outcome, is unpersuasive.

The ruling was 7-2 with Justice Antonin Scalia writing in the majority opinion “Even where the protection of children is the object, the constitutional limits on governmental action apply.” States have continuously tried to ban video games ever since the medium emerged in the late 1970′s. The Supreme Court has rejected these laws as unconstitutional and continuously struck them down as such.