Let the rape, murder and mayhem begin: Supreme court says kids can play violent video games

Six years ago, California adopted a state law that criminalized the sale of violent video games to children under 18, and called for stricter regulation of video game labeling. Since the law's passing, it has been challenged by the video game industry in all levels of the U.S. Judicial system.

Today, the Supreme Court upheld the 2009 District Court ruling and declared the California law to be a violation of the first amendment to the Constitution.

According to the Supreme Court, video games do not deserve special treatment because they are "interactive," and there is no causal link between video game violence and real world violence.

Furthermore, the court called the law "unprecedented and mistaken" because it argued that content directed at children should not be protected under the first amendment.

"A legislature cannot create new categories of unprotected speech simply by weighing the value of a particular category against its social costs and then punishing it if it fails the
test," Monday's ruling from the Supreme Court said. "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."

Justice Samuel Alito concurred with the ruling, and said California's law was "not framed with the precision that the Constitution demands." However, Alito said he disagreed with the Court's view that violent video games "really present no serious problem," and said his experience has led him to believe there are reasons to suspect that violent video games have a very different effect on the player than books, music, movies and television on their viewer.

"In some of these games, the violence is astounding. Victims by the dozens are killed with every imaginable implement, including machine guns, shotguns, clubs, hammers, axes, swords, and chainsaws. Victims are dismembered, decapitated, disemboweled, set on fire, and chopped into little pieces. They cry out in agony and beg for mercy. Blood gushes, splatters, and pools. Severed body parts and gobs of human remains are graphically shown. In some games, points are awarded based, not only on the number of victims killed, but on the killing technique employed. It also appears that there is no antisocial theme too base for some in the video-game industry to exploit."

"There are games in which a player can take on the identity and reenact the killings carried out by the perpetrators of the murders at Columbine High School and Virginia Tech. The objective of one game is to rape a mother and her daughters; in another, the goal is to rape Native American women. There is a game in which players engage in "ethnic cleansing" and can choose to gun down African Americans, Latinos, or Jews. In still another game, players attempt to fire a rifle shot into the head of President Kennedy as his motorcade passes by the Texas School Book Depository. If the technological characteristics of the sophisticated games that are likely to be available in the near future are combined with the characteristics of the most violent games already marketed, the result will be games that allow troubled teens to experience in an extraordinarily personal and vivid way what it would be like to carry out unspeakable acts of violence."

For fans of video game history, Alito's statement might be irritating, as his list of shocking video game titles includes a game that wasn't made or sold in the United States, a game that is now more than 20 years old, and a series of games made by a racial separatist group for the specific purpose of indoctrination. No child today could walk into a store and purchase any of these titles under any circumstances, and they were extreme outliers in the video game market even when they were new.