You may have seen reports of yesterday's Supreme Court ruling that video games deserve First Amendment protection and therefore California's law banning the sale of violent games to minors was unconstitutional, but what you may not have seen, if you just skimmed the coverage, is what the case was really about. What California did was say that the voluntary video-game rating system isn't sufficient, and the state had to set up its own standard to judge what was appropriate for children and punish vendors who violated it.
It would have been as if the state had said it was worried that kids might be sneaking into R-rated movies, and therefore they had to prosecute theater owners by creating their own rating system and arrest those who violated it.
As I explained in a column I wrote about this case last year, the Federal Trade Commission did an investigation in which they hired kids to try to access different kinds of supposedly forbidden content. They found that 72 percent of their testers successfully bought an "explicit content" CD, 54 percent successfully bought an R-rated CD, 28 percent got into an R-rated movie, and 20 percent successfully bought a "mature" rated video game. In other words, video game sellers were more vigilant about not selling to kids than vendors of any other kind of mature content.
So this case wasn't really about whether violent video games do any harm to kids, or about whether they're art. It was really about whether the voluntary industry standard was so insufficient that the law had to intervene. And not much would have changed had the law been upheld. As it is today, if you're a 12-year-old who wants to play Call of Duty, there are about a dozen ways to do it (get your mom to buy it, get your big brother to buy it, borrow it from a friend...), but going into a store and buying a copy doesn't happen to be one of them. That's just as it would have been had the law been in effect.
And maybe that's the best approach we as a society can take: to say that, yes, it's probably not a great idea for 12-year-olds to be decapitating zombies for six hours a day, so we'll put just enough hurdles in the way so that if you're underage, you have to work a little to get your hands on the material. But we aren't going to put anyone in jail if it happens.
