From today’s Salon:
On April 19, Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Sr. decided that games weren’t speech at all, and thus deserve no First Amendment protection.
At issue was a St. Louis ordinance that requires parental consent before children under 17 can buy or play violent or sexually explicit video games. The Interactive Digital Software Association had asked for a summary dismissal of the ordinance, arguing that it violated the First Amendment. Limbaugh disagreed.
The court reviewed a video tape of four violent games including the (by industry and gameplayer standards) ancient “Doom” and, on that, decided that video games don’t deserve protection under the First Amendment. Salon quotes Henry Jenkins, director of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Program, who I think best sums up just why this decision is idiotic, ill-informed, and deserves to be overturned on appeal. He says, “Imagine if I took a look at four books, all within the same genre, to determine whether literature was worthy of First Amendment protection.”
It’s a deplorably small cross-section, and it hardly reflects the totality of what games have to offer. To condemn an entire medium based on no other evidence — to say, as Justice Limbaugh did, that there is “no conveyance of ideas, expression, or anything else that could possibly amount to speech” in the realm of video games — reveals just how out-of-touch and reactionary our lawmakers can be.
