Video games deserve the same constitutional protections as books and movies, the Supreme Court ruled Monday in striking down as unconstitutional California’s attempt to ban the sale of violent games to minors.
In a 7 to 2 vote, the court upheld a lower court’s decision that California’s law imposing a $1,000 fine on those who sell or rent violent video games to minors violated free-speech rights. But there was more disagreement on the court than that tally would indicate.
First Amendment protection
The same is true in the rest of the United States, as social scientists and parents debate whether video games represent a new and frightening phenomenon with dangerous psychological effects, or simply trigger unproven fears that accompany any new technology.
It was the court’s first examination of a trend that has reached into two-thirds of American homes and created a multibillion-dollar industry. Lawmakers across the country, catering to parents worried about a technology their children understand better than they do, have passed laws banning the sale of violent video games to minors, and other states want the option. Courts have struck down each of those attempts.
Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia said that “like the protected books, plays and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas — and even social messages” that are guarded by the First Amendment.
He continued: “No doubt a state possesses legitimate power to protect children from harm, but that does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed.”
He was joined by Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Stephen G. Breyer dissented for separate reasons.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. agreed with the outcome of the case but did not join Scalia’s opinion.
Alito and Roberts concluded that “California’s law is not framed with the precision that the Constitution demands.” Although the majority did not invite a rewrite of the law, Alito said he would not “squelch legislative efforts” to come up with a law that is less vague.
Alito and Roberts said the court was too sanguine about the effects of video games, which, in Alito’s words, “may be very different from anything we have seen before.”
He described games in which players can reenact the killings at Columbine High School and Virginia Tech; in which the goal is raping Native American women or killing ethnic and religious minorities; in which new technology may allow a player to “actually feel the splatting blood from the blown-off head” of a victim.
Scalia was unmoved. “Justice Alito recounts all these disgusting video games in order to disgust us — but disgust is not a valid basis for restricting expression,” Scalia wrote.
He said that violence has never been found to be outside the First Amendment’s protection. And he noted that children through the years have been fed a hefty portion of it, from fairy tales (“Cinderella’s evil stepsisters have their eyes pecked out by doves”) to high school reading lists (“Lord of the Flies recounts how a schoolboy called Piggy is savagely murdered by other children”).
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