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Politics & Government

Locals Weigh In on Supreme Court Violent Video Games Ruling

On June 27, the Court struck down an anti-violence California law that would have prohibited the sale of most M-rated and many T-rated video games to minors, a measure that Laguna Niguel's representatives voted against.

In one video game, players re-enact the Columbine and Virginia Tech shootings. In another game, players engage in “ethnic cleansing” by gunning down African-Americans, Latinos or Jews—their choice. In another, players shoot President Kennedy in the head, and in yet another, they rape Native American women.

Described by Justice Samuel Alito, these games were the only ones mentioned by any justice of the Supreme Court on June 27 when the Court struck down a California law prohibiting violent video game sales to minors.

Other justices were unfazed.

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“Justice Alito recounts all these disgusting video games in order to disgust us—but disgust is not a valid basis for restricting expression,” wrote Justice Antonin Scalia in the majority opinion.

A 7-2 majority held that neither the medium nor the content of violent video games—defined by the 2005 California law as those in which players can kill, maim, dismember or sexually assault an image of a human being—excluded them from First Amendment protection.

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“Like the protected books, plays and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas—and even social messages—through many familiar literary devices … and through features distinctive to the medium,” Scalia wrote.

Shaun Pearson, an employee of the GameStop in Laguna Niguel, agreed. “[Film critic] Gene Siskel once said video games will never be an art form. I’m glad he’s been proven wrong,” he said. The majority opinion in the case, Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, noted that it took the Court several decades to deem movies worthy of constitutional protection.

On the other hand, Kim Anderson, the state-level legislative advocate of Capistrano Unified School District’s PTA, supported the law and “would have liked to see the Supreme Court protect our children’s well-being and health over their right to free speech.

“I believe that excessively violent video games definitely have a negative impact on kids. Research shows that a heavy diet of violent video play does make kids more aggressive; it makes them more likely to commit violent acts as an adult, and it also increases their heart rate and blood pressure,” she said. Anderson was commenting on behalf of herself rather than the PTA.

But six years ago, both of Anderson’s representatives in the State Legislature voted against the video game bill, AB 1179, which nonetheless passed easily. At the time, current Republican state senator Mimi Walters represented Laguna Niguel in the State Assembly, and Republican Dick Ackerman—no longer in public office—represented Laguna Niguel in the State Senate as the chamber’s minority leader.

Ackerman opposed the bill as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee before voting against it on the floor. He told Patch he viewed it as “an issue of freedom of speech.”

“[The law was] unenforceable, unconstitutional and nanny state stuff. Parents need to raise their own children,” he said.

Asked how he would address the matter of violent video games as a parent, he responded, “That question has come up with my grandkids and [my kids] control what their kids look at. They’re on top of it.” 

Laguna Niguel resident Wendy Ferreira, who has a 15-year-old son and a 13-year-old daughter, also believes that policing media content is the responsibility of the parent. "When it comes to material that comes into my home, whether it’s a movie or a game, I try to use my own judgment, based on knowing my children’s ages and maturity. The ratings don’t matter much to us, and I’ll generally screen a game or movie before letting my kids play it or see it," she said.

"As such, we would never have a violent video game in our home,” Ferreira said. Call of Duty is one of the games her son plays, though he does not play video games frequently.

The 2005 law, which was never enforced—two federal courts had ruled it unconstitutional before the case reached the Supreme Court—would have penalized retailers who sell or rent violent video games to minors with fines as high as $1,000 per offense. It would have also required an “18” sticker on each such game; these stickers were to be over twice as large as the current ratings labels.   

The ratings system used by the video game industry is analogous to that of the film industry. The non-governmental Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) rates games as E for everyone, E10+ for everyone 10 and older, T for teen or M for mature. (Ratings of EC for early childhood and AO for adults only are exceedingly rare.)

As with movie theaters and MPAA ratings, video game retailers enforce the ESRB ratings—and the recommendation that M-rated games not be sold to anyone under 17 without a parent present—on a voluntary basis. 

Pearson said the first thing he was told when hired by GameStop was that he would be fired if he sold M-rated video games to kids with no parents and no ID.

“We card everyone under 30. People don’t get it, they think, ‘It’s just a video game.’ It’s not. Call of Duty is violent. There are kids who join the army because they think they know what it’s like. They don’t,” Pearson said.

Pearson said employees always explain to parents what inappropriate content a particular game contains.

“I recommend against Red Dead Redemption to parents every time because of the full graphic nudity, but stuff like Halo we give some lenience to since there’s no foul language and it’s violence against aliens or humans that basically look like robots,” he said. Red Dead Redemption is set in the Old West and includes a scene of two characters having sex and brief female nudity.

Pearson agreed with a 2005 article from the gaming site Gamespot that the law’s definition of violence “would seem to cover virtually every M-for-Mature-rated game and many T-for-Teen rated games as well,” but pointed out that games such as those cited by Justice Alito do not reach retailers and claimed that none of the games in his store glorifies violence.

“Games [with graphic violence] don’t depict actual humans. In Dead Rising, for example, the violence is against zombies. And in Grand Theft Auto, where you can kill many innocent people, you’re never tasked to do so.” In Dead Rising (rated M for blood and gore, intense violence, language, sexual themes and use of alcohol), players slaughter an endless stream of zombies using everything from ketchup bottles to chainsaws.

Whether or not most violent games glorify violence, and whether or not the sale of such games is criminalized, parents will keep buying their children games with violence, according to another GameStop employee, Rene Tapia.

“I honestly don’t think this law would have affected our sales. [Explaining to parents violent content] already doesn’t affect sales. Parents only draw the line at sex,” Tapia said, “which I personally find very odd.”

And, as the state legislature learned the hard way, the Supreme Court only draws the line at sex as well, at least when it comes to censoring obscenity.

To describe what games should be prohibited to children, lawmakers lifted phrases such as “patently offensive to prevailing standards in the community” from the landmark 1973 ruling in Miller v. California, which described sexual material that qualified as obscene and therefore could be censored. In fact, AB 1179 altered the exact words used by the Court only to exchange the words “prurient” and “shameful” with the word “deviant” and to insert “for minors” three times.

The majority opinion, however, was explicit: “Our [past rulings] have made clear that violence is not part of the obscenity that the Constitution permits to be regulated.”  

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