Game Over for Violent Video Game Ban

The Supreme Court says California cannot ban the rental or sale of violent video games to children.

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The high court agreed Monday with a federal court's decision to throw out California's ban on the sale or rental of violent video games to minors. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Sacramento said the law violated minors' rights under the First and Fourteenth amendments.

In its decision, the Supreme Court held that video games qualify for First Amendment protection, just like books and movies. The court was not persuaded by California's argument that "interactive" games allow the player to participate in the violence.

"They communicate ideas through familiar literary devices and features distinctive to the medium," the court ruled. "And, the basic principles of freedom of speech... do not vary with a new and different communications medium."

Decision: Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association

The law would have prohibited the sale or rental of violent games to anyone under 18. Retailers who violated the act would have been fined up to $1,000 for each infraction.

The law covered games "in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being."

The court on a 7-2 vote said the law was unconstitutional.

"No doubt a state possesses legitimate power to protect children from harm,'' said Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion. "But that does not include a free-floating power to restrict the ideas to which children may be exposed."

The ruling marked a victory for video gamer creators and sellers.

"There now can be no argument whether video games are entitled to the same protection as books, movies, music, and other expressive entertainment,'' said Bo Andersen, president and CEO of the Entertainment Merchants Association.

The industry already has its own ratings system. An "M" sticker is placed on games considered especially violent.

Two justices, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, indicated the fight to legislate on the issue might not be over. Alito said a narrower state law might be upheld.

Leland Yee, the California state senator who wrote the video game ban, told The Associated Press Monday that he was reading the dissents from justices Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer in hope of finding a way to reintroduce the law.

"What sense does it make to forbid selling to a 13-year-old boy a magazine with an image of a nude woman, while protecting the sale to that 13-year-old of an interactive video game in which he actively, but virtually, binds and gags the woman, then tortures and kills her?'' Breyer said.

Unlike depictions of "sexual conduct,'' Scalia said, there is no tradition in the United States of restricting children's access to depictions of violence. Scalia said the violence in the original depiction of many popular children's fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella and Snow White.

More than 46 million American households have at least one video-game system. The gaming industry brought in at least $18 billion in 2010.