Activist group decries 'predatory game industry' to Supreme Court

Although California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a 2005 law that prohibited the sale of violent video games to children, it was struck as unconstitutional in court. State legislators contested the ruling, and have spent over $250,000 in an ongoing legal battle over the law. In May, lawmakers successfully petitioned the United States Supreme Court to review previous rulings. Now, a conservative group has filed an amicus brief with the court in support of the video game law.

As GamePolitics reported, the Eagle Forum filed the brief on Monday, which calls the law a vanguard against a "predatory, billion-dollar video game industry that churns out increasingly graphic blood and gore for impressionable minds to imbibe." The document was written by Andrew Schlafly, who also founded Conservapedia, a right-wing version of Wikipedia. His mother, activist Phyllis Schlafly, created the Eagle Forum as a family values group in 1972.

In the brief, the Eagle Forum alleges that video games are, in part, responsible for a number of social problems among today's youth, including "mass killings perpetrated by youngsters," poor high school graduation rates, game addiction, and death from excessive gameplay. The group also claims that the law does not breach the First Amendment, as the courts have previously ruled.

"Violent video games hurt children in two ways. Their increasingly realistic and disturbing images burn into children’s impressionable minds much as pornography does, and the role-playing inherent in a video game causes the child to buy into the rampages of murder and other heinous crimes that he is acting out," the document states. "The First Amendment does not forbid state legislatures from keeping this harmful material from children. It was an error with national implications for the Ninth Circuit to invalidate the California statute. Displaying a shocking image to a child is conceptually identical to the utterance of 'fighting words' to an adult, which this Court famously held to be outside of First Amendment protection."

The statute was signed into law by Schwarzenegger but challenged in court before it could take effect. It sought to ban the sale or rental of "violent video games" to children. A "violent video game" was defined as a game in which players can kill, maim, dismember, or sexually assault "an image of a human being." Under the law, retailers that sold such games to children would face a $1,000 fine. The bill also required "violent" games to bear a two-inch-by-two-inch sticker with a "solid white '18' outlined in black" on their front covers. The new stickers would be over double the size of current front-cover labels.

Although many legislators, voters, and conservative groups support overturning the game statute, some believe California's legal battle is a waste of the state's limited resources. One opponent is the president and CEO of the Entertainment Software Association, Michael Gallagher.

"California's citizens should see this for what it is--a complete waste of the state's time and resources," Gallagher said. "California is facing a $21 billion budget shortfall coupled with high unemployment and home foreclosure rates. Rather than focus on these very real problems, Governor Schwarzenegger has recklessly decided to pursue wasteful, misguided, and pointless litigation."