The Supreme Court today released its opinion regarding California’s attempt to ban the sale of so-called violent video games to those under 18. My company, Vindicia, filed an amicus brief in the case, Brown v. Entertainment Merchant’s Association, to make sure the Court was aware of the ramifications of the California law in the digital gaming world.
The decision is being widely reported as 7-2, which is true enough on the merits of this law. But looking closer, the decision is really 5-4 when it comes to the question of whether the First Amendment categorically protects the sale of video games to minors.
As I noted in a blog post after attending oral arguments in the case, Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts both seemed willing to allow states an ability to restrict the sale of violent video games. The Chief Justice seemed to miss the point that Postal 2, the game in question in the case, appears designed specifically to make white middle-aged conservative fathers like him angry. Justice Alito’s concurrence, with which the Chief agreed (bringing the two additional votes in the 7-2 vote), argues that some other law that better defines “violent” could pass constitutional muster.
Justice Thomas wrote a dissent in which he continues to take the position that kids really don’t have any free speech rights as an originalist matter. The flip side being that game creators have no right to sell to them if they’re under 18 (and as an original matter, probably under 21). Justice Scalia rightly points out in the majority opinion that Justice Thomas’s theory may support a system where parents could put their kids on a state-wide “do not sell video games to” list, but Scalia asserted that game makers’ free speech rights are violated when all kids are banned from buying their games.
Justice Breyer continues simply to believe that everything is a balancing test, regardless of the fundamental enumerated right in question, and that therefore judges should be allowed to use political arguments about what is best for society to balance laws against their harms. I’m reminded of Justice Scalia in another recent opinion replying to an almost identical Breyer argument with, “the very enumeration of the right takes out of the hands of government—even the Third Branch of Government—the power to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the right is really worth insisting upon.”
Today’s decision is good news in that the Supreme Court has found that states attempting to severely restrict the sales of video games have been going about it using unconstitutional methods. What’s still frightening is that we appear to be only one vote away from a state finding a way to restrict sales of video games to minors. Luckily, most of the methods that legislatures who really just don’t like video games would want to use would fail other constitutional tests. However, the “do not sell” list concept combined with the existing rating system does leave open a path for legislation that may not burden video game makers much. (That concept, however, faces the difficulty of the changes the digital revolution is bringing to the game industry’s business models, as we outlined in our Amicus brief.)
For adults, this opinion reaffirms something many of us knew. The fact that some people don’t like the content of video games is no basis for curtailing or choking them off at what many consider to be the beginning of a revolution in creativity, realism, and storytelling.
