Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia surprised me this week.  He wrote the majority decision in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association.  This case was about California’s ban on the sale of violent video games to children. To me, not only as a parent,  but as a person who just plain cares about what kind of environment we create for our children to grow up in, such a law seems obviously good. I mean, the basic premise is that exposing children to violence is bad and children are not capable of exercising good judgement about what they purchase. So, like children can’t buy cigarettes, alcohol or porn, they should not be able to buy video games that are inappropriate for their age due the violent nature of the graphics and type of activity involved in the game.

Call me naive, but why the game manufacturers would take the trouble to contest the law, is beyond my comprehension. Most decent people draw the line somewhere when it comes to profits. I mean, even if there was some legal loophole through which beer makers could sell to underage teens, I like to believe that the management in those companies would choose not to pursue a legal avenue that allows them to earn more by increasing sales to 14 year olds.

Do the game manufacturers really believe, deep down in their soul, that it’s ok for young children to sit at a game console for hours playing games that depict rape, murder and other violence?  In fact, the games reinforce the behavior, granting points and bonus rounds for the more violent acts the player commits. And it’s already been established these games can be addictive and more and more research points to how such repetitive play rewires an individual’s brain, especially a young brain!.

So Judge Scalia, in his infinite wisdom, father of 9 and grandfather to 28, likened the ban on violent games to “restricting children to the  ideas to which they are exposed” — a role he apparently believes is only for a parent to play. Let’s say I can overlook the concept that the violence in video games is equivalent to an “idea” like ideas about religion, politics or sexual orientation. Even if I agree with that part of the argument (and I do not), then I still wonder why he upholds the right of the CHILD to make the purchase. Because even with such a law in place, parents could still legally buy the violent video games for their children and keep their right to expose their children to ideas of violence, as Scalia thinks they should be able to do.

The law was obviously intended to prevent children from buying such games without their parent’s knowledge. We all know that, in reality, the average parent is not always aware of what their child is doing on the computer. Kids today have access to money, shop on their own, and enjoy far more privacy then kids of the previous generation.

Consider what kinds of content is being dealt with in the law:

It defined violent games as those “in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering or sexually assaulting an image of a human being” in a way that was “patently offensive,” appealed to minors’ “deviant or morbid interests” and lacked “serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.”

The objective of one of the games that was examined in the case is to rape a mother and her daughters. Scalia compared this to reading Grimms Fairy Tales. For the life of me, how an educated man can compare the evil stepsisters in Cinderalla to a 12 year old boy virtually raping women on his game console to acquire points leave me dumbstruck. Even without the psychological research proving the potential harm this can cause to a child’s emotional development, it’s hard to fathom how the US Supreme Court can find it right to allow minors to have access to such interactive content without their parents needing to be involved.

As games become increasingly interactive, we are not far away from gamemakers presenting even more reality-like features. Without spelling out the details, if we can swing virtual rackets at virtual tennis balls, build virtual gyms in our living rooms with virtual personal trainers, you can imagine what game makers can do with violence and sexual deviation.