Youngster’s wardship is not worth a worship

“Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed. Even the most violent video games are not worse than the fairy tales we were used to listen to before the invention of computers and video games”. With these words, Antonin Scalia, one of the Judges of the American Supreme Court, comments on the decision deleting a law approved in 2005 by the California Government. The law has been abrogated because, according to the Supreme Court, it violated the First Amendment of the US Constitution protecting freedom of expression.

The law prohibited the sale to minors of video games in which the range of options available to a player included killing, maiming, dismembering, or sexually assaulting an image of a human being. People aged 8-18 years spend on average seven hours a day playing video games. According to the California Government the fact of “living” in these alternative, but increasingly realistic, universes would confuse youths, and predispose them to violent behaviours similar to those seen in video games.

Although the nine members of the Supreme Court admit that the excessive use of video games may cause a confusion between fantasy and reality, it cannot be proved that there exists a direct link between violent video games and harm to minors.

However, a study carried out in 1975 by McCartthy et al., shows a relation between the view of violent TV programmes and the tendency of youths to engage in violent behaviour. This is more likely to happen if the violent message appears as something effective, if the character is presented as someone similar to the player and if the latter observes the games in an agitated emotional state.

Such study acquires a much more significant value if we consider that TV images are generally perceived by the audience in a quite passive way, whereas as for video games, the players, decide consciously how characters have to behave.

It seems, therefore, that in the US the protection of freedom of expression is more important than that of minors. Consequently, it is not clear why some CDs present the “Parental Advisory- Explicit lyrics” label when lyrics contain blasphemous words and/or sexual references.

According to the statistics carried out by sector-based associations, all over the world the video game industry earns at least 18 million dollars a year. It is therefore unsurprising that the Californian law was criticised by creators, distributors and dealers of video games such as Sony, Disney, Electronic Arts and Microsoft which difficultly can be defined as “good giants”.