The Supreme Court is hearing arguments today on a California law that would restrict the sale of violent video games to minors. As Andrew Moseman reports in a clip round-up for the Discover aggregator blog 80beats, the case raises interesting first-amendment questions, and prompts reconsideration of the restrictions that already apply to minors–such as those regarding alcohol and tobacco.
I don’t want to minimize the importance of the first-amendment issues; such things are critically important for journalists, among others. But much of the legal ratiocination would be moot if violent video games were not harmful to minors. That seems to me to be a key point, and it’s an empirical question: Do studies show that violent video games are hazardous to our children?
Moseman quotes the Wall Street Journal to the effect that the law restricting sale of the games was based on
legislative findings that they stimulate “feelings of aggression,” reduce “activity in the frontal lobes of the brain” and promote “violent antisocial or aggressive behavior.” [The emphasis is mine–PR.]
With all due respect to California’s legislature, we might question whether it should be the arbiter of whether violent video games cause all those terrible things–just as we might question whether child psychiatrists have the appropriate expertise to craft the state’s legislation.
If we don’t trust the legislature, we can turn to the San Francisco Chronicle, which also believes it knows all about the harm these games cause:
Allowing children to thumb away at the controls that maim, torture and kill human figures comes with deadening side effects to a player’s personality and outlook.
Based on which study, exactly? Or based on the editorial writer’s disapproval of the games his or her kids are playing?
Moseman finds a group of more than 80 scientists who say that studies “do not even establish the ‘correlation’ between violent video games and psychological harm to minors that California says exists, let alone the causation of harm…” These scientists filed an amicus brief in the case, as reported by PC World (not an independent voice in this debate).
Moseman’s round-up suggests that most reporting will cover the legal issues, without addressing the far more important issue (in my view) of whether or not violent video games lead to “violent antisocial or aggressive behavior.”
Join me in following the coverage tonight and tomorrow morning to see whether our colleagues elsewhere in the media take note of the importance of the central, testable scientific issue regarding violent video games. And let’s see how many of our colleages in science writing try to sort out the facts.
And if it turns out that video games do cause harm, then perhaps we should rethink the remedy. Most murders are committed by adults, not children. California might do better to restrict the sale of these games to adults, and, in the meantime, let children enjoy their fantasies.
– Paul Raeburn
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