“[There is] no conveyance of ideas, expression, or anything else that could possibly amount to speech. The court finds that video games have more in common with board games and sports than they do with motion pictures.”

That piece of #$% jurisprudence is from a federal judge’s ruling last month that video games aren’t entitled to First Amendment protection, as reported at Salon.com [via Ernie the Attorney] and CNN.com. Fortunately, this idea is already in conflict with a previous ruling from the Seventh Circuit and thus, hopefully, dead on arrival.

I suppose the question I should be asking is why people get so hung up on the medium rather than the contents of the message? The case at hand involved graphically violent video games. I prefer a game called Civilization: Call to Power (and I loved its predecessor, Civilization, on my old Amiga, and later on the Mac). The goal of the game is to lead your civilization to global domination. Among other strategic actions, players must weigh the benefits of internal vs. international trade; weigh industrialization vs. environmental damage; budget for the competing concerns of scientific research and military hardware; and evaluate which government structure is best for their goals (despotism, fascism, democracy, communism, etc, all have strengths AND weaknesses to be evaluated and reevaluated as situtations change). If people got together face-to-face and discussed these issues, even in the context (or pretext) of a game, the conversations would have to be entitled to the highest level of First Amendment protection. Why should the standard be any different because the medium is new?

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