14 DAY TRIAL // At the moment, California, a rather cash-strapped state, is spending quite a lot of money to mount a Supreme Court challenge related to a videogame law aiming at restricting sales of violent titles. The law was overturned twice, judged to be unconstitutional, but the State of California seems to be determined to fight it all the way.
And a conservative group, the Eagle Forum, has decided to help by offering an amicus brief with the Supreme Court, basically supporting the law enacted in California.
This would not make the news if it not were for the language used in the brief and the way it ties videogames with all the problems of modern society, from sudden death to bad grades for kids, and school shootings. Most of the arguments used have already been proved to be untrue by other groups, like the direct link between videogames and violent behavior.
GamePolitics has obtained the brief and has highlighted a few of the passages that assault the videogame industry. Eagle Forum says that “The First Amendment does not render our nation’s youth defenseless against the predatory, billion-dollar video game industry that churns out increasingly graphic blood and gore for impressionable minds to imbibe” and goes on to say that videogames are “deviant,” “disturbing,” enablers of “mass killings,” “harmful,” “predatory,” and the cause of “rampages of murder and other heinous crimes.”
We talked about the fact that Barack Obama had mentioned videogames as being a health hazard, because they limited the time that children spent moving around, and as a threat to the quality of education, because they took up time that should have been devoted to studying. But after seeing the hate that Eagle Forum is targeting at videogames, the language used by the President of the United States seems to be balanced and natural.