14 DAY TRIAL // The designer working on the Disney project Epic Mickey has said that video games are at the moment facing the possibility of more censorship that movies did at the same moment in their evolution, years ago.
The legendary game designer, who has worked on such transformative titles like Deus Ex, Thief and System Shock, has talked to Gamasutra at a panel discussion at the Penny Arcade Expo and has said that the film industry managed to keep most attempts at censorship at bay by making sure that no so called “questionable content” appears in mainstream movies and by adopting the Motion Picture Association of America ratings early.
Warren Spector believes that the continuous attacks that video games have been subjected to in the last few years are rooted in the idea that “games” and “play” are linked to children and need to have their content scrutinized in order to make sure that the vulnerable category is protected from nefarious influences.
In his earlier Keynote at the Penny Arcade Expo Warren Spector celebrated the way gaming has evolved to be more inclusive and said that it has reached a Golden Age.
He also evolved “November 2nd could be the start of a timeline where we’re the first entertainment medium denied first amendment protection.”
The Supreme Court will be hearing a case that involves a California law that explicitly bans the sale of video games to children under the age of 18.
A lower court has decided that the law infringes on First Amendment rights but the state decided to appeal the decision and there are some fears that a conservative majority might say that the law does not breach the Constitution.
The law would not amount to actual censorship of video games but it might promote the idea that video gaming is used to push questionable content to vulnerable groups.