Do video games make children violent?

The ESA has opposed previous attempts to mandate enforcement of game ratings, getting courts to overturn laws in the state of Washington; St. Louis County, Montana; and Indianapolis that made it illegal to sell violent games to minors. Courts in each case agreed with ESA arguments that games are constitutionally protected speech, and thus age restrictions must be limited to the type of discretionary systems used for movies, books and other media.

The Interactive Entertainment Merchants Association, a trade group representing game retailers, has consistently opposed such legislative measures as unnecessary and invalid. "The bottom line on this matter is that retailers have made the public commitment to partner with parents, and quite frankly you simply cannot legislate sound parenting," group president Hal Halpin said in a statement reacting to Yee's California bill. "We again welcome responsible parties interested in making a tangible difference on the issue to work with us, rather than pursue a legislative course proven unconstitutional time and again."

Markels likened current attempts to legislate video game restrictions to previous efforts aimed at comic books, Web sites and movies. "Every new medium has to fight to be to be protected," she said. "We're just asking for consistency. Why should a James Bond video game be treated any differently than the book or movie it's based on?"

Critics say games are, in fact, different from other forms of media. No book will require you to aim a virtual gun at somebody's head to move the plot forward.

Leland Yee, speaker pro tem of the California Assembly and author of a new bill to restrict the sale of violent games to minors, said interactivity makes games different. "Unlike movies, where you passively watch violence, in a video game you are the active participant and making decisions on who to stab, maim, burn or kill," Yee, a child psychologist, said in his statement accompanying the bill. "As a result, these games serve as learning tools that have a dramatic impact on our children."

Joanne Cantor, a communications professor at the University of Wisconsin who has conducted influential research on how media affects children, said it's well-established at this point that watching violent media desensitises kids to real-world violence and prompts them to act more aggressively.

Cantor said games, by their nature, tend to be more harmful than passive media. "The effects are compounded because the player participates in causing the outcome, and they're directly rewarded for killing," she said. "The other thing is that with violent video games, kids typically are at it much longer than they would be with TV or a movie. Kids can get wrapped up in these for hours."

Cantor, a prominent critic of the complex rating system applied to TV programming, said the ESRB system is more comprehensible, but it's still not enough for parents whose firsthand knowledge of video games may have stopped at "Ms. PacMan."

"Most people who don't play these video games have no idea what's in them," she said. "What we need is more information for parents on what exactly is in these games. If parents knew there was an opportunity to visit a prostitute, decapitate somebody and watch the blood spurt... I think they'd feel much more strongly about not letting that in their homes."

Washington's Fenty said he's convinced games such as "Grand Theft Auto" are contributing to juvenile crime in his city. "I've talked to people who worked with at-risk youths in Washington DC, and they hear it directly from teenagers' mouths that they emulate these games," he said. "That's led directly to a rash of juvenile car theft in Washington. These youth spends hours and hours doing that kind of thing in a game, and then they go out and emulate it in the community."