Some would say video games have nothing to do with real-world violence. We are somehow supposed to believe that the images children are constantly subjected to have absolutely no effect on children who view them, that they pass through children's consciousnesses like sand through the hourglass of our lives. Every week it seems, a new study comes out confirming the link between fictional violence and real-world violence, but these opponents never budge.

How many more studies can they possibly need? And don't be fooled into thinking the problems end with violence alone. Video games do more than just inspire violence; they cause rickets! It's no wonder that even seasoned gamers are starting to come around, recognizing the violence that has always been present in video games. It's clear that regulation of such violence is advisable and necessary; what remains is to determine whether such regulation is permissible under our Constitutional scheme of government.

Some argue that the First Amendment prevents the Federal government from regulating the violent content of video-game products. Even if (for the sake of argument) we accept the idea that such regulation is a form of censorship, it doesn't necessarily implicate the first amendment. The purpose of this legislation is to encourage the video-game industry to abide by tougher voluntary standards of decency. Self-censorship is no censorship, because no speech is created and censored.

Moreover, limits on the First Amendment, rooted in common-law traditions, have been recognized since its ratification in 1791. Libel and slander, along with obscenity, are not protected because they inhibit the free flow of information and productive dialogue by corrupting the channels of discourse with misinformation and filth. Likewise, restrictions on the dissemination of copyrighted speech are empowered under Article I, because copyright restrictions encourage free speech; in a world without copyright, no one would have an incentive to speak at all.

The same is true of video-game violence. Such violence imperils our cherished freedoms of speech by removing our children's capacity for rational thought. Though intellectually stimulating games (such as software implementations of chess and parchesi) do exist, their numbers are dwarfed by the heaps of games whose gameplay consists of nothing more than pure violence, games that bypass the higher-order rational-processing regions of the brain and tap into the raw evolutionarily primitive regions. Studies have shown that violence correlates with misfunction of the pre-frontal cortex. As if rickets and other deleterious health effects weren't enough, video games may be causing actual brain damage.

So if video games are such a menace, then why stop with the Media Marketing Accountability Act? Why not eliminate violent video games from adults' consumption as well as children's? Well, the answer is twofold:

1. Adults have more-developed emotional and neurological functions than children do and so aren't affected as much by the influences of video-game violence. Just as alcoholism is sharply curtailed by limiting the possession and consumption of alcohol to mature adults, the far-reaching effects of video-game violence can be curtailed by limiting its consumption to adults who, by definition, possess the maturity necessary for healthy information processing. The growing incidence of violence at high schools underscores the simple fact that young people, by virtue of their being young, lack the cognitive functions necessary to interpret the dangers of their world and so need adults to process their world for them.
2. Outright prohibition, alas, never works; it merely creates a vibrant black market for the prohibited item. To return to the alcohol analogy, Prohibition during the 1920s demonstrated that it was impossible to remove alcohol outright from the daily life of adult Americans. The imposition of a legal-drinking age, in contrast, has generally been a resounding success. Alcohol producers have a legal adult market for their liquors, and simple enforcement prevents young people from illicitly acquiring booze. With the video-game industry, we need only demonstrate that adults comprise a sufficient market for the industry's wares, a task that shoudln't be so hard in light of the fact that adults are the only members of our population who actually earn an income to purchase video games with.

In short, by restricting video-games sales to adults and prohibiting the video-game industry from marketing their violence directly to children, we can go a long ways towards eliminating the violence that plagues our society. Though future evaluation will decide whether we have gone far enough, it is clear that we must at least go this far. To do otherwise would be to abdicate our responsibilities as mothers and fathers of our most precious and vulnerable commodity: our children.