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Editor's note: Evan's entertaining history of censorship in media is the perfect complement to a day spent digesting yesterday's barbecue and apple pie. Read it and get educated! -Brett
If you keep on top of video game news, you've probably heard that the United States Supreme Court is about to rule on whether or not video games are protected by free speech. Specifically, the court will rule on the constitutionality of California's AB 1792, which gives violent video games a legal designation as "harmful matter," and therefore makes their sale to minors punishable by law.
Whether the Supreme Court upholds or rejects this bill at this point, it is doomed to the same fate as every other attempt to allow the government to selectively censor media: It will at some point be overturned in favor of industry self-regulation. Despite the claims of anti-game groups, video games as media are fundamentally no different from movies, comic books, television, or music, and attempts to legislate them will similarly fail.
What this bill and others like it represent are the late phases of a cycle that has played out for as long as there have been both new, popular forms of entertainment and someone to stand up and claim that they are destroying the fabric of society. The details may be different, but the basic story remains the same.
Phase 1: The New Hotness
Every new medium begins in obscurity. The first movies were simple and mostly served to demonstrate film technology without regard to narrative or structure. So we had films like Fred Ott's Sneeze (1894) and La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon (1895). We might look at these now and think that people were pretty easily entertained back then (especially once you know that people actually paid to see that second one), but of course they'd never seen anything like it before.
Film had to wait for technology to improve in order for the media to reach its full narrative potential, and until that happened films existed as fascinating novelties with no aspirations of social value.
The first comic book was probably Histoire de M. Vieux Bois (1827) by Swiss caricaturist Rodolphe Töpffer, but for the first century of their existence comics were largely dismissed as light, escapist fare intended for children. Even as the medium developed and its audience grew, society as a whole paid little attention.
This was also the case with video games; the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device (patented in 1948) and Tennis for Two (1958) were incredible inventions at the time, but they were regarded as closer to fads or experiments than anything of cultural significance.
Phase 2: "F34r Our L33tness."
A medium can only putter about on the edge of culture for so long; it either dies of disinterest or rises into the mainstream, and the line between these two is profitability.
By 1906, the business of making movies had grown into a full-fledged industry, and films themselves had developed into a predominantly narrative medium. The first feature-length film (The Story of the Kelly Gang, 1906) and the development of advanced filming techniques such as multiple shots and movable cameras led to the creation of bigger, more ambitious projects. As the art developed, the audience expanded, and by 1908 there were about 10,000 movie theaters in the United States.
Later, comic books saw a much larger leap in popularity than film after the debut of Superman in 1938 and the beginning of World War II in 1939. Both the appeal of superheroes and the need for affordable entertainment made comics extremely profitable and thrust them into the mainstream, and the market expanded steadily during the war.
Video game development remained primarily the domain of hobbyists and the chronically bored until the early 1970s, when the first coin-operated arcade cabinets and home consoles went into production. Unfortunately, the industry expanded too quickly, leading to crashes in 1977 and 1983, but the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985 turned video games into a viable, relatively stable multi-billion dollar industry by the end of the '80s. However annoyingly, "Nintendo" became synonymous with "video game," and the industry grew around them.
Phase 3: "Woah…Slow Down."
Commercial success creates competition, and competition leads to the pushing of metaphorical envelopes. In the race to win a larger piece of the audience's expendable income, competitors within an industry experiment with technology and subject matter in order to produce unique experiences. And this is where the trouble begins.
During the Great Depression, movie studios decided that audiences might not want to watch downbeat movies, so they flooded the market with lighthearted musicals. Predictably, there were more musicals released than any audience could reasonably be expected to watch, so studios looked for ways to innovate.
Warner Bros.' solution was to begin producing crime films based loosely on current events. Movies like Little Caesar (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) depicted gritty, realistic stories of criminals doing criminal stuff, usually dying horrible and much-deserved deaths. These movies were pretty much the anti-musicals.
The belief that films promoted immorality was not new, even at this point (an article in the Chicago Daily Tribune on April 23, 1907 blames a boy's theft of $7,000 on "Five Cent Thrillers"), the combination of Warner's gangster films, Mae West's thinly-veiled dick metaphors, and the Marx Brothers' crazy asses led to a renewed call from religious and civil groups for censorship. This movement proceeded largely unchecked, largely due to a 1915 Supreme Court decision that concluded that movies were a business, not an art form, and as such were not protected by the First Amendment.
By the end of World War II, superheroes ruled comic books. Sensing a market for alternative stories, William Gaines, publisher of Entertaining Comics (EC), started a "New Trend" of horror, crime, science fiction, and fantasy titles like Tales from the Crypt and Shock SuspenStories. EC was not the only publisher of horror comics, but their comics were by far the most successful, featuring the standard zombies, vampires, werewolves, ghouls, and, perhaps most famously, the ironic twist ending.
Attempts to blame comics for the outbreak of postwar juvenile delinquency began in the late 1940s, but it wasn't until 1954, with the publication of Dr. Fredric Wertham's book Seduction of the Innocent, that widespread public outcry began. Wertham's book claimed, among other things, that children who read violent comic books are encouraged to commit acts of violence, and that the relationship between Batman and Robin might turn children gay.
Wertham's claims and the resulting public concerns were enough to provoke a Congressional hearing on juvenile delinquency, during which comic book publishers were made to defend their books against the claims that they were promoting youth violence and encouraging immoral behavior. Despite eloquent and reasonable testimony from Gaines and other industry defenders, the hearings cast the comic book industry in a very bad light. The Senate suggested to the industry that it change its tone and content, with the implicit threat that if they did not do so, it would be done for them.
In the '90s, the video game industry continued to draw in new gamers, and graphics had improved to the point that it was no longer possible to convince even the most gullible of parents that a dead game character's death spasms were actually a celebratory dance of some kind. Games like Doom, Mortal Kombat, and Grand Theft Auto gave parents, politicians, and self-described experts all new reasons to fear for the future of humanity.
This period saw the rise of now-disbarred lawyer Jack Thompson, the Fredric Wertham of his time, who claimed, among other things, that the rumbling of a Sony DualShock controller is "operant conditioning, behavior modification right out of B.F. Skinner's laboratory," and that the optional boy-on-boy kissing in Bully made it undeserving of a "Teen" rating, because he's not homophobic at all.
The Senate conducted hearings in 1993, during which witnesses testified that Night Trap is bad (but for different reasons than you or I would testify that it is bad), that children who play violent video games are encouraged to commit actual acts of aggression, and that overexposure to simulated violence desensitizes players to real-world carnage. Once again, a government takeover seemed like a very real possibility.
Phase 4: "Well Fine, Assholes."
At this point in the cycle, things look pretty dire. With the enemies of media unified against them, industries are faced with two options: regulate themselves or submit to the mercy of the government.
The film industry of the early 1930s did not have the First Amendment or public sentiment in their corner; people saw Hollywood as an immoral and corrupt place that produced immoral and corrupting films. Will H. Hays, head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association (later the Motion Picture Association of America), had developed loose guidelines for film content in 1927, but he lacked the authority to enforce it so it went largely ignored. In 1930, however, with the pressure on, the MPPDA instituted a formal Production Code, based on the teachings of Catholicism, to delineate which content was and was not appropriate for American films.
Studios still ignored the new rules until Hays created the Product Code Administration, an authoritative body with the power to authorize or deny films based on their adherence to the Code. No film could be released unless it had received a certificate of approval from the PCA. Eventually Hollywood got on board the Code Train, and the Production Code determined content for over thirty years.
On the heels of the devastating Senate hearing on comic books, William Gaines went to other comic book publishers and told them that they had to work together if they were going to keep their industry alive. The others agreed, and they created the Comics Magazine Association of America, with its own code and enforcement agency, the Comics Code Authority.
Because a restrictive code was not at all what Gaines had suggested — and because stipulations like the ones forbidding the use of words like "horror" and "terror" in comic titles obviously targeted EC — he initially refused to join the CMAA. However, faced with an inability to sell unapproved comics to wholesalers, he had to give in. EC transitioned to medical dramas and other, more experimental titles, but its business in comics had effectively ended.
In a rare sign that society might have actually learned something from history, video games skipped the enactment of a code entirely. Instead, individual developers created ratings systems for their own games. In late 1994, however, the industry founded the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB) to provide ratings for all games released in the United States. The ESRB served a similar purpose to the Code Authorities in film and comic books, but without all the crazy religious people.
Industry use of the ESRB is ostensibly voluntary, but hardware manufacturers and many retailers will not license or sell unrated games.
Phase 5: "Okay…I Guess You're Cool."
The Production Code for movies stayed in place until the late '60s, although for years filmmakers and studios persistently tried to find ways around it. Eventually, the industry at large simply started ignoring the MPAA and the Code, as MGM did with Blow-Up (1966):
MPAA: You can't release that. It has boobies.
MGM: Well, we're going to.
MPAA: Well, you can't.
MGM: Well, we just did.
MPAA: Well…you shouldn't have.
In 1968, with so many refusing to respect its authoritah, the MPAA finally abandoned the Code in favor of a ratings system. Originally there were only four ratings: G (for "General"), M (for "Mature"), R (for "Restricted"), and X (for "X"), but the "M" rating became "GP," and then "PG," and then in 1984 the MPAA threw an intermediary "PG-13" in there because that bit with the heart in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was probably a bit much. In 1990, "X" became "NC-17," and the ratings have remained the same ever since.
The creation of a ratings system more or less stabilized the industry, and courts have consistently rejected the censorship and banning of films at the state and local level (in 1952 the Supreme Court overturned the decision that denied Hollywood First Amendment rights). While controversies still come up from time to time, film as a medium has achieved acceptance and legal protection.
The Comic Book Code is technically still in place, but by the '70s it became fairly optional — if a book didn't receive CCA approval, the publishers just left the Code Seal off of the cover and sold it anyway. The Code itself has been modified to allow more mature themes and content, but since most comic dealers will sell books whether they've been approved or not, it has become meaningless.
The video game industry, without all that pesky Code approval to worry about, has spent the time since the inception of the ESRB refining the ratings system, and contrary to the title of this section, games have not yet reached the level of public acceptance (or, at least, permissibility) of film or comic books.
This is where we are now: The Supreme Court is going to rule on whether games can be selectively banned, despite the fact that history has proven that every attempt to ban or censor entire media has either failed outright or been overturned later. It will be no different with video games. As understanding, acceptance, and truth spread, people will run out of reasons to blame games for the things that were wrong with society before we even had video games.
Video games will win this debate because film won this debate; comic books won this debate; and music, television, and books won this debate. And in fifty years when people are freaking out about how much time the kids are spending in those damn holodecks, holodecks will win this debate. It is just a matter of time.
That's not to say it will happen automatically, or even quickly, but we can speed things up by getting involved, talking to people, and most importantly by not allowing the enemies of fun to put us on the defensive. They are wrong, they are misinformed, and they will lose this argument, because we have more than just reason and the truth on our side.
We also have history.