Star-Advertiser - Hawaii supports regulating violent video game sales

Finishing off the videogame theme for tonight:

Hawaii has joined a growing list of states supporting a contested California law to ban the sale of violent video games to minors.

The other day, the topic was Analects 2.3 (“Lead the people with rules… and they will avoid punishments but be without shame,” &c.) and the importance of non–law-based social regulation. In the comments, Corey quoted A Man for All Seasons:

“What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil? … And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned round on you - where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s, and if you cut them down — and you’re just the man to do it — do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”

I think a case like this one is a good place to clarify my feelings about law. Roger Ames often remarks that the meaning of Analects 2.3 is that law is a last resort. Law is what we do when the other options on the table have failed.

So, if we look at the case of selling violent videogames to children, the question we need to have before we create a law is “Have non-legal remedies already failed or will they predictably fail?” I think the answer here is “No.” While it is true that the game industry has a completely unhealthy obsession with violence (among other means of corrupting the youth), that doesn’t mean that the law in question will help resolve the issue. Notice that the law only restricts the sale of games to minors, it does not prohibit the creation or distribution of games. However, in practice most major retailers already have a voluntary policy in place of restricting the sale of games rated MA and above. So, adding the proposed law would add more regulation without having much impact on the actual practices of retailers.

The danger here is that the law is being treated as a means of symbolic communication. “We think violent games are bad, so here’s something, even though it won’t change anything.” This is supposedly a conservative sentiment. However, the truly conservative thing to do is to be wary of the unnecessary wielding of the governmental power. We do not know what future laws today’s law will be taken as the precedent for. Games appear to be a new form of communication (“speech” in legal terms), so any new restriction on them needs to be motivated by something like the proverbial man shouting fire in a theater, least we open the door to restriction of the freedom of speech. In this case, however, we do not observe any empirical linkage between the popularity of violent games over the years 1970–2010 and the level of violent crime during those same years. Videogame usage has skyrocketed, but violent crime has mostly been going down since the end of the crack boom. Absent some more overt connection between games and social harms, the use of the law as a tool of symbolic chastisement is a dangerously frivolous way of expressing our disapproval of games. The sage does not speak unless he expects his words to be thereby realized.