Supreme Court Sees Video Games as Art

June 27, 2011|By John D. Sutter, CNN

The “God of War” games from Sony are considered violent, but the Supreme Court says such games still have protection as art.

Maybe it helps for the nation’s highest court to say it, too?

Video games are art, and they deserve the exact same First Amendment protections as books, comics, plays and all the rest, the U.S. Supreme Court said Monday in a ruling about the sale of violent video games in California.

California had tried to argue that video games are inherently different from these other mediums because they are “interactive.” So if a kid has to pick up a controller and hit the B button — over and over again until he starts to get thumb arthritis — to kill a person in a video game, that’s different from reading about a similar murder, the state said.