The landmark free speech case about videogames, Schwarzenegger vs. EMA, will be argued before the Supreme Court on Tuesday.  The case was brought by the State of California in an effort to overturn a ruling by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in which the state’s law restricting the sale of violent videogames to children was struck down. 

The law treats videogames differently from any other media by regulating violent content; all other laws on how content can be sold focus on sexual content.  A wide range of advocates, both from inside the videogame industry and from comics (see “Stan Lee Stands Up for Videogames,” for example) have objected to the law.  The Comics Book Legal Defense Fund has filed an amicus brief, comparing the California law to the attacks on comics that decimated the industry in the Fifties (see “CBLDF Joins Videogame Case”).

If allowed to stand, a whole new class of content could be regulated, and while videogames may be especially vulnerable to this line of attack (proponents of the law argue that games are different because players actually participate in simulated violent acts, rather than experiencing them passively), other media would be likely to follow.