ABSTRACT
As America, the world leader in entertainment media, increasingly specializes its economy toward its strengths, more and more different kinds of technological imagery and graphics and entertainment will be developed, and each of these will inevitably seek constitutional protection. Violent video games are just one manifestation of a whole media culture of violence. Besides showing the harmful behavioral effects of violent video games, studies have also demonstrated the ways in which those games are marketed to children. With the average child playing ninety minutes of video games each day, experts estimate that children comprise up to 60 percent of the video game audience. The Eighth Circuit placed great emphasis on its finding that video games possess some kind of storyline, as if this was the vital component of protected speech. The lawsuits relied on research that characterized violent video games as "firearms trainers" and "murder simulators."
