Has such a label been a burden to carry?

Sometimes. Increasingly, the anti-game activists have been directing their fire towards me, trying to depict me as a paid apologist of the video game industry because I work closely with the industry to encourage the development of educational games and because I do workshops within the game industry to encourage creative experimentation and alternatives to the current ways of representing violence. David Grossman called me a "prostitute" the other week, for example, and Phil Donahue tried to besmirch my character on national television by raising the specter of corporate funding of my research in a context where it was impossible to respond to or contextualize those charges. So, let me be clear here: I have never received any money for my work against games censorship and in fact, I have spent a great deal of my own money on that cause. I don't charge any more for speaking to industry groups than I charge for speaking to educational institutions and in many cases, I get paid less. The games industry does not need me as their spokesman and indeed, I would be a most unreliable industry spokesman since I am often pretty critical of some of the decisions which the industry is making. I see myself much more as a consumer advocate and a civil libertarian than an industry advocate.

But, none of this is new. Moral reformers have always targeted those people who work for change within the system, tending to prefer throwing rocks from the sidelines to rolling up their sleaves and trying to foster creative solutions to their concerns. The same thing happened when comic books came under fire in the 1950s, for example, where Frederick Wertham, the leading anti-comics activist, tarred and feathered a range of educators and progressive reformers who sought to work with the industry to improve the cultural and educational content of comics. The assumption always gets made that it is impossible to speak to the industry without being corrupted by it. Yet, to make any real impact on the character of popular culture requires one to actively engage with the industries that produce that culture.

This past September, you joined 29 other scholars in filing a brief challenging the recent St. Louis ruling. Can you fill us in on the case and the significance of the decision?

On April 19, U.S. District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Sr. issued a decision, finding "no conveyance of ideas, expression or anything else that could possibly amount to speech" within contemporary video games, declaring that they therefore enjoy no constitutional protection. Limbaugh had been asked to adjudicate an appeal by the Interactive Digital Software Association of a Saint Louis law that restricted minor's access to violent or sexually explicit video games. The decision was astonishingly expansive, reaching a verdict about the current state and future development of a complex and evolving medium based on a cursory and superficial investigation.

While individual books like Lady Chatterley's Lover and Lolita have confronted government censorship, no one has ever considered them representative of all printed matter. The constitutional claims of a medium have historically rested on our understanding of its highest potential-not its worst excesses. Several decades of legal disputes over pornography have, if nothing else, determined that the works must be taken as a whole, rather than read in parts, to determine whether they were lacking in literary, political, or intellectual value.

But, somehow, games are different. Saint Louis County had presented the judge with videotaped excerpts from four games, all first-person shooters and all the subject of previous controversy. The IDSA had submitted videogame scripts designed to show their underlying dramatic structure. What does it suggest that neither side asked that the judge to actually play the games? His ruling misidentified Resident Evil as the "Resident of Evil Creek," misspelled Mortal Kombat, and incorrectly capitalized Doom. In other words, the judge couldn't even be bothered to get the titles correct for three of the four works he examined. All of the games considered were more than five years old, suggesting that the judge understood the medium as static rather than as evolving. Neither side offered anything resembling expert testimony into the artistic potentials of games.

The impact of the decision from a legal perspective is likely to be minimal. It runs in the face of a whole series of other court cases at approximately the same level which have reached diametrically opposite conclusions. It will, in all likelihood, be overturned on appeal. But what it has done has reinvigorated the anti-video game reform movement which had disappeared off the radar for a while; it has sparked a whole new cycle of negative press about games and game players. Activists like David Grossman or groups like the Lion and the Lamb have felt empowered to launch national campaigns against Grand Theft Auto III. During the sniper attacks on Washington, we even saw one activist claim that the message, "I am God," was proof positive that the sniper was a gamer, assuming that it had to refer to the God Game genre. It says something about those so-called moral reformers that they imagine a world that has become so secularized that the only possible place anyone could learn about god would be playing a video game!