Was the brief filed as a simple reactionary action or is it part of a more concerted effort to fight the growing number of court cases similar to this one?

The statement was important because it brought together a fairly broad coalition of scholars—across different disciplines, across different institutions, across different nations—who were ready to challenge the assumption that video games somehow caused or promoted real world violence. The reformers often act as if they had the entire academic community behind them and it simply isn't the case. Most criminologists would not consider media violence to be a significant factor in promoting violent crime. Most work in the anthropology of play would find the idea that significant numbers of people confuse play and reality to be absurd. Most work on media consumption would find this idea of people being programmed by games to be simplistic and naive as a way of understanding the complex ways people interact with media. Most psychologists would reject the stimulas-response models underlying media effects research as hopelessly out of date. And even the media effects researchers themselves tend to qualify their findings much more narrowly than comes across when they are presented by activists and politicians. Increasingly, these scholars are joining forces to speak out politically or participate in the legal process to challenge attempts to regulate media content. I wish I could say this amounted to a full fledged movement. For the moment, it is largely ad hoc with these scholars working in concert with a range of civil liberties groups, such as the Free Expression Network, which helped to pull together this particular document. Yet, the good news here is that the debate about video games is increasingly on the agenda of groups who care about the core Constitutional protections.

Surprisingly, the game industry and gaming community has shown little reaction to such a troubling decision like the one in St. Louis. Why do you think that is?

Most game designers I speak with are terrified to speak up in defense of their own industry for fear that they will become the targets of these moral reform groups and will thus face significant economic losses. Their lawyers tell them to remain silent and to rely on their lobbying groups to launch the defense. This is unfortunate on many levels. First, many of people in the game design community think deeply about issues of media violence and the social impact of their products and there has been enormous soul searching within the industry in the wake of Columbine. I have seen some real step forwards in terms of how violence gets dealt with in contemporary games and the result will ultimately lead games to become a more sophisticated medium. But, these efforts are hidden from view and thus the industry doesn't get credit for those steps forward. Part of what gives the impression that I am an industry appologist is that I am willing to stick my neck out and talk about these issues when most of the industry people are cowering behind their office doors. Secondly, I think the IDSA significantly bungled its handling of the Limbaugh case, treating it as a foregone conclusion rather than insisting that the judge examine a broader range of products or listen to expert testimony. They got caught with their pants down in St. Louis and I think many in the industry are frustrated that they were unable to adequately promote their interests. Thirdly, I think the game industry has often failed to have a larger view of the development and promotion of games as an emerging art form; they have been so focused on immediate payoffs that they have been unwilling to date to make real investments in promoting scholarship or professional training about their industry, in developing educational games which might exploit the medium's full potential, in experimenting with creative projects which may not be blockbuster hits, in expanding their potential audience to untapped demographic groups, or to educating the public about the debates surrounding their industry. The Film Industry has historically been much more proactive in each of these areas—though they have been less and less so as film has been absorbed into larger media conglomerates. All of this has allowed the media reformers to depict them as crazed, unethical, irresponsible, and uncaring, as cigar chomping crooks exploiting American children, and I think the public needs to hear the most thoughtful voices in the industry more often, needs to know more of the behind the scenes thinking which goes into making a compelling game.