Illinois Governor Vows to Appeal Ruling on Video Games

Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was horrified last year when he heard about a new video game called "JFK Reloaded." In the game, the player is placed in the precise place where Lee Harvey Oswald stood—the 6th-floor window of the Texas Schoolbook Despository—and challenges the player to recreate his three shots. The closer you get to matching the three trajectories of his shots (one in the President’s neck, one in his head, and one misses entirely), the closer you get to a perfect score of 1,000. The game was released on the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, and Traffic, the Scottish company that designed the game, offered a cash prize to the player who reached the highest score. Traffic called Reloaded a "docu-game" and said its purpose in creating the game was to disprove the conspiracy theories surrounding Kennedy's death. The game's creator, Kirk Ewing, argued, "We genuinely believe if we get enough people playing, we'll be able to disprove once and for all any notion that someone else was involved in the assassination."

Naturally, many people who heard about the game were astounded. A spokesman for Ted Kennedy said, "It’s despicable. There’s really no further comment." Gov. Blagojevich decided that enough was enough, and late last year he proposed a ban to bar stores from selling or renting extremely violent or sexual games to minors. The measure, which was to go into effect January 1, allowed fines of up to $1,000 for violators. In proposing the ban, Blagojevich equated violent games with pornography, liquor and cigarettes. "We shouldn't allow them (children) to go to stores and buy video games that teach them to do the very things we put people in jail for," he said. "Buying these games should be up to parents, not kids."

Supporters of the law agreed with the governor that children were being irreparably harmed by exposure to games where characters go on killing sprees or engage in sexual escapades. The assassination of President Kennedy was the straw that broke the camel’s back. But amazingly, several groups immediately filed suit against the law, saying that it restricted the rights of stores and manufacturers to sell legal products to anybody. Opponents pointed out that similar laws had been struck down successfully in other states. On Friday, U.S. District Court Judge Matthew Kennelly ruled that Illinois’ restrictions are unconstitutional, and he barred the state from enforcing the law.

In his ruling, Kennelly said that state officials had come "nowhere near" demonstrating that the law adheres to the constitution. He said that the law would interfere with the First Amendment and that there is not a compelling enough reason—such as preventing imminent violence—that would allow such interference. "In this country, the state lacks the authority to ban protected speech on the ground that it affects the listener’s or observer’s thoughts and attitudes," Kennelly wrote. David Vite, president of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association, told reporters, "It’s unfortunate that the state of Illinois spent taxpayer money defending this statute. This is precisely what we told them would happen."

Immediately after the ruling, Gov. Blagojevich said in a statement, "This battle is not over. Parents should be able to expect that their kids will not have access to excessively violent and sexually explicit video games without their permission."