A Senate subcommittee examines violent content in video games

What happened

Senators Joseph Lieberman and Herb Kohl convened the hearing after seeing footage from a digitized fighting game and from a live-action horror title in which players watched and intervened in staged attacks. Proceedings mixed testimony from child development researchers, parents' organizations and industry executives, and the legislators' position was explicit. Produce a workable labeling system, they said, or Congress would consider writing one. No statute was ever passed, and the threat itself was the instrument of the whole exercise.

The industry's appearance did it no favors. Executives from the two competing console makers used part of their testimony to criticize each other's standards, one pointing to a rating scheme it had already introduced and the other to its stricter content policies, and the disagreement was reported as evidence that voluntary self-regulation was not working. Publishers, arcade operators and computer software groups each proposed different systems, leaving the committee with several incompatible answers to one question.

The substance of the dispute was not resolved in that room. Researchers disagreed about what effects, if any, interactive violence had on children, and they still do. Advocates of regulation emphasized parental information and marketing practices; the industry emphasized speech protections and the difficulty of drawing usable lines. What the hearings did settle was procedural. Within a year publishers had organized a single ratings board, and the question moved to state legislatures and eventually the courts.

The world at the time

Congress was already examining violence in television and film, and games had just become a mainstream consumer product with content aimed at teenagers. Consoles carried no labeling of any kind, so a parent had no way to compare a cartridge with a film rating. Two hardware companies were competing aggressively for older players, which sharpened every disagreement about standards.

What it changed

The Entertainment Software Rating Board was organized in 1994 and began assigning ratings that autumn, and major retailers agreed to stock only rated titles. Legislators in numerous states pursued laws restricting sales to minors, an effort that ended when the Supreme Court held in 2011 that games are protected speech. Hearings on game content recurred periodically for decades.