Gnawing….

Misery loves company; gnawing does, too. It’s been gnawing at me lately for some reason: Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association. So I have to share this gnawing with you.

Entertainment Merchants was the case, decided in June 2011, where the Supreme Court overturned a California law that prohibited the sale of “violent video games” to minors and required that such video games be labeled “18” on their packages.

Justice Alito remarked, without dissenting, that “the violence is astounding. . . . Victims are dismembered, decapitated, disemboweled, set on fire, and chopped into little pieces. . . .” More: There is a theme of “’ethnic cleansing’ [of]. . . African Americans, Latinos, or Jews” in the video games.

Back to me being gnawed.

The part that gnaws me is Justice Scalia’s suggestion for the Court that these vile video games are like. . . literature. Here, Scalia enlists this quote from Judge Posner: “[T]he better [literature] is, the more interactive. Literature when it is successful draws the reader into the story, makes him identify with the characters, invites him to judge them and quarrel with them, to experience their joys and sufferings as the reader’s own.”

What? Maybe I’m missing something here but that can’t be an analogous description for the violent games prohibited to minors by California. In these games, you—the player—are besieged by people trying to kill you and thus you have to kill them before they do you. You thus don’t have time to “identify with the characters” and “judge them and quarrel with them” or “experience their joys and sufferings as the reader’s own.” The enterprise of the game, made unequivocally clear before you even have thought about purchasing it, is that you either kill or are killed.

And the action is relentless and heart-pounding. For you are not reading about someone else killing enemies, raping women, and shooting up a mall. In the video game, you are killing your enemies, raping women, and shooting up a mall, or risk the danger that you will be targeted. And there is no time to reflect on why you’re doing these things other than to stay alive and indulge your most atavistic impulses.

There is no time to think, reflect, deliberate, and, most certainly, there is no time to “judge the characters and quarrel with them.” In short, when you are busy killing people who are trying kill you, you don’t do those conventional things you do for literature.

Scalia points to violent scenes in Homer, Dante, the Lord of the Flies; violence has been part of our best literature, he insists. But these works do invite the reader to do those things that Posner recognizes about great literature: identify with the characters, invite him to judge them and quarrel with them, to experience their joys and sufferings as the reader’s own.

The violent video games don’t any of these things.

Lots of other things can be said about the games, and why the California law should have been declared constitutional. But the analogy to literature was gnawing.