Editor's note: Evan's entertaining history of censorship in media is the perfect complement to a day spent digesting yesterday's barbecue and apple pie. Read it and get educated! -Brett

If you keep on top of video game news, you've probably heard that the United States Supreme Court is about to rule on whether or not video games are protected by free speech. Specifically, the court will rule on the constitutionality of California's AB 1792, which gives violent video games a legal designation as "harmful matter," and therefore makes their sale to minors punishable by law.

Whether the Supreme Court upholds or rejects this bill at this point, it is doomed to the same fate as every other attempt to allow the government to selectively censor media: It will at some point be overturned in favor of industry self-regulation. Despite the claims of anti-game groups, video games as media are fundamentally no different from movies, comic books, television, or music, and attempts to legislate them will similarly fail.

What this bill and others like it represent are the late phases of a cycle that has played out for as long as there have been both new, popular forms of entertainment and someone to stand up and claim that they are destroying the fabric of society. The details may be different, but the basic story remains the same.

Phase 1: The New Hotness

Every new medium begins in obscurity. The first movies were simple and mostly served to demonstrate film technology without regard to narrative or structure. So we had films like Fred Ott's Sneeze (1894) and La Sortie de l'Usine Lumière à Lyon (1895). We might look at these now and think that people were pretty easily entertained back then (especially once you know that people actually paid to see that second one), but of course they'd never seen anything like it before.

Film had to wait for technology to improve in order for the media to reach its full narrative potential, and until that happened films existed as fascinating novelties with no aspirations of social value.

The first comic book was probably Histoire de M. Vieux Bois (1827) by Swiss caricaturist Rodolphe Töpffer, but for the first century of their existence comics were largely dismissed as light, escapist fare intended for children. Even as the medium developed and its audience grew, society as a whole paid little attention.

This was also the case with video games; the Cathode-Ray Tube Amusement Device (patented in 1948) and Tennis for Two (1958) were incredible inventions at the time, but they were regarded as closer to fads or experiments than anything of cultural significance.

Phase 2: "F34r Our L33tness."

A medium can only putter about on the edge of culture for so long; it either dies of disinterest or rises into the mainstream, and the line between these two is profitability.

By 1906, the business of making movies had grown into a full-fledged industry, and films themselves had developed into a predominantly narrative medium. The first feature-length film (The Story of the Kelly Gang, 1906) and the development of advanced filming techniques such as multiple shots and movable cameras led to the creation of bigger, more ambitious projects. As the art developed, the audience expanded, and by 1908 there were about 10,000 movie theaters in the United States.

Later, comic books saw a much larger leap in popularity than film after the debut of Superman in 1938 and the beginning of World War II in 1939. Both the appeal of superheroes and the need for affordable entertainment made comics extremely profitable and thrust them into the mainstream, and the market expanded steadily during the war.

Video game development remained primarily the domain of hobbyists and the chronically bored until the early 1970s, when the first coin-operated arcade cabinets and home consoles went into production. Unfortunately, the industry expanded too quickly, leading to crashes in 1977 and 1983, but the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1985 turned video games into a viable, relatively stable multi-billion dollar industry by the end of the '80s. However annoyingly, "Nintendo" became synonymous with "video game," and the industry grew around them.

Phase 3: "Woah...Slow Down."

Commercial success creates competition, and competition leads to the pushing of metaphorical envelopes. In the race to win a larger piece of the audience's expendable income, competitors within an industry experiment with technology and subject matter in order to produce unique experiences. And this is where the trouble begins.

During the Great Depression, movie studios decided that audiences might not want to watch downbeat movies, so they flooded the market with lighthearted musicals. Predictably, there were more musicals released than any audience could reasonably be expected to watch, so studios looked for ways to innovate.

Warner Bros.' solution was to begin producing crime films based loosely on current events. Movies like Little Caesar (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) depicted gritty, realistic stories of criminals doing criminal stuff, usually dying horrible and much-deserved deaths. These movies were pretty much the anti-musicals.

The belief that films promoted immorality was not new, even at this point (an article in the Chicago Daily Tribune on April 23, 1907 blames a boy's theft of $7,000 on "Five Cent Thrillers"), the combination of Warner's gangster films, Mae West's thinly-veiled dick metaphors, and the Marx Brothers' crazy asses led to a renewed call from religious and civil groups for censorship. This movement proceeded largely unchecked, largely due to a 1915 Supreme Court decision that concluded that movies were a business, not an art form, and as such were not protected by the First Amendment.

By the end of World War II, superheroes ruled comic books. Sensing a market for alternative stories, William Gaines, publisher of Entertaining Comics (EC), started a "New Trend" of horror, crime, science fiction, and fantasy titles like Tales from the Crypt and Shock SuspenStories. EC was not the only publisher of horror comics, but their comics were by far the most successful, featuring the standard zombies, vampires, werewolves, ghouls, and, perhaps most famously, the ironic twist ending.

Attempts to blame comics for the outbreak of postwar juvenile delinquency began in the late 1940s, but it wasn't until 1954, with the publication of Dr. Fredric Wertham's book Seduction of the Innocent, that widespread public outcry began. Wertham's book claimed, among other things, that children who read violent comic books are encouraged to commit acts of violence, and that the relationship between Batman and Robin might turn children gay.

Wertham's claims and the resulting public concerns were enough to provoke a Congressional hearing on juvenile delinquency, during which comic book publishers were made to defend their books against the claims that they were promoting youth violence and encouraging immoral behavior. Despite eloquent and reasonable testimony from Gaines and other industry defenders, the hearings cast the comic book industry in a very bad light. The Senate suggested to the industry that it change its tone and content, with the implicit threat that if they did not do so, it would be done for them.

In the '90s, the video game industry continued to draw in new gamers, and graphics had improved to the point that it was no longer possible to convince even the most gullible of parents that a dead game character's death spasms were actually a celebratory dance of some kind. Games like Doom, Mortal Kombat, and Grand Theft Auto gave parents, politicians, and self-described experts all new reasons to fear for the future of humanity.

This period saw the rise of now-disbarred lawyer Jack Thompson, the Fredric Wertham of his time, who claimed, among other things, that the rumbling of a Sony DualShock controller is "operant conditioning, behavior modification right out of B.F. Skinner's laboratory," and that the optional boy-on-boy kissing in Bully made it undeserving of a "Teen" rating, because he's not homophobic at all.

The Senate conducted hearings in 1993, during which witnesses testified that Night Trap is bad (but for different reasons than you or I would testify that it is bad), that children who play violent video games are encouraged to commit actual acts of aggression, and that overexposure to simulated violence desensitizes players to real-world carnage. Once again, a government takeover seemed like a very real possibility.