Regulations, Nations, and Freedom of Speech： A Cultural and Legal Analysis of Video Game Regulation

As the video game industry has firmly established itself as an art form as well as entertainment, certain games and content have led to legal issues in several countries. These court cases usually fall under freedom of speech and expression. The author has studied three of the five top video game producing and purchasing markets in the world--the United States, Japan, and the Republic of Korea--to explore how each country regulates this industry These three countries explicitly guarantee their citizens the freedoms of speech and expression, but, due to cultural differences and historical interpretations of those rights, the policies concerned with gaming have been handled differently by each country. The argument of the author is that historic interpretations of freedom of speech in legal cases can inform how video games and content controversy will be decided by the constitutional courts in these three countries. Japan and the Republic of Korea, for example, have historically interpreted freedom of speech rights in a way that benefits the citizenry as a whole, marking them as more collective. The United States has historically interpreted freedom of speech and expression in a way that benefits individual citizens, marking it as individualistic. These cultural aspects of how legal decisions are reached has affected the relatively new technology of video games