BROOKE GLADSTONE: Video games, like some magazine covers, music and movies, can be racy, misogynistic and violent. For the most part though, games, even disgusting ones, are protected as a matter of free expression. So the question currently working its way through the courts in St. Louis and Seattle is: whose job is it to keep the kids away from the adult games? In St. Louis there was an ordinance that made it illegal to sell or rent violent games to children; a federal panel struck that down as an infringement on free speech. Officials are now appealing that ruling. In Seattle, something being called The Video Game Violence Bill will make it illegal to sell to minors video games depicting violence against uniformed police officers. That law is being contested too. For Henry Jenkins, director of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, games must be protected so that the game makers have the freedom to explore and grow the medium, despite its sometimes unsavory manifestations.

HENRY JENKINS:I think what we're looking at is the emergence of a powerful new entertainment form that's going to transform how we tell stories, how we think about society in the 21st Century. The comparison I made in Reason Magazine was between Grand Theft Auto III which is a contemporary controversial game and Birth of a Nation. As someone who teaches film regularly, we always have to struggle with Birth of a Nation because it transformed the language of cinema; on the other hand it's a vilely racist work. From the very beginning the film was deeply, deeply controversial. When I look at something Grand Theft Auto III I'm looking at the same issue. [SOUNDTRACK FROM GRAND THEFT AUTO III] Because on one hand I think critics are right - this is a profoundly anti-social work - a work where you get to sleep with prostitutes and murder them, a work where you club civilians and steal their automobiles and so forth. On the other hand it has dramatically transformed the kinds of experiences games offer - creating this very richly detailed space - a very open-ended space where you can pretty much do anything in that environment you could do in an actual city. And as you do so it then introduces this question of choice and consequence which is I think long-term what video games are going to be about.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Let's talk about another very popular game that's also been criticized called Black and White.

HENRY JENKINS:You're God in that game, and you're trying to rule over a population of creatures. One of the easiest and efficient ways is through fear. You could, on the other hand, take the slower process of building their trust.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:I've always thought that the game in which you are most like God is SIMS where you create actual worlds, and although there's no violence written into SIMS, organized crime I guess has begun to emerge within the SIMS world!

HENRY JENKINS:The SIMS is a game that I think most of us would see as ethical and benign. Will Wright does something really interesting which is that if a character dies in the SIMS, the other character mourn the loss. So death has consequences and has meanings. Yet what we discover is when people first got the standalone SIMS a lot of them experimented with torturing their SIMS, walling them into rooms and letting them starve to death; catching the house on fire. Now as it's moved to a multi-player game on line there's been reports of fairly systematic attempts to organize crime. Now I find that interesting because on the one hand when we talk about Grand Theft Auto III which is an open-ended world, there are players who are trying to play that game with a minimal amount of mayhem, because it's harder to play that way. On the other hand, with the SIMS which is a very ethical world, people are experimenting with doing evil or anti-social things, and I think that says something about the current state of games -- that as the games become more open-ended -- if they become more highly responsive - if they allow you to have more choices as opposed to sort of the early games which were very much like shooting galleries where you just killed anything that moves --then people are going to have to make their own choices about what is moral and what is ethical.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: What is the intended audience for these games, and I don't mean just what the marketers say -but for real.

HENRY JENKINS:Statistically what we're seeing is that the overwhelming majority of people buying games -particularly for the PC - are over the age of 18 - that the game market has gotten older and older. As it's done so I think one of the reprehensible things is the game industry has largely turned its back on manufacturing games for young children. The question around the censorship battle then is do we want to restrict this medium to content that's appropriate for all members of the family, essentially stifle its ability to explore more mature themes and cut it off from where the real growth has been economically -that is for older players. That's sort of what happened in the comics in the 1950s where the Comics Code cracked down and made it impossible to continue to appeal to the mature readers of comics and so for 20 years we were stuck in a place where the only thing you could see were Richie Rich and Mickey Mouse and I think it would be regrettable if that was the case. On the other hand, it is very important for the industry to provide parents with the kinds of information they need to make intelligent decisions.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:You know going back to that piece in Reason magazine, you observed that the fact that these mysterious game environments are beyond the technical savvy of many parents, so, so they don't feel as in control and, and this creates a climate for I think you said "moral panic."

HENRY JENKINS:Parents are feeling out of control. They feel like popular culture is threatening to them because there's so many choices today and they're having trouble finding intelligent information about it. My fear is though that that - that sense of being out of control is being played upon by various groups who have their own agendas who want to regulate the content of culture, who want to stigmatize certain segments of society, and I, I think they're real repercussions of simply giving over to fear rather than trying to make rational decisions based on intelligent information.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:What about the impact on retailers? I mean just prior to this interview we discussed Wal-Mart's cherrypicking of the artifacts of popular culture and leaving a whole lot of it off their shelves -- however, Grand Theft Auto and all those games have a great presence on their shelves.

HENRY JENKINS:The majority of games in the United States are sold by a handful of chains of which Wal-Mart is probably the most important. Most of us believe that with the pulling back from state or-- and local ordinances as a way of getting at this problem, the reform groups are going to now take aim at the retailers and really try to organize boycotts or put pressure on them simply not to carry the games, and if that happens, then a whole sector of entertainment is going to disappear.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well Henry, thank you very much!

HENRY JENKINS: Thank you!

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Henry Jenkins is director of Comparative Media Studies at MIT and he joined me from Georgia Public Radio.