It is now the law of the United States that video games are art. It is now the law of the United States that video games are a creative, intellectual, emotional form of expression and engagement, as fundamentally human as any other.

“Like the protected books, plays and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas — and even social messages — through many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialogue, plot, and music) and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player’s interaction with the virtual world),” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the Supreme Court on Monday, in a case that arose from a California effort to ban the sale of violent video games to minors. “That suffices to confer First Amendment protection.”

Well, I’m glad we’ve gotten that taken care of.

It isn’t every decade that a new form of media officially joins the spoken and written word as a member of the special class of protected endeavor we consider vital to the functioning of pluralistic, democratic society. The last big one was film, about 60 years ago.

As Justice Scalia pointed out, the Supreme Court originally found motion pictures unworthy of First Amendment protection. (You know, that freedom of speech thing). In 1915 the court ruled that states could broadly censor films because movies could be “used for evil.” It took until 1952 for the court to grant film constitutional recognition. (It bears noting that television historically has not been entitled to full First Amendment protections from the state because television uses the public airwaves.)