By Ben Berkowitz

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A group of international scholars on Wednesday filed a brief urging a federal appeals court to strike down a St. Louis ordinance restricting children's access to violent video games, calling the law and other proposals like it "profoundly misguided."

Thirty-three scholars, representing institutions such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of California at Los Angeles and London University, filed the brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in St. Louis, Missouri.

"Efforts to address real-world violence by censoring entertainment are profoundly misguided," the group said in its brief.

In mid-April, a federal court in Missouri upheld a St. Louis County ordinance requiring parental consent for minors to purchase video games that depict graphic violence.

The Interactive Digital Software Association, an industry trade group, opposed the ordinance, calling it both unnecessary and a violation of free speech rights, and appealed the lower court ruling.

The brief filed by the scholars on Wednesday was organized by the Free Expression Policy Project, a New York-based think tank founded in 2000 that has filed a number of legal briefs in past in court cases opposing laws restricting access to media.

In their brief, the group of scholars, who included social psychologists and media experts, questioned the relationship between media violence and real-life violence.

"Most studies and experiments on video games containing violent content have not found adverse effects," they said. "Researchers who do report positive results have generally relied on small statistical differences and used dubious 'proxies' for aggression, such as recognizing 'aggressive words' on a computer screen.

"Indeed, research on media violence more generally has also failed to prove that it causes -- or is even a 'risk factor' for -- actual violent behavior," the brief said.

The current case is not the first one federal courts have considered covering restrictions on access to games.

St. Louis's ordinance was tentatively enacted one day after a different federal appellate court issued an injunction against an ordinance enacted by the city of Indianapolis restricting access to violent video games in arcades.

In May, a California congressman introduced a bill in the House of Representatives that would make it a federal crime to sell or rent video games showing violence, prostitution or drug use to anyone under the age of 17 without parental consent. The bill has been under committee review since the summer.