Video games can often get incredibly bad press; controversial antics happening in the virtual world are quickly becoming popular scapegoats for politicians to blame social and criminal problems on, with no repercussions or ill effects on anyone. Right?
Well some people don’t seem to think so, it appears a few people got tired of biased and quite embarrassingly inaccurate news reports on violent games and so did something about it. One man in particular, British Labour MP Tom Watson, has been defending video games in parliament, he is the reason we have seen so little political fallout over the controversial game ‘Modern Warfare 2’. He pretty much put a halt to another MP’s campaign before it managed to build any momentum at all.
Watson never intended to combat gaming’s negative press alone however, he has made a pretty interesting advocacy group on facebook see it here on facebook, where people are able to talk to this game savvy politician and share ideas with one another.
There has been some pretty interesting ideas raised; in particular there have been talks about whether enough is being done to stop little kids playing 18 rated games or if there should be an older age rating added, this seems to be the source of much negative press after all.
Another interesting issue was the idea of an additional ‘reality based’ rating, which tells customers if the game will reflect the real world in a perhaps distressing way.
What do all those other horrible MPs who probably all hate games and think that gamers are horrible and probably want to ban games forever or something think of this? Well they think it’s pretty cool and have shown an interest in how to connect with gamers, as well as the issues that have been raised with gaming recently. So that’s nice of them.
Although some games do perhaps go too far, much like some movies, books or plays, it is really good seeing someone thinking rationally and fairly about it, and stopping some of the bizarre anti games campaigns getting out of hand. I’m sure MP’s from the previous generation to mine have been sticking up for older media forms for a long time.
By Daniel Rowbotham