What does your candidate think about gaming?

[TheGrandMom]

Who is the Gamer’s Candidate? | Edge Online

Who is the Gamer’s Candidate?

"If Hillary Clinton had won the Democratic nomination, the question of whom the avid gamer should vote for in the next presidential election would have been easy: anyone but Hillary Clinton. Her Senate history was scattered with failed attempts to regulate games and frequent calls to investigate industry bodies, leaving no question that a new Clinton White House would challenge the industry status quo.

But Clinton didn’t win, and with her defeat the situation has become murkier: To the voter whose single issue is videogames, who is now a better choice for president? Though the situation is no longer so clear-cut, Senator Obama and Senator McCain (as well as running mates Senator Joe Biden and Governor Sarah Palin) do differ in opinion on several political matters that are critical to industry health. These are the things you as a gamer should know before you cast your ballot in November.

Note: None of the text in this article should be taken as an endorsement from Edge-Online. Edge-Online has not endorsed either candidate.

Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL)

Of all the politicians involved in the presidential race, Obama has spoken the most frequently about videogames. He has publicly expressed his love for Pong, though he also admitted that Pong was the last videogame he has actually played. Still, a politician willing to admit to playing any sort of game is rare.

But then Obama has always been quick to show that he doesn’t hold the medium in the highest respect. He frequently references videogames as shorthand for youth inactivity and apathy, the most famous example of this being from a speech he gave in Austin in February 2007. There, he implored young people to “turn off the TV and stop playing GameBoy” because “we’ve got work to do.” In 2006, Obama’s campaign returned a $500 contribution from then-ESA president Doug Lowenstein. No reason for the act was ever given.

Obama does actually have an official stance on federal videogame regulation. Speaking to Common Sense Media in late 2007, he expressed his belief that the industry has the opportunity to regulate itself via better informational campaigns and tools for parents. If the industry does not take the chance to improve this system, however, he said his administration would indeed step in. In the same interview, the Senator stated that he would back a federal study examining videogame’s effect on childhood cognitive development.

According to the Obama campaign’s official stance, Obama is against levying additional taxes on the Internet. He is also the politician at the forefront of supporting federally mandated net neutrality—such laws would keep the Internet from becoming a tiered service where only certain content (from content providers willing to pay an additional fee) would be delivered at maximum throughput. These two issues could have a significant effect on the future of digital distribution, particularly for smaller, independent distributors. The senator is also strongly in favor of rigorously protecting intellectual property rights and redefining the FCC standard of “broadband” to a higher minimum bandwidth.

Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE)

Biden does not have a significant history with videogame-related issues, but he is notorious for being anti-consumer on issues of technology. He has historically been vague on net neutrality, and fought vigorously for the intellectual property concerns of the RIAA and the MPAA.


Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)

The most cohesive answer on what John McCain’s view on videogame regulation might be comes from a blogger reporting on the Senator’s summer 2008 New Hampshire town hall meeting. In this report, McCain is paraphrased as saying that parents should be responsible for choosing what games their kids can play, and that this should be done on a case-by-case basis. According to the report, he then used the videogames question to segue into a discussion on child pornography. Still, this hesitation to regulate the industry falls in line with the traditional Republican belief in “small government.”

The McCain campaign has also toyed with the idea of using games to market its candidate. Earlier this year, the group released the Facebook-based browser game Pork Invaders, a Space Invaders clone, to introduce young voters to McCain’s desire to cut government overspending.

Like Obama, McCain is against levying additional taxes on the Internet. He is also, however, against federally regulated net neutrality, which his official website states is an “unnecessary government intrusion.” This represents a critical difference between the two candidates. The McCain campaign has stated that McCain will support efforts to crack down on the “global epidemic of piracy.” McCain also advocates expanding broadband penetration into communities that currently lack the service, a stance he shares with his opponent.


Gov. Sarah Palin

Photographic evidence of Palin’s flight sim experience aside, comparatively little is known about the governor on any political issue, let alone one as fringe at the moment as videogames. Palin was once embroiled in a non-games related book censorship scandal; as the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, in 1996, she fired (and then rehired due to public backlash) a librarian for resisting a book ban. Palin has since gone on the record stating that her talks of censorship were “rhetorical.”

[Feba]

Re: What does your candidate think about gaming?

What a pointless article. It took them twelve paragraphs to say what would fit in a single sentence: "The presidential candidates and vice presidential candidates, respectively, are about the same."

Maybe two if you want to tack on "But in any case, Hillary didn't win, so we're in the clear."

[Malacite]

Re: What does your candidate think about gaming?

What Feba said. I'd be surprised if Obama actually stepped in. I mean, why stop there? Why not Television and the Music or Movie Industries? Where can you conceivably draw the line? (hint: you can't)


And he is right about parents telling their kids to be responsible and turn off the games and study. He's not going to force this (he can't) and is just speaking out as a concerned parent himself. As much as the notion ticks me off (being an avid gamer) I do see his point.


Anyhoo, moot discussion. The industry has proven it can regulate itself just fine. If parents want to buy their kids GTA IV, that's their (stupid) decision. Seriously sick of hearing about people bitching about violence and shit in games when they're willing to let their kids buy rap music, watch what they want on TV and go see R rated movies/buy M rated games.


RTFM!!! (The ESRB in this case)

[Akashimo]

Re: What does your candidate think about gaming?

Act, why this always happens when it comes to candidates? ><
They talk about 2 issues, can A is win with 2, but fails with 1, while can B is vice-versa.
McCain wins with his stands on the video game industry for regulations, while Obama wins for net neutrality. grr >< I may end up coin flipping at the polls.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: What does your candidate think about gaming?

Actually, this is just as important as many other issues, as it hits upon the net neutrality issue, which actually does have something to do with gaming. We've already seen Comcast attempt to tier off access, which the FCC recently slapped down. Now they're back to thier old bullshit with capping bandwidth, which is designed to discourage piracy, but actually infringes on MMOs, DL content for games and internet comminications of all kinds.

People need to let the government know that while we might pay for internet access through various parties now, it is rapidly becoming a major resource. Any attempt to regulate the control of information and ideas infringes on that First Ammendment and while the internet may not be any one country, those that provide access are bound to laws.

I don't want the government controlling it or defining net neutrality, either, I just want them defending it from manipulation. The First Ammendment is the most sacred of all our constitutional rights, when it is comprimised in any way, shape or form, the rest of what the Constitution stands for is endangered.

Gamers don't like Hillary because she was a threat to that, though thier reasons might have been more shallow and just wanted to keep having games like GTA.

I think on this particular issue, both VP candidates give me a little reason for concern. They might not have the power of thier presidential counterparts, but the fact that Biden held hands with the RIAA and Palin censored the distribution of a book is bothersome to me. These two will have a voice on various matters.

As for Biden and McCain, the "epidemic" of piracy is more talk than it is a problem. When the RIAA was running scared about people downloading MP3s, sales on lots of music was soaring. See, the recording industry was far more concerned that thier handpicked "stars" were losing out to other artists - both independant and otherwise - that people discovered, liked and went out and bought it.

Sony and a lot of companies have been obsessed with profit control, both regionally and nationally. "Radio plays what they want you to hear," we've heard it said and its almost always been true. Now that they're competing with the internet and iPods, we've seen a slight change in tune with the introduction of HD radio and there's more variety and attention to independants. God only knows how long that will last, but hopefully they'll stay wise and stop trying to decide what the public wants.

So all of this is actually really relevant, you guys just take it for granted.

[Feba]

Re: What does your candidate think about gaming?

I'm not talking about if it's important, I'm talking about the fact that the views are pretty much equivalent.

It's like saying "Which Candidate is better a better babysitter?"

A: "I'd play board games, cook some nice fried chicken, and send them to bed right on time."
B: "I'd play cards, and teach them how to if they don't know, reheat some leftovers, and read them a bedtime story."

There's really no difference. Obviously how someone treats your kids is an important issue, but unless the conversation is more like:

A: "I'd play board games, cook some nice fried chicken, and send them to bed right on time."
B: "I'd take them to some shady parts of town while I do errands, grab pizza for dinner, and let them stay up as late as they want."

it's not really worth talking about.

Akashimo: Please don't vote. Idiot. If you must, at least do a little research. Net neutrality and freedom of speech are undeniably important issues, but there is so much more out there to look at.

[Malacite]

Re: What does your candidate think about gaming?

Barack Obama and Joe Biden: The Change We Need | Technology

[MrMageo]

Re: What does your candidate think about gaming?

Meh even tho video games might be evil, tv might be evil, computers might be evil, movies might be evil. We still have to make the decision for ourselves, the tv and video games don't make us watch or play, we choose to do it, which is what a free country like canada or the USA is designed to offer, a freedom of choice. The government should just step back off of issues like this because its like trying to swim up a waterfall while throwing money at it.

Basically to sum up this is a dumb article and a waste of time. I choose and you choose what we want to do in our day to day lives. If the government starts making those choices for us we arent really free anymore are we.

[Karinya]

Re: What does your candidate think about gaming?

Video games can't be evil, only beings with minds can be evil.

Video games might be *dangerous*, like cars or guns or cigarettes. I don't think they are particularly dangerous, but I could be wrong. (Obama, apparently, is willing to study the issue - I don't really mind that because he also is against rigging scientific studies to say what you want them to say. So a study conducted under his administration will only reveal what the effects of video games actually are whether we know about them or not.)

If they are dangerous, though, that doesn't mean that we should necessarily completely abandon them, any more than we do cars or guns or cigarettes. It just means people need to be aware of the dangers and use them responsibly. (If actual harm from video games were discovered and proved, I wouldn't mind seeing a surgeon general's warning on them similar to what is on cigarettes. I doubt there could be enough undiscovered harmful effect to justify a program of licensing like we have for cars, for the simple reason that a harmful effect that big wouldn't be undiscovered.)


P.S. If there is a "voter whose single issue is videogames", that voter is a moron. You can't play video games while you are being tortured in Cuba because somebody thought you might be a terrorist and the government decided proof was optional. Or when you're dead because the mine you worked in collapsed after the mine safety organization was taken over by a mining industry executive. Or when your house was flooded by a hurricane after the federal government ignored warnings about the inadequacy of the city's disaster safety. (Well, I suppose if you took a mobile system with you when you evacuated you could play until the batteries went dead. But any games you left behind would probably be destroyed.) I could go on, but I think you get the point - there are many issues more important than video games and you can only play video games at all if you are already reasonably well off on those other issues.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: What does your candidate think about gaming?

Net neutrality and freedom of speech are undeniably important issues, but there is so much more out there to look at.

Such as?

With the exception of obvious issues such as the economy, gas prices and foreign policy aside, I'm interested to hear what you think is "major."

[Malacite]

Re: What does your candidate think about gaming?

Actually, in most cases (90%+) Video Games make you less violent since it serves as an outlet for those tendencies (assuming you're a sane person to begin with)

[Feba]

Re: What does your candidate think about gaming?

Such as?

With the exception of obvious issues such as the economy, gas prices and foreign policy aside, I'm interested to hear what you think is "major."

Well, freedom of speech is one of, if not the most important thing in the world to me. So nothing is more important than that; and if I were voting purely on that basis it would have to be Obama, simply because of Palin's book banning past. Not that the RIAA doesn't support censorship, but at least that's not Biden saying "I want these thoughts GONE!".

I'm not really sure what in the world you mean by "economy, gas prices and foreign policy aside" though. That's like saying "Well, ignoring how much the car can carry, how reliable it is, and how many miles it gets to the gallon, which car do you like most?"-- those are all pretty important questions when you're considering a car. I mean, I don't really consider gas prices to be an important issue on their own personally, but excluding the economy and foreign policy doesn't make any sense to me. Are you just saying "besides those"?

If that is the case, then it's hard to find something that doesn't go back to one of the two. Education is important, although that goes back to the economy; and even foreign policy in a sense. Better education puts us in a better situation on an international level, both in terms of jobs and markets and bringing in more money, and in terms of having more smart people keeping us safe (Think of how quickly WWII would've been over without some of the technology Germans had. I've even seen things discussing how, if Hitler had followed the advice of some of the designers, he might actually have won.) Obama wins there, because he has shown himself to be very pro-education, and wanting to improve education; I'll admit I'm not very familiar with McCain's position on the subject (and really, how could I be? Even he doesn't care about his issues, as shown by the convention.) but anyone who would put someone so pro-ignorance (again, book banning, as well as refusing sex education and promoting creationism in schools) on their ticket can't care too much about the issue.

Protecting (or at least, respecting until you are able to change it) the constitution is obviously important. To me, Obama wins there, on the basis of his previous constitutional law experience, his support of reasonable and sane gun control (allowing people to own guns, with better background checks, and restrictions to try to keep them away from criminals, especially youth) instead of a complete ban, and simply the policies which the GOP has put into place over the past 8 years and McCain doesn't seem to have any rejection of (although, again, even McCain doesn't care about his issues). Obama had a speech the other day where he said that even if he wanted to take away guns, he couldn't, because he didn't have the votes in congress [to pass a constitutional amendment]; that shows a respect for the constitution and how the government should work that you don't see with the GOP, skirting around the edges of legality and hoping that nobody brings it to court.

I think you're misinterpreting what I said, though. I didn't mean "sure, those are important, but they aren't what you should vote on". I meant "these are very important, but there's a lot of other stuff out there you should look at before you vote." This is one of the main reasons I'm against representative democracy at all; it forces people who might have multiple things that are very important to vote against one or more of those issues to elect the 'lesser evil'. It forces you to vote against yourself, unless you want to devote your life to politics, and then you still only get to make the decisions in the single role you're elected to.

[Omgwtfbbqkitten]

Re: What does your candidate think about gaming?

There are issues that I honestly have started to toss into what I like to call the "Boogyman" wagon instead of a bandwagon. Abortion, evolution vs. creationism, gun control - these are "issues" that haven't really gone anywhere because they're so darn useful for scaring you into voting for what coincides with your most likely viewpoint.

Abortion people like to pull the Supreme Court card on. Always worried about who the next president will be and who he'll appoint to the court. If the democrats get one, its like people think abortions will skyrocket. If a republican gets in, the dems think he'll appoint people to overturn it. Well we've had both sides in office the last 16 years and nothing has changed either way. The only angle of the debate that has changed is how we protest that (and the DNC and RNC, apparently). First Ammendment again.

Evolution vs. Creationism - Honestly, I don't see the problem with just teaching both sides. I don't think people are dumb for believing in creationism. Oh, right, they call it "intelligent design" now, very politically correct-sounding, but w/e. Anyway, my concerns are more to the end that teachers have been fired over talking about creationism when Evolution doesn't exactly go to great lengths to figure out how life began. Somehow life just happened. Very scientific, I must say. Maybe Schrodinger's cat was there or maybe he wasn't.

Oh, hi2u censorship, btw.

And, ah yes, gun control. Of the three, this seems to at least have made marginal progress by contrast. Thing here is no matter how much more deeply things get controlled, guns will fall into the hands of the wrong people and shit will still happen. The concern of most people is that we're going to great lengths to limit how the good guys get them when cracking down on illegally obtained guns should probably garner more focus. Guns don't kill people, people kill people and people who kill people more often get thier guns in a back alley than go through a waiting period at the gun shop. That or they get thier hands on Daddy's gun.

No easy answers here, but politicians seem to think there are, which is do nothing or restrict the good guys further. Both awesome solutions

Biden and Palin both helped supress speech in some form, too, Feba. We can't go lesser of two evils there, its the same evil. Biden just supported it on a corporate level while Palin went to ban a book outright. Biden's support affected people on a larger scale, though several others are involved there. Palin tried it locally and got smacked down.

For a time, I had the honor of interviewing lots of bands, both big time and smaller acts alike. When I asked them about the issue of piracy, which I always did, the big time acts always expressed some dislike of the industry and the RIAA. Some of this so-called piracy came from the artists themselves, who leaked the tracks they were forbidden to put on the albums. It was some good stuff too, but some exec decided it wasn't cool and he didn't want the masses to hear it.

That's just as bad as banning some books and firing a librarian for standing up to speech. That actually kinda goes back to the teachers being fired over creationism. Censorship again, but this time by science so it must be OK. To hell with someone else's livlihood so long as dangerous ideas are surpressed.

[Feba]

Re: What does your candidate think about gaming?

Honestly, I don't see the problem with just teaching both sides.

Ok. How about we teach both sides of every issue then, for fairness?

When we teach the Holocaust, we should also teach about the idea that it's all a hoax, and never happened. Same with the moon landing. When we teach the solar system, we should also teach about how the earth might be flat. When we teach biology, we should give equal weight to the process of sperm fertilizing an egg and the possibility that babies are brought by a stork.

Do you see the problem? First of all, there are dozens of creation theories out there, and if you want to be fair you'd have to teach all of them. Secondly, if you're doing it in the name of teaching alternate theories, you have to teach an alternate idea to hundreds or even thousands of very important events and phenomena. Nobody is against giving people access to this sort of bullshit, kids should be free to learn about it WHERE IT IS APPROPRIATE-- in their freetime, when they're exposed to lots of bullshit. It would take a huge amount of time and resources to teach it in the classroom, and honestly our students don't have time for that. If we wanted to teach every side to every story we might make slightly more informed students; at the cost of most of them dying before they have a high school education.

when Evolution doesn't exactly go to great lengths to figure out how life began.

You need to go back to science class. Evolution has nothing to do with how life began. That would be abiogenesis. And we're making plenty of progress in that field. Evolution deals SOLELY with the fact that life changes over time. Evolution never promises to explain the beginnings of life-- the fact is, we don't know how life began on earth. We can get pretty good ideas of how it COULD have happened, again through studies of abiogenesis, but I doubt we will ever know precisely. Teaching any creation theory, including scientific ones, over another in a classroom is deceptive and a waste of time.

That said, we most likely will be able to synthesize life from inorganic components soon enough, and we have plenty of theories that show how it COULD have happened. The explanation is far from 'it just happened', and even if it were, it wouldn't discredit evolution, because evolution has nothing to do with it. It also wouldn't do anything to prove creationism.

As for abortion and gun control, I'm not really sure what you're talking about, those aren't really huge issues to me, and I didn't bring them up (I mentioned gun control as an example of protecting the constitution, not as the subject itself). They're important too, of course, but I don't see who you're talking to.

As for censorship, as you point out, the MAFIAA's censorship a matter of executives deciding not to put out copies. That's no worse than a publisher deciding they don't want to print a book, really. If you really want to get your book or album out there, and the executives won't let you do that, you're free to self-publish it; and that fact is made much easier through the existence of the internet. If the government says you can't distribute something, you're SOL, and have no way to distribute that speech.

As for not allowing creationism in schools, it again has nothing to do with censorship anymore than not teaching Holocaust denial or Flat Earth or 9/11 truth. You wouldn't want someone teaching your children that the Holocaust never happened, and it's all a massive hoax arranged by Jews for some nefarious gain. That doesn't mean you'd censor them; you'd let them go rant on forums and KKK rallies and associate with Neonazi's, that's the cost of freedom of speech; but you sure as fuck wouldn't let them teach your children.

Oh, and by the way BBQ, if you really care about the first amendment, you really ought to know that the Supreme Court ruled teaching creationism in schools unconstitutional a very long time ago.

[Malacite]

Re: What does your candidate think about gaming?

Why couldn't we have evolved from cats...