By Cameron Hills
Source
Article: Opinion:
Meeting with Biden is a mistake for the game industry by Kris Graft,
January 9, 2013.
In the wake of
the Sandy Hook school shooting Gamasutra Editor-In-Chief Kris Graft suggests
just meeting with VP Biden creates the appearance the Video Game Industry is
part of the violence problem. Neither blanket
denials nor playing ostrich head in the sand is going to solve the problem of
violence or improve our perception with the public. Only a balanced and measured response through
funding new research, proper public relations (PR) and advertising work, and
adult level conversations through lobbying and direct talking to political
leaders will move this industry in the proper direction.
On January 16th,
President
Obama announced a $10 million research program to probe the link between
Violent Video Games and gun violence (Tassi, Forbes.) While the Forbes article noted that VP Biden
said “he didn’t believe an actual link between violent games and violent
actions was there,” a January 16, 2013 article by
Frank Cifaldi on Gamasutra used the ominous language “Obama asked Congress to
fund research into determining a link
between video game violence and real life violence.” This sounds like the US Government will be using
slanted research to hammer our industry’s image. We (Graft) need to fund proper, double blind,
studies from accredited and respected researchers in the psychology and
sociology fields. They must test the
dual theses that games have causal links to violence and ways current and future
games can act as pressure release valves on potentially homicidal
individuals. Simply throwing money at
unqualified researchers or ad-hoc studies will not help.
So how can we
improve our image? In his editorial,
Editor Graft starts out “If you're meeting with Joe Biden about gun control,
you're stating that you are part of the problem, and therefore, you are part of
the problem.” While engaging in the
popular PR past time of “Spin Doctoring” is as about as appealing as spackling
makeup on a pig, we need to have a multi-faceted approach through education,
facts from our research programs and advertising programs targeted to those
individuals and groups who would paint our industry with the same brush as the
National Rifle Association (NRA.) That education also extends to our
politicians.
Like it or not,
Politicians hold the keys to the legislative process and no amount of studies
will sway their opinions once they get on their soap-box. We need to engage leaders of both federal and
state/provincial levels to both help inform opinion and give us warning of
future misguided efforts to legislate our industry.
The video game
industry is filled with creative people.
By working together with the proper professionals in these other fields
we can keep a sane discussion about what video games can do to solve our problems.
