Blog 4 - Politics

The political climate around games is changing. Last year, there was a competition sponsored by the Federal Department of Education encouraging small businesses to make educational games and awarding hundreds of thousands of dollars of funding to the winner. This is fantastic. It shows that some lawmakers are aware that video games can have hugely beneficial effects. In fact, this competition's results showed that many of the winners implemented some of the ideas I presented in the introduction blog post. Specifically, content that automatically adjusts to provide an appropriate amount of difficulty, a way to integrate the game into standard instructional practice, and a way for teachers to receive and analyze data from the students' play sessions.  Other factors that were commonly present were story-based narratives, rewards, and competition, which are all ways that games currently engage players. This allows the transference of what is currently captivating about games to make it still captivating when the experience is educational.

Still, for every positive thing that happens in the realm of games in politics, there are about 5 more negatives. For example, in 2012, our own representative Frank Wolf submitted a bill to congress called the Violence in Video Games Labeling Act, which would require all video games rated E or above by the ESRB to contain a label reading "WARNING: Exposure to violent video games has been linked to aggressive behavior."

For those unfamiliar with the ESRB, it stands for the Entertainment Software Rating Board and they give all games sold a rating that goes from EC (early childhood), up through E (everyone), E10+ (everyone 10 and older), T (teen, recommended for 13+), M (mature, recommended for 17+), and AO (adults only, only sold to those over 18). Unlike the MPAA, which simply assigns a rating and moves on, the ESRB marks all rated games with content descriptors. For example, the M-rated game Halo 3 is rated M for "Blood and Gore, Mild Language, and Violence," while the M-rated game Dead or Alive: Extreme Beach Volleyball is rated M for "Gambling, Mature Sexual Themes, and Nudity." This allows parents to make more informed decisions about what games to buy for their children, as many parents are much more comfortable with violence than with sexual themes.*

As you can see, this label would apply to every game except those granted an EC rating. A game rated E is very unlikely to have any content that could be considered violent, so the warning would only serve to confuse consumers about the games they were buying, as seen in this mockup made by the author of this Joystiq article about the act, Jordon Mallory. Additionally, the "link" that the warning describes is a correlation between aggressive behavior and violent video game play. As we all know, correlation does not imply causation, and it makes sense that people who have aggressive dispositions would enjoy violent video games.

When you combine this with the fact that nearly every act of violence committed in this country gets blamed on the shooter's video game playing, it's clear that video games do not have a very positive reputation in politics. Even though I believe efforts like Games for Good are making huge strides toward getting mainstream acceptance of video games' ability to have positive effects, there is clearly a long way to go. The current bright side? It looks like it's going in the right direction

*As a side note, the ESRB was actually only created after the introduction of Mortal Kombat to arcades in 1992. Parents who considered all video games to be "for kids" and therefore kid-friendly were horrified to find that Mortal Kombat included very graphic and violent "fatalities" that players could perform. This led to the need for a ratings board to determine what games were appropriate for which age groups and allowed games to be marketed exclusively to adults, if they so chose.