There is no way that I’m going to be as good at an eloquent rant against right-wing anti-gaming conservatives as they guys over at penny-arcade. There certainly does seem to be a growing rise in the number of politicians that want to ride the gaming bandwagon for all it’s worth.

This is happening both in America and Europe, for the sake of sensationalism British journalists in such open minded papers as the Daily Mail are taking tragic events and using them to drive their own personal agenda. Tragic stories where a child has been killed by a knife attack, suddenly become the fault of violent video games rather than the product of a disenfranchised youth and poor parenting. These events are tragic and something that we should be working to preventing from happening again, but a knee jerk reaction against the latest form of popular media isn’t the answer.

Games come with ratings surely there’s a more inherent problem in the fact that people aren’t adhearing to these ratings rather than the games themselves. Why should parents be allowed to duck the responsibilty? They let their 12 year old kid play a game that’s clearly 18 rated of course it’s not going to be suitable for them! With parenting like that, they probably aren’t on hand to then help the kid by clarifying what’s right and wrong, what’s reality and what’s virtual.

/rant over, and seemingly coherent one.

That’s by no means a comphrensive summary of what can be a more complex arguement addressing fundamental beliefs on the role of the state in day to day lives, etc. The reason for the rant was the ESA decision to fund $50,000 - $100,000 into pro-game industry politicians. This is an important step for the industry, it’s a rapidly growing industry worth billions and it needs to start punching its weight politically. The UK should be following this lead and investing in some serious lobbying, stop allowing people to take easy swipes at the industry because they don’t think we’ll fight back.