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Is the Game Media Being Oblivious?
MaryAlan writes "The National Summit on Video Games, Youth, and Public Policy was this weekend, and almost no one from the game media showed up. In fact, the game industry seems to pretty much be ignoring the whole event. There's an article up on GamesFirst, which attended the summit, that criticizes the mainstream game press pretty hard for not attending. Apparently only one game journalist showed up. From the article: 'The video game media owes it to our readers to come to events like this and listen, come here and think, and come here and base our editorials on the reality of what's being said instead of an interpretation of the talking points that are published afterwords. Too many of the people discussing these issues in forums do so based on the works of the game media, and too few in the gaming media are spending the time to make it justified.'"
No, there are no real reporters in the game media. Those working in the game media are either in the pockets of the game publishers, or themselves without personal interest or experience in covering events where they would apply reportorial tradecraft (i.e., interviewing people they do not know). It's laziness, inexperience, and graft.
It really doesn't matter if the gaming companies attend or not because they are not going to be listened to anyways ...
This is very similar to what happens whenever an Oil company shows up to an environmental meeting, which believe it or not happens quite often; oil companies hire dozens of environmental scientists to ensure that they're doing as little environmental damage as is possible. (On a side note, most environmental damage is done because of govenmental decisions; oil is shipped from Alaska rather than piped through Canada because the US govenment's regulations, and shipping is prone to accidents). No matter what evidence they demonstrate to show that there is no connection between CO2 and global warming nothing they show will ever be listend to.
Basically, what I'm trying to say is that the Gaming Industry could show up to an event like this and have God as a witness and no one there will listen to them when they say videogames do not cause children to perform violent acts.
Did the conference planners send out multiple invitations to the gaming press well in advance of the event? Or did they just announce it on their own website and expect everyone to find out about it on their own?
This guy's the limit!
Well, my entire generation has played video games, and the murder rate has gone down.
As an aside, isn't it strange that for some reason, the people who want to ban video games because they're dangerous and might possibly show a slight statistical increase in violence tend to be the same people who call it a 'socialist nanny state' when you're talking about regulating food safety or the environment or something that could actually save thousands of lives at once, contrary to this video game tripe, which could allegedly cause a few dozen murders here and there over time?
It's been a long time.