It Begins - The War on Video Games

I have said many times that for a medium to become mature it has to undergo 4 phases. Movies went through them. So did television, comic books, jazz music, rock, rap, television and The Internet.

1. The Me-Too Expansion. Every company in the world sees how profitable the new medium is and tries to enter the market, even though they have an almost universal lack of insight into the particular medium or market. The companies that survive this phase, which can come in waves, usually go on to become paramount in the industry. Websites like YouTube and MySpace are living through this right now.
   
2. Fear Mongering. Every ill that is presently befalling our children is blamed on the new medium. Hearings are held, regulations are passed, ratings are drawn up, taxes are proposed and news anchors breathlessly ask "Won't anyone please think of the children!" Most, if not all of the fears are overblown exaggerations if not out right lies.
   
3. The Art House Expansion. Pretentious artistes 'discover' the medium and proceed to churn out a ton of obtuse, joyless, technically inferior dreck. It is labelled as 'brilliant' and 'revolutionary'. Anything that came before is 'obsolete'. Anything that most people would consider fun is 'plebean'.
   
4. Maturity. This stage begins when the men and women that grew up with the medium begin assuming the reins of power in society. There is no social stigma attached to the medium, it is simply another from of entertainment. What was once taboo is now accepted, if not hokey. The medium is defined, for the first time, by itself and not by the mediums that preceeded it.

Just about any media, any form of entertainment, you could name falls into one of these categories. So it should come as no surprise that Hillary Clinton is looking to pile on the video game industry. Placing a sin tax on video games, and it is a sin tax, is moronic. It's a cash grab, an expansion of the nanny-state, and pandering to elderly voters at the expense of young voters. But claiming that "people will be implanting chips in our children to advertise directly into their brains and tell them what kind of products to buy" may be the dumbest thing to come out of a politican's mouth this month (and that includes Ted Stevens). Either way, it's the opening salvo in a new war on Gaming.

technorati tags: videogames, Politics,