GH Editorial: Politicians Fiddle While the US Burns

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GH Editorial: Politicians Fiddle While the US BurnsPosted 5:19pm Mon Jun 26, 2006 by The Gaming Horizon Archive Tags: archive, editorial, politics

This article was originally published on Gaming Horizon, GameBump's predecessor. It was written by Nate Francis.

Politics in the United States has always had its sordid little moments. Even leaving behind the historical missteps among earlier generations of politicos, we need look back no further than the 1990's to begin assembling an impressive catalog of silliness, incompetence and downright malfeasance from state legislatures all the way to Pennsylvania Avenue. In this age of 24/7 wall-to-wall news coverage, our national political edifices have captured our imagination, scorn and contempt like no other.

Remember me? I'm guilty. Any gamer can kick back on his beanbag, toss down a few shots of warm Coca-Cola, and immediately bring to mind any of dozens of congressional, judicial and presidential scandals. I mean, just riffing off the top of my head, we have:

Bill Clinton perjures himself in grand jury testimony
Oklahoma judge Don Thompson loses his job after being caught using a penis pump under his robes while court was in session
House Speaker Tom Delay retires from the House in the midst of grand jury probes into the legality his various political activities
Representative William Jefferson is videotaped accepting tens of thousands of dollars in bribe money; the cash is later recovered from his freezer
President Bush launches a war on Saddam Hussein's Iraq based on faulty and/or contrived intelligence
Vice President Dick Cheney shoots his hunting partner in the face
Representative Cynthia McKinney assaults a capitol police officer
Representative Patrick Kennedy wrecks his car at 2am in Washington D.C. while under the influence (of something); escapes a sobriety examination by claiming he was "on his way to a vote"The entirety of Congress allows comprehensive illegal immigration legislation to die
And now, word that both Dennis Hastert and John Murtha could be in ethical trouble for extremely shady earmarks

Clinton, Thompson and Delay, of course, have since left public service. The rest of those miscreants? Still currently "governing" you and I.

Seriously. With politicians of this caliber, who really needs enemies like Iran and North Korea?

Now, these paragons of virtue are once again turning their vigilant eyes to electronic gaming. Why?

The creamy filling of evil. In the pantheon of societal ills, we can make a reasonable argument that game-related violence falls far down near the bottom of the list. Now, I'm not blatantly dismissing the results of innumerable studies done on the subject of gaming-related violence; while many studies are obviously flawed or biased, the data does seem to indicate that exposure to violent game content, realistic or not, heightens aggression in the people who are exposed to it for at least a short period of time. What has never been established, of course, was whether this aggression led directly to the committing of violent crimes. Sure, some people have gone to court with the claim "Well, I saw it in Grand Theft Auto, so I did it." However, other people have claimed every motivation known to man - "The Devil made me do it", or "My blood sugar made me do it". Have we legislated against the Devil? Twinkies? No.

Further, anecdotal evidence would seem to take some of the air out of the anti-gaming lobby's sails.

Consulting the FBI's compiled Ten-Year arrest records for 1995 to 2004, we see that felonious violent crime among offenders 18 and under dropped by a whopping 31.1 percent. This includes crimes such as murder, forcible rape and aggravated assault. In other words, the crimes depicted in highly-scrutinized games like Grand Theft Auto and Postal dropped by significant margins in a time where the most violent of videogames were in their heyday. While the "other assaults" category noticed a small up-tick of 7.6 percent (which is easily as attributable to the movie "Fight Club" or the Break.com website as it is to gaming), overall crime by juvenile offenders was down by a significant figure of 22.2 percent for all categories of crime.

This, of course, happens to coincide with the release and popularity of some of the most violent, sadistic, sexualized titles known in the industry. We passed from the cartoony slaughter of "Wolfenstein 3D" to the ultra-realistic gore of "Soldier of Fortune 2". The car chases of "Spy Hunter" gave way to the car chases of "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas". Graphics acceleration brought us from the "Karate Champ" dark ages to the beat-down enlightenment that was "Tekken 4".

So, inexplicably, as our gaming technology allowed us to cut closer to a cinematic level of violence, crimes that Congress believes are exacerbated by this trend are, in fact, dropping at a rate which even Rudy Giuliani would be proud of.

So why the attention?

But who will save the children? Simple. Look at the list of governmental misdeeds outlined above. It is by no means exhaustive. This is a government that, on both sides of the aisle, needs distractions to keep the voters’ eyes as far away from the shortcomings of our elected representatives as possible. Violent games such as the aforementioned GTA series are a low-hanging fruit; a trough that our fattened, embattled politicos can waddle up to and sate themselves from, in stomach-turning displays of faux-bipartisanship. They get their photo op; they get to look tough for some older constituents by bullying game industry-types from their unassailable bully pulpit. While the business of the country remains an undignified mess - no immigration legislation, the war in Iraq, and ethics violations running rampant - for a moment, politicians can play at 'doing their jobs'.

Who pays the price for that type of governance? We all do.

It's been said that in America, "you get the government you deserve". I'm not sure what type of calamity I was responsible for in another life, but I don't recall anything I've done in this one to deserve this incompetence masquerading as governance.