Hilary Clinton Demonises Games For Political Capital

News has just come in that Hilary Clinton and a bunch of so-called Democratic Senators from New York and Connecticut have asked the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention to investigate the "impact of electronic media use."

Whilst the ‘Children and Media Research Advancement Act’ legislation does not call for restrictions, it is clearly intended as a way for those politicians who wish to advance their own political careers by demonising videogames to justify increasing unhelpful restrictions.

According to GTA-hating Democrat Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, this"...is a big step toward helping parents get the information they need about the effect of media on their children."

$90 million had originally been the estimated cost of the study, but this has still to be confirmed at the time of going to press. The proposed bill would fund research into the “...cognitive, physical, and sociobehavioral impact of electronic media on child and adolescent development-everything from physical coordination, diet, and sleeping habits to attention span, peer relationships, and aggression levels”.

Clearly, what the politicians want is an easy answer to a very complex question in order to win votes. Of course there needs to be better regulation of selling games with violent or adult content to minors. SPOnG is sure of this. But to commission costly studies to ‘prove’ or ‘disprove’ a link between videogame violence and anti-social behaviour is missing the point. And at the same time, it is unnecessarily demonising videogames and ‘blaming’ children’s exposure to games for their unacceptable behaviour.

Of course violent videogames will affect children in a negative way, exposing them to behavioural patterns they may wrongly copy as they may not yet be able to distinguish between right and wrong. The same can be said for pornography, violent movies and TV and drugs, none of which SPOnG would want to see children or minors exposed to.

By the same token, we also do not want to see Big Government Brother restricting our access to any of these things as adults. Not that we are advocating drug abuse or the use of pornography, although both can be loads of fun. No, we want to see governments focus on the things they should be spending their tax dollars/£/€ on – better and more equitable services in education, health and other essential public services.

While the game-banning politicians rejoice, the gool ol’ American Civil Liberties Union is up in arms, with spokesperson Marv Johnson claiming: "Down the road when--if there is some sort of finding that there is harm in this--then we're going to see calls to regulate speech because of the potential harm."

Other opponents to the proposed costly and pointless research include leading tax-payers dollars watch group Citizens Against Government Waste, who deemed the aforementioned Lieberman its 'Porker of the Month' when the idea was first proposed. The group slammed Lieberman for funding expensive and "redundant” studies which have already been undertaken by other organisations such as the Kaiser Family Foundation and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

SPOnG will sign off here with one last chilling thought. If Hilary becomes America’s first female President, where is that going to leave us regarding reasoned debate about the complex relationships between videogames, the family and society?