We've been asked to blog a short post on what politics, specifically, the presidential election, means for our topic. I am not a particularly political person: I do hold strong political beliefs, but they are not particularly common, nor ordinary. Add to this obstinacy, the unwillingness to compromise some principals in favor of others, and I am not easily wooed. I am more easily convinced by arguments to avoid voting than I am convinced that our republic needs my token participation in order to legitimize it. I am perhaps, overly bitter and cynical, but then, it's hard not to sometimes.
But all of this is deeply personal and inappropriate for this space. But by their very nature, politics is the public expression of what one's personally held beliefs are, with the ultimate aim of codifying those beliefs into a body of law that a set of citizens have agreed to submit to. It doesn't matter what color your state is, you're still wrong, and I resent you and your politicians for the attempt to impose your beliefs on me. By and large for the most part, we can argue until we are blue in the face, fail to reach common ground even if we acknowledge one another
Which is why I think games have a chance in escaping the whole process. Which isn't to say that there isn't a strong influence on games from the political sphere. The controversies of the 1990s, so reminiscent of the hysteria surrounding (in reverse order) rap music, films, rock and roll, comic books, surrealism, films, the waltz, Romanticism, novels, secular music, (I suppose) poetry, maybe fire, stone flint hand axes, and originally bipedalism. There is nothing new under the sun. Change has been scary since forever. Now that we have a group of musty legislators empowered to slow down scary changes (the senate is a fairly old invention) confronted with a new, scary set of changes.
Largely, these things are irrelevant. The ESA does a reasonably good job (in my uninformed opinion) of serving as a lobby for the commercial interests of our industry. Likewise, the VGVN seems a little bit hysterical when it claims "video games are being threatened by legislation on the federal, state and local level, and it is time for gamers to stand up and voice their concerns." At a grassroots level, I'm content to let these organizations pull their weight. I don't think Arizona's HB2660 is going to stop anyone from enjoying Grand Theft Auto IV anytime soon.
The larger issue at stake, if we've learned anything from the recent Mass Effect controversy, is one of free speech. It seems narrow minded to pretend that games, just because they are a relatively novel form of expression, deserve additional special regulations. That said, the number of politicians who still seem to thing that they can regulate speech, especially in this day and age (hint: internet) is infuriating. Thanks for electing them!
I'd be willing to embrace a principled politician who had the correct position on free speech, security, copyright, and net neutrality, but frankly, the market will do as it sees fit, and games will follow suit.
The biggest thing stopping the emergence of AO titles full of tastefully mature content (Titus: The Game) isn't The Man in Washington. It's Wal-Mart.