14 DAY TRIAL // Everyone's watching the electoral campaign in the US nowadays, with the eyes peeled for more details on the personalities of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, the two main candidates for presidency. It seems that the two important political characters have promised to take care of all the videogames-related issues, including inappropriate content inclusion, poorly done ratings, violence in games etc. The only problem is that once the two candidates start criticizing the videogame industry, they'll lost a pretty important part of the votes, since practically everyone's a gamer nowadays.
We might even get to the point where a pro-gaming candidate would collect hundreds of thousands of votes, just because he's a Halo 3 fan. You can't avoid to mix games with politics, specially when the blogosphere manages to combine the two major phenomena, with the strangest results, like the claim that Obama looks like Tiger Woods... Back to Hillay Clinton, you should know that the senator introduced the Family Entertainment Protection Act (FEPA) two years ago, after the scandal surrounding GTA titles and the Hot Coffee incident, trying to regulate the inclusion of sexual and violent contents in videogames.
Here's what Hillary Clinton claimed in a response to a Common Sense media poll: "When I am President, I will work to protect children from inappropriate video game content". Barack Obama couldn't miss the opportunity to approach this issue as well saying stuff like "It's time to turn off your Game Boys", in February 2006. In case you didn't know Obama returned a donation from the Electronic Software Association's Doug Lowenstein and made the following claims in a CSM poll:
"I would call upon the video game industry to give parents better information about programs and video games by improving the voluntary rating system we currently have. Broadcasters and video game producers should take it upon themselves to improve this system to include easier to find and easier to understand descriptions of exactly what kind of content is included. But if the industry fails to act, then my administration would. "
That sure sounds like trouble gamer folks... I bet that every Halo 3 fanboy reading their statements wouldn't vote for one of the two, preferring to check out the other candidates or simply not vote.