Attentive readers may have noticed that I take issue with the ESA from time to time. Let me rephrase that. I think the ESA is such a bunch of incompetent bastards, when they aren’t outright hurting gamers, that it drives me to an apopletic rage on a regular basis.
That being said, I’ve expressed my hopefulness that the new ESA president, Michael Gallagher, might not be as horrible as his predecessor Doug Lowenstein. Recently, GamePolitics.com featured a profile on Gallagher from the Washington Post:
On trips to Capitol Hill these days, Michael Gallagher usually has a black Nintendo DS stashed in his suit pocket… his main reason for carrying the device is to give lawmakers some hands-on time with the latest titles the video game industry has to offer.
Why put a Nintendo DS into the hands of politicians? …he’s trying to dispel stereotypes that he still encounters about video games. One stereotype he’s trying to crack, for example, is that games are primarily for kids, when research has shown that the average gamer’s age is in the 30s… Gallagher likes to point out that only 8 percent of the games released each year are violent, “mature”-rated titles of the sort that make headlines.
A little bit of background info on Gallagher from the Post article:
Gallagher said the video game industry has parallels to when he was vice president of state public policy at Verizon, a time when the cellphone industry was facing legislation based on fear that cellphones lead to traffic accidents and media scares about the phones causing brain cancer.
Cellphones were an industry that had been "accepted by society but still under attack politically," Gallagher said.
And that’s exactly where games are at the moment. Lowenstein must be reading this and totally flipping his gourd right now. How could the ESA head actually be doing something useful to correct misperceptions about video games with lawmakers!? Maybe the future isn’t quite as bleak and post-apocalyptical as we all expected.
