Floodgates

There's been continual buzz going around the gaming community. Exactly why this heightened state of matters came about is hard to touch on. Some might cite the upcoming console releases, but I think it really comes down to something simpler.

There buzz has been every little legal action and political sentiment expressed towards video games globally. Not a day goes by where slews of blogs and famous geeky websites are plastered with the latest in legal woes to befall the industry. This is not because it attracts gamers, but because we're afraid.

Quite simply, I've been around the internet a long time. I've been around the gaming and computer geeks on the internet for just as long, and we've always made fun of the government. We're largely a logical, calculating bunch (computer science geeks anyway), and as such anything as buereaucratic as the government is easy pray for our cold reason.

To have something viewed as so wholly inept suddenly blunder its way into our domain is like a multicloaked hobo wandering into a nudist colony, we notice, we look alarmed, and we pay attention.

While very few people on the internet are doing much about these bumbling steps by the government, save for talking very thoroughly about them, it's only a matter of time before we take full offense to the politicians manhandling of our world. The storm of e-mails and letters the Florida Bar Association recieved regarding the ineptitude of Jack Thompson is just the tip of the iceberg. If the ignorant continue to scrape against us, we're going to scrape back.

This next section may really be me being overly hopeful, given the continued downward spiral of the nation, but I think it isn't too far off. There are illogical computer people, and certainly illogical gamers, but I'm pretty sure that those of us 18 and over are intelligent enough to pull the following off.

Quite simply, scraping us is the worst thing the current generation of politicians could ever do for themselves. Ever seen two children fight over a controller? You know how fanatical we can be over video games. Ever seen the anger and shock manifested when in the middle of playing an authority robs the child of the controller? Good children like me fume in our rooms for the rest of the day, bad children get vicious.

The difference here is, there are millions of us, and we're over 18. We're not children anymore, but we're just as fanatical about video games as we've ever been. We've never trusted politicians, we've never trusted the government, but we didn't care because we had video games. We were content to live in the real world, because we had our fantasy ones.

Washington has our attention now, because they're stomping about in the foothills of our mountain domain. We are watching from above, carefully analyzing everything they do, and we aren't liking it. We see an elephant and a donkey stomping around, making like they own the place in the land of the behemoths. If they start to ascend our holy mount they will be struck down.

In less flowery speech, if Washington starts legislating what games we can play, if they start making our habit difficult we will make their lives difficult. We are a vast, largely intapped voting audience and ticking us off is going to mean as many if not more than twenty million votes for the intelligent man in town. That's not just the presidency, thats each and every senator, house representive, governor, and school board official. Mention 'murder simulator' at your own peril.

We the gamers of the world are watching. For the longest time we decided the game of politics wasn't fun. The rules were silly, the players were stupid, and we had better games to play. If you the idiots in charge want us to come out and play, we'll come out and play. We'll march straight on Washington in numbers not scene since Martin Luther King Jr. was in town. We have more than enough dispensible income to plaster your streets, your homes, and your televisions with support for our cause, and we certainly have enough sway over the internet that you can kiss support here goodbye too. Every blog and banner ad will carry our message home, and you'll be washed down into the ocean to drown when you open up this floodgate.

We are watching, waiting, and ready.