Dec 6
Gamers Don’t Like Their Rights
According to a new poll released by New York-based PR firm, Hill & Knowlton, and conducted by Opinion Research, 60% of consumers polled agreed that the government should regulate the sale of games deemed mature or violent. This news isn’t that surprising; in taking a random poll of 1,150 Americans, as Opinion Research did, you are bound to get an overwhelming majority of people who don’t understand gaming or gaming culture. A bit more disturbing is that 50% of those people said they would be fine with the government outright controlling the mature content that goes into videogames. This seems to be a bit of a slap to the face of free speech, but there are a large amount of people out there jumping on the anti-gaming band wagon.
What is surprising about the poll, conducted between Sept. 17-19, is how current gamers responded. With 44% voting “Yes” to government regulation of mature content in games and 55% voting that the government should regulate the sale of mature games, it seems that a surprising amount of gamers don’t value their favorite medium’s freedom of speech. One wonders if the gamers polled fully understood what government regulation in gaming means, not only for games, but for first amendment rights in general. Hit the jump for some words from the people at Hill & Knowlton, a few graphs of the poll’s results and some other thoughts.
Much like myself, the people at Hill & Knowlton wonder how many people understood what government regulation in games truly means, though they do stress that the questions were clearly worded and easy to understand. Hill & Knowlton’s Rob Vernon, a gamer himself, said that he was “alarmed” with the results. The graphs below show you what I just said above in picture form.
I find it strange that a community as loud and vocal as the gaming community wants the government regulating anything. The tenacity of gamers alone makes me highly dubious of the results of the survey and prompts me to wonder just who was clicking on the “current gamer” check-box when they were filling it out. Overall, I would say that being a “current gamer” does not exactly make you a “hardcore gamer,” and thus many of the gamers filling out the poll were the type of people who know only what the mainstream media tells them about gaming. Of course I could be totally wrong in this assumption; maybe a large percentage of gamers are into totalitarianism.
[Via Next-Gen]
Categories: Gaming Industry, Retail, Statistics, WHY??13 Comments so far
Leave a comment
Regulating violence (or any content) in games is incredibly stupid, would these people want the same thing done to movies?
Exactly, films are allowed to regulate themselves. Why not games?
I too do not trust the results of this survey. Did they poll people who play Minesweeper at work and call them gamers? Just like the movie industry, the government has no right to control what can and cannot be shown in a video game.
I’m with Dexter on this one. I could totally see someone who casually plays online flash games in his down time calling himself a gamer.
Judging by the fact that Americans are, as a whole, stupid, fat creatures, this poll seems to be bogus.
[img]http://img516.imageshack.us/img516/1088/gamerregulationchartcorid9.jpg[/img]
Let’s hope BBCode works in comments…
Yeah, well I guess it doesn’t so much work…. still, you should check out the image to see the newest research on the matter.
HTML FTW.
HTML FTL?
HTML FTL…
What did it remove?
Maybe we should enable BBCode, since that’s what everyone seems to like…
Americans, for some reason, have decided they want everything regulated for them, want more rules imposed upon them, want to think as little as possible, and have a sense of liberation from responsibility. They are willing to throw away their liberties, rights, and the Constitution so that the government can tell them when to shit and tax their toilet paper. I’m so fucking sick of stupid Americans. Why’d you get me all riled up at work?