Note: I am Pat Slattery and I usually blog at The Free Market Project. I was asked to help provide content for this site as Mr. Jackson attends to family business. I am honored to do so. I noticed as I logged in to post that Mr. Jackson has provided an update containing the sad news of his mother’s passing. My heart goes out to Mr. Jackson and his family.
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I turned on my radio and heard a host talking about the White House Video Game Czar. This person, Constance Steinkuehler, says the job represents “an incredible opportunity to make good on the claim that games have real promise.” (Link to the article at USA Today.)
The host I was listening to, Michael Medved, got into the aspect that the left, as represented by this president and his administration, seem to think that anything of value has to come from the government. More than that, it has to come from the White House.
Something different struck me. These people have no idea what the free market is or how it works.
Video games are currently abundant and profitable. People with ideas for video games produce games and sell them to consumers of video games in the general public who voluntarily part with their money in exchange for the opportunity to play the games. Everybody wins in this voluntary transaction. Game developers get paid for their work, and gamers have traded their money for the game they wanted.
What is this video game czar going to do? Supposedly the promise that she’s going to fulfill for video games is that they’re great learning tools. What can she do to fulfill that promise?
The only thing she can do is force compliance on someone, probably the video game makers, but, given their history, it’s not beyond the imagination that the do-gooders at the White House would force people to buy educational games. Now that the game consoles are often hooked into the internet, I can imagine a government bureaucracy monitoring game play. Too much time on Modern Warfare without putting in a few hours on Captain Planet Defeats Carbon Man and your console will not allow you to play anything else until you’ve got your Captain Planet hours in.
What leftists (statists) don’t understand is that, if there is a desire for games that teach, companies will produce those games. Why? Because it will be profitable to do so. What game companies will probably end up doing is figuring out (without help from the government) where there are niches for learning games and they will create them. They will be better than anything that could be designed by Constance Steinkuehler, or anyone else in government. If Ms Steinkuehler was a great game designer, she’d be in the private sector designing games and getting rich, not at the White House sucking off of the government teet. (Was that harsh?)
For some reason, the left has no problem compelling people to do what they otherwise would choose to do. The way I like to put it is that they like to dictate to people how they should live (what products they should buy, what they should learn, and what they should produce). You can bet that what they’d like to do is create something like a license to produce video games which requires the producer of the game to insert “positive learning” (the message of which will be totally up to the government) into their games, or to produce a certain percentage of learning games. (You can bet none of those learning games will be teaching how variability of solar output affects temperature on Earth.) It will impose an enormous and unnecessary cost on the video game makers, doubtlessly costing jobs. Yet Obama will somehow claim he’s created jobs.
That is the statist game: dictate what people can do, and force compliance. I’d much rather play a game called “Free Market Capitalism” where people serve their fellow man by providing goods and services people want and need at prices people are willing to pay in a voluntary transaction. Do you think the White House Video Game Czar would create that game? The leftists in the White House don’t even understand how to play it.
Socialists believe that all forms of production should belong to the government.
You know, I’ve often wondered if these leftists had ever played a game of SimCity. It really teaches you a lot about taxes. When you lower taxes, more people move into your town, and it keeps growing. I’m not sure if they don’t get it, or they just want to control everything we do. In socialism, the people on the top of the pyramid benefit, so it’s not like ALL the wealth gets distributed.
This is about the dumbest article I’ve ever read, and I usually don’t read articles because I’m normally playing video games all the time.
We are a nation of stupid people with an attention span the size of a gnat. isn’t it obvious that we need Progressive Czars to save us from ourselves?
Right now, we are a nation obsessed with video games. Why shouldn’t Maximum Leader turn that crisis into an opportunity to teach us which end is up?
Thank you Maximum Leader for putting Constance Steinkuehler in charge of our future.
With this latest change I now have renewed hope.
*Smirk*
One more step in the progressive long march to invade every last corner of our lives…
Your idea that the white house would monitor gameplay and force ‘compliance’ is wacko. I work at EA and we were visited by Mrs. Steinkuehler Squire today for a lecture and q&a. If she wanted to force compliance she wouldn’t be coming to the largest free market publisher of games begging for assistance. It’s the same model DARPA uses to great success. Anyway, according to her the biggest uses of gaming tech in the government are in the military and NIH, and she doesn’t believe in edutainment as a viable educational tool. She’s also interested in the neurological effects of gaming, for instance players of first person shooters rewire their brains to notice stimuli more frequently than people who don’t play them. You paranoid fringe conservatives need to check your facts, as usual. The world isn’t going to end because the government wants to take advantage of an emerging and powerful technology.