Donald Trump Reopens a Long-Settled Video-Game Debate

A recent meeting at the White House where President Donald Trump spent an hour talking to partisans is the latest chapter in the long, unwise push against video games. Talking about both sides of the violent video game debate, without any sort of conclusive outcome, the White House also played a reel of violent video game footage.

The meeting was held following the remarks of President Donald Trump who linked video games to the last month’s violence in Parkland, Florida that killed 17 people.

Furthermore, the administration invited several major game studios as Trump plans to meet the representatives from the video game industry. On Monday, The Entertainment Software Association, the biggest video game trade group will attend a meeting at the White House to have a discussion regarding the long-settled debate on video game violence.

The reel that was played and published by the white house is apparently cut from violent games shown or reviewed on popular YouTube channels. So, it is quite obvious that it won’t stay up and live for long since one of the creators of the footage is sure to issue a takedown notice.

Trump said in February that “I’m hearing more and more people say the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts,” but the president did not say who those people were, or whether they had actually looked into the matter.

At the same meeting, Trump also said, “You see these movies, they’re so violent and yet a kid is able to see a movie if sex isn’t involved, but killing is involved. Maybe they have to put a rating system for that.”

Of Course, there is a system that rates and assigns age and content to consumer video games: the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB). And every game shown in the reel published by the White House is age-restricted.

Back in the 90s, when the same topic was advanced, the Trump administration was clearly wrong and now, it’s doubly wrong, it seems.