Silly Season

Silly season is in full swing here in the United Kingdom - the awkward time in summer when Parliament is in recess, leaving the newspapers with remarkably little real news to report.

In the absence of much action on the political front - and deprived of handy headline-spinners like the extensive floods of early summer - the papers turn instead to an assortment of ridiculous, unsubstantiated or downright made-up stories to keep sales high.

These can often be outright stupid, such as leading tabloid the Sun's thoroughly debunked attempt to convince readers that there was a great white shark stalking the sea off the British coast. They can also be more worrying; tabloids including the Sun and the Daily Mail have filled their pages with disingenuous stories claiming that Britain is in the grip of a crime wave and descending into anarchy and mob rule, despite statistics which demonstrate a steady drop in crime in the country in the last twelve years.

Silly season doesn't just affect judgement in newspaper editorial meetings, though. While Parliament may be in recess, the prospect of an early election still hangs over the heads of every politician in the nation - and none more so than David Cameron, the leader of the Conservatives, Britain's largest opposition party.

Cameron's political position is difficult, to say the least. The Conservatives (commonly known here as the Tory party, or the Tories, a historical name for the party which dates back to the 1600s) gained significant ground on the ruling Labour party in recent years as Tony Blair's star waned. As Labour was rocked by the backlash to the deeply unpopular war in Iraq and a scandal over dirty deals in the party's financing, Cameron was there to ensure that the Tories made hay while the sun shone.

The sun isn't shining any more - at least, not so brightly. Blair is gone, and with him many of the main reasons that people disliked the Labour government. As such, the party is enjoying what the media has dubbed the "Brown bounce", with new prime minister Gordon Brown creating a surge in popularity that could well, pundits claim, see the party through another election.

The relevance to the videogames industry of this political background will be clear to anyone who has followed the news here in the UK in the last week.

Cameron, who initially presented himself as a youthful, "right-on" sort of candidate, building his public image by declaring the Conservatives to be the party of choice on environmental issues, has been gradually forced back into the more socially conservative Tory heartland by the pressure of a possible election later in the year.

The latest victim of this retreat, perhaps unsurprisingly, is the videogames market. Cameron lashed out at videogames - along with music videos and movies - at the unveiling of a manifesto on law and order earlier this week, associating them with gang culture, crime and violence.

Cameron espoused tough policing and stronger legislation, but speaking at the launch, said that "action to strengthen our society" was also needed - action which included "video games and things like that, where we need to think of the context in which people are growing up."

"The companies which make music videos, films and computer games have a social responsibility not to promote casual violence, the gang culture and the degradation of women," he claimed.

It's a statement which sounds perfectly reasonable when it's phrased in that manner - but of course, the only way in which a government could apply such a policy would be to introduce tougher censorship measures and curbs on expression. Britain already has legally binding age ratings and a classification board which can effectively ban a product from public sale by denying classification (as happened recently to Manhunt 2). Cameron didn't say how he planned to add to that system, but it's clear that any major effort to further restrict the medium would be very damaging, not to mention entirely unnecessary.

This is a silly season story for a variety of reasons; most notably that it is ridiculous, and unsubstantiated to the point of being, essentially, entirely made up. Cameron has seemingly abandoned all hope of attracting votes from younger people in their twenties and thirties - the Conservatives are here seen making an appeal to an older, more fearful type of voter who is presumed not to understand or care about videogames as a medium.

As such, videogames make an excellent scapegoat - and the fact that countless studies into the effects of videogames on people's minds have utterly failed to uncover any solid link with violence or crime is, seemingly, classed as irrelevant by the Conservative policy-makers.

This is important for a few reasons. Primarily, it demonstrates that the videogames industry is not out of the woods yet in terms of social acceptance, even in Europe, let alone in the United States. David Cameron is increasingly unlikely to be the next prime minister of the UK, and as such will probably never put whatever policy he has in mind in place - the real danger here is that Labour decides this policy has attracted support, and opt to copy it in its own manifesto. While Tony Blair may have been fully briefed on this industry and publicly supportive of it in Parliament, that kind of support cannot be relied upon on an ongoing basis.

However, there is another side to this argument - one which says that David Cameron has been very foolish to anger and alienate a large swathe of younger people with this pronouncement, exactly the same younger people which the party has tried very hard to court with its environmental policies.

This, perhaps, is where the industry can find newfound strength in the political sphere. No politician with ambitions of seeing the inside of Downing Street would ever dare to suggest that movies such as Scarface and Goodfellas should be banned; these films are defining classics for a whole generation of people who now have votes and aren't afraid to use them.

At present, however, politicians seem to believe that it's okay to threaten games like Grand Theft Auto in a similar way. Without putting too fine a point on it, GTA is an 18-rated game - which implies that if the government is enforcing its own legislation properly, the vast bulk of its players are also over 18, and therefore able to vote. The huge sales of the Wii in the UK bear out the assertion that gamers as a demographic are getting older, more affluent, and more numerous.

In other words, this market is coming to represent a whole lot of votes - and a whole lot of political power. Political lobbying will be needed to sort out the prevailing negative attitudes in some of the corridors of power in London and elsewhere - but what those politicians and lobbyists alike might want to consider is that videogames are now a medium which addresses vast swathes of potential voters. Perhaps with that in mind, we might see a few less barbs thrown in this direction when silly season rolls around next year.