PSP World

Why President Obama Should Embrace Video Games

Despite being the youngest president in recent history, Barack Obama still does not share one important feature with America's younger voters: a love of video games. As candidate and later as president-elect, Obama made several comments to the press about what he sees as the social danger posed by digital entertainment. For example, in 2009 he told parents that it would be a "good idea to put away the Xbox" and focus more on homework. Some observers found that stance fairly hypocritical given that the President ran campaign adverts on Xbox Live and in the game Burnout: Paradise. Microsoft's Xbox has frequently borne the brunt of the President's disdain, but Sony didn't escape his attention for long. During a speech to graduating students at Hampton University in Virginia this past weekend, Obama laid the blame for our short attention spans squarely at the feet of technological devices like apple's iPad and the Playstation 3:

"You're coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don't always rank that high on the truth meter," he told the students. "And with iPods and iPads, and Xboxes and PlayStations -- none of which I know how to work -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation. So all of this is not only putting pressure on you; it's putting new pressure on our country and on our democracy."

We can understand using video games as a rhetorical advice -- for example to encourage parents to spend more quality time with their kids. But a real technophobia is beginning to show through Obama's constant negative comments about the video game industry.

Does the president need to be reminded that Microsoft, an American company, employs 53,000 people here in the United States? Has he seen that revenues generated by the video game industry topped 20 billion USD this year, at a time when other major industries were closing their factory doors and laying off employees? Perhaps, in an era of declining job prospects in manufacturing and services, it might not be a bad idea for little Jimmy to pick up that Xbox controller after all. The software and entertainment industries are expected to remain reliable sources of employment in the coming decades.

Even if we put aside the powerful economic arguments for embracing video games, there are important social and cultural benefits to gaming as well. While many games currently occupy a pop-cultural nadir shared with Arnold Schwarzenegger movies and superhero comic books, some game creators have attempted to move the medium in a more serious artistic direction. It took early cinema several decades to move out of the vaudeville house and into the legitimate artistic realm, and it could be that games are on the verge of making a similar leap. Similarly, the spinoff technologies generated in areas such as medical imaging, human-computer interfaces, motion sensing and artificial intelligence all have significant potential to improve the human condition.

Making off-the-cuff statements about video games as a waste of time may be politically expedient. But it also betrays a lack of understanding about both the potential benefits of digital entertainment and the way in which America's economic fortunes are increasingly connected to devices like the iPad, Xbox and Playstation 3.

An Obama campaign advert in Burnout: Paradise.