GamePolitics.com

» see gamepolitics.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

i was in internet cafes in ankara between 2002 and 2005 playing counter-strike, which is exactly the stretch american state legislatures spent trying to make the sale of a game like that to a minor a criminal offense. None of that reached me as anything at all. There was argument about games in turkey too, but it happened in newspapers and at kitchen tables rather than in bill numbers and court dockets, and GamePolitics was a site about bill numbers and court dockets.

Dennis McCauley started it in march 2005. He was already the video game columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, so the site began as a working journalist covering a beat his newspaper would only give him a column of space for. The premise was narrow and it turned out to be enormous: track what governments and courts were doing to video games, every filing, every hearing.

The timing was luck of the best kind. In july 2005 a dutch modder named Patrick Wildenborg published the Hot Coffee patch that unlocked a sex minigame left inside Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and GamePolitics had the first interview with him. That story pulled in an ESRB re-rating and a congressional response, and it ran through the site for months.

The Entertainment Consumers Association bought the site on 25 october 2006 and kept McCauley as editor. look, an advocacy group owning the outlet that covers its own issue is a conflict, and the site was reasonably open about carrying it. McCauley stepped down in september 2009 and James Fudge eventually took over as managing editor.

~ the record ~

~ the beat ~

Jack Thompson is the name the site is bound to. He was a florida attorney who spent the 2000s filing suits and pushing legislation against violent games, and GamePolitics covered him closely enough that the two are hard to separate in retrospect. He was permanently disbarred in september 2008, and the site kept publishing for another eight years without him.

The rest of the beat was quieter and more useful. State after state passed laws restricting the sale of violent games to minors, and every one of them was struck down in federal court on first amendment grounds before it could take effect. GamePolitics was the place that actually followed each of those cases through to the ruling, which almost nobody else was doing at that length.

~ the day it died ~

The Supreme Court decided Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association on 27 june 2011 and held that video games are protected speech under the first amendment. That closed the category of law the site had been built to follow. The legislatures largely stopped trying, and the beat thinned out over the next four years.

James Fudge announced the closure on 4 april 2016 and the last update went up on 18 april. The stated reason was that the mission had been accomplished and the site was no longer needed, which is a rare thing to read in a shutdown notice. Most sites die because the money left.

~ the long tail ~

The premise turned out to be wrong about one thing. The fight over games did not end in 2011, it changed shape and moved out of the courts and onto the platforms, and the arguments after that were about harassment and moderation rather than about whether a state could fine a shopkeeper. GamePolitics was not built for that version of the subject.

The archive is patchy now and a lot of the eleven years of case tracking survives mainly through citations in other people's writing. The ECA itself went quiet not long after. What the site proved is that one reporter on an unglamorous beat can hold a record that institutions with far more money never bothered to keep.

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