[MUD-Dev] Retention without Addiction?

[Koster]

From: Chris Holko
> [Raph Koster]:
 
>> We're certainly the target of the moment. And given the heavily
>> conservative government and benches we're going to have for the
>> next few years as well as the serious erosion of freedoms we're
>> already observing, there's real risk of stuff happening like what
>> happened with the Comics Code, at least here in the US.

> Consistently it hasn't been declared "Conservatives" who come
> after the game industry.  I seem to recall that the so call "left"
> has more Congressman and friends coming after the industry than
> the "right".  The ones coming at the industry from the "right"
> seem mostly to be confined to religious circles and not political
> ones.  Remember both Gore and Clinton both came down on the
> entertainment industry as a whole, but particularly games, as
> being to violent for children.  Even Lieberman chimed in.

I didn't say "Republican." I said "conservative." On a wide range of
social issues, Lieberman *is* conservative, just as Tipper Gore was
conservative on the issue of rock lyrics.

I was really referring to the mood of the country, and the general
cast of its political climate at the moment. We are entering a
period of social conservatism, and I would expect that videogames,
as the least established popular medium, are the likely target of
censorship or at the very least some degree of erosion of
freedoms. The party in power has very little to do with it.

Conservatism is literally about being conservative in shifting the
boundaries of the status quo. The entertainment industry, in
not-very-small-part, is about pushing boundaries in order to attract
attention. In some eras, nobody cares; in others they care a
lot. The more established the industry is, and the more lobbyists it
has and the more direct financial ties to government it has, the
more insulated from this it will be. Extreme left and right wing
governments are both quite capable of being conservative--in fact,
few governments on earth are as conservative as entrenched Communist
ones.

-Raph

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