Hillary Hunting Manhunt II

You have to expect that there will always be politicians making hay off of the entertainment of younger generations.  They did it with rap music in the nineties, hell, heavy metal in the eighties, even rock and roll in the fifties.  First it was violent movies that were turning kids into roving packs of killers, and now it’s video games.

I guess with Hillary Clinton’s campaign undergoing something of a slow implosion it was time for the junior New York senator to jump on the bandwagon:

I guess this must be one for those of us who spent the 90s wanting to throw large objects through the television set as we watched that sanctimonious, finger wagging, judgmental prick Joe Lieberman on the floor of the Senate joining with the Republicans to derail the constitution:

Senators Joe Lieberman (ID-CT), Sam Brownback (R-KS), Evan Bayh (D-IN), and Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) called for a thorough review of the video game ratings process in the wake of “Manhunt 2″ receiving a “Mature” rating. In a letter to the Entertainment Software Ratings Board (ESRB), the Senators detailed how the change in rating opened the door to widespread release of the game, which depicts acts of horrific violence.

Well that is just peachy. Do we suppose Hillary sat down and actually played Manhunt 2 on the campaign trail in order to arrive at this conclusion, or did she just take Joe’s word for it, much like she did when she voted for the Kyl-Lieberman amendment that others have quite rightly pilloried her for? Because Joe, you’ll recall, was a useful idiot for the Bushies when they discovered Iran had no nuclear weapons program and they had to find another reason to bomb them into the stoneage — something they neglected to tell the public about. And despite the fact that Clinton’s excuse for voting for the AUMF was that she had “bad information” from the Bush Administration on the Iraq weapons program, she decided to trust them — and Lieberman — and amp up the Iran war rhetoric.

Now, I’ve played the first Manhunt.  Great game, I’m telling ya.  You sneak around killing bad guys in the most gruesome way imaginable (your first weapon is a plastic bag), the whole time they’re trying to hunt you down, calling you names, cursing at you, and promising to do some rather inappropriate things with your corpse once they’ve killed you.

Okay, so the game might not be for all audiences, but guess what.  I’m thirty.  I think I’m perfectly allowed to watch Se7en right before I fire up the old PS2 and engage in a little slaughtering.  Yes, I have two daughters, but about the only video game they get to play is Wii baseball, and that’s how it’s going to stay until they reach what I feel will be an appropriate age to play more mature games.

It’s called parenting, and I got a handle on it, trust me.

What irritates me is that it’s always video games and music; rarely is it movies.  This is something that has always at least partially baffled me.  You can’t buy a cd at Wal*Mart that has cuss words in it, but you are good to go when it comes to movies; sex, drugs, violence, Earnest doing things that aren’t limited to selling cars in thirty second tv spots, you name it.

With video games, it is particularly annoying because actions such as this show that Clinton et al are still playing with the notion that video games are just for kids, the whole time failing to understand that I’m the target video game demographic now.  You see, video games have evolved.

The thing with video games is that technological advances along with recognition among certain areas of the entertainment industry have taken the industry to a place where they are no longer just making toys for kids, but also telling stories.  For many video games today, the term video game is woefully inadequate.  Better would be something like interactive story, or interactive movie.

The credibility of video games as a story telling platform as opposed to just child’s play has been further increased by Hollywood celebrities lending their voice over talents to a great many titles and not out of some promotional gimmick (go check out the credits of the Grand Theft Auto series, or even the original Manhunt which stars the talent of Brian Cox).

The point is, as the video game industry advances, video games are coming closer and closer to movies as a method of story telling.  The generational gap of their audiences are narrowing while it is becoming increasingly apparent that the true difference between the two mediums is interactivity.

All of this is beside the point, however.  It’s simply not their place.

Further, as Jane Hamsher points out, it’s nice to see Hillary Clinton taking yet another page out of Joe Lieberman’s book.  You know, so we Democrats can see exactly where she’s coming from.

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