Bethesda Game Studios and its popular first-person RPG Skyrim are no strangers to a little bit of controversy. But who would have thought that the back-and-forth squabble between the game’s fans, detractors, and developers would have jumped out of the digital domain and gone all the way to… the White House?
We can’t quite tell if it’s a joke or just a poorly phrased (and evidenced) argument, but there are a mighty 215 signatures and counting on a digital petition, hosted as part of President Obama’s “We the People” online petitioning system, to “ban the Deadly Videogame Known as ‘SkyRim’ for The Safety of America’s Youths [sic].”
The petition, created a whopping two days ago, still needs in upwards of 24,750 signatures for White House representatives to even consider chiming in on the merits of banning a video game. We’re not holding our collective breath for the petition to even reach one thousand signatures, let alone the Obama administration ultimately deciding that the fate of a Dragonslayer is one of the more pressing issues worth tackling in today’s political landscape.
So just what, then, is the petition’s creator – allegedly a “Stephenson B.,” from Dyersburg, Tennessee – hoping to accomplish? And why? The creator’s charges are threefold:
“Whereas videogaming has proven to cause social, ethical and health problems in people of all ages, whereas sexual perversion and homosexuality are threatening to destroy the Christian foundations on which this nation was built, whereas a new video game has just been created that far exceeds any others in the psychological and spiritual damage it does to teens,” reads the start of the petition, which goes on to ask that the Obama administration ban all copies of the game “produced by Blizzard Entertainment,” we note.
In addition, the petition calls for the administration to “seize and destroy” all copies of the game, prosecute the game’s players – under what charge, we have yet to actually figure out – and to create a national database of “videogame avatars” and “screen names” that could be used to monitor teenagers’ playing habits.
Even as a troll, the Skyrim petition reads fairly weak. And if this petition is meant to take a serious stance against video gaming, there are a lot more controversial titles to address than Skyrim: It’s not like Bethesda Game Studios has any control over any adult-themed (or child-killing) modifications that community members create for the title. And as far as we can tell, that’s about as controversial as Skyrim really gets.
[pcmag]
