Gotta Love It - Video Game Politics

It's been a busy week here, over the past 5 days our Info Lit team of 4 librarians conducted 35 research class sessions. Not a bad run and overall pretty successful. We used Turning Point for some of our sessions to gain additional feedback from the students, and created more open ended workshops, but really didn't focus on tying in gaming strategies. As much as I would have loved to play around with the structure, with up to 11 sessions in one day just keeping the logistics of multiple classrooms flowing smoothly eat up most of my time.

My light at the end of the tunnel came today while working with a couple Public Speaking classes. The class assignment is to locate and create a persuasive speech arguing for a current bill in Congress. I love this assignment and my background (2 years working in the MN House of Representatives, 00-01) gives me a lot to talk about with our students. At the end of the day today, I had an enjoyable interaction with two students doing Senator Brownback's "Truth in Video Game Ratings" bill, S.568.

We had a good discussion about both sides of the issue and what the "real" intent of the legislation. It was interesting to hear the student's perspective on requiring the ESRB to play through all game content before issuing a rating. There were students on both sides of the issue and we ended up having a discussion about games as an entertainment media. The students were able find a variety of quality sources, including gamepolitics.com.

Gamepolitics.com has a good intro on the bill here.


photo by pianoforte, via Flickr.com