White House cares more about the positive impact of games than in-game violence

Mark DeLoura, former Senior Advisor for Digital Media at the White House, sat down with GamesIndustry.biz for a lengthy conversation on violence and video games. It's not a new conversation,; two years ago there was a spike in the violence and video games debate. Nancy Pelosi came out opposing the link between video games and real-world violence, a survey on whether or not parents thought games caused violence emerged, and Video Game Voters launched a campaign against Fox News over the issue.

The debate was at its highest two years ago because of things like the Aurora Shooting and the Navy Yard Attack. Almost anyone and everyone that had access to a cable news network spoke on the issue.

Because DeLoura was an advisor at the White House during these times, he has the inside scoop on the governments view of violence and games. What the former advisor reveals about the government's thoughts on games shows that no one really spoke about violence and they care less about violence and more about how games can help people:

"The funny thing is it felt like I was bringing the violence conversation to the table because I have 20 years of scars and I'm from the game industry. So I come in and it's like I have my armor on, and nobody ever really said, 'what about violence in video games?' Or very, very rarely did that ever come up…

My takeaway after having been in the White House is there's an interest in seeing if games can be used to address societal challenges. That's the primary interest in games – we've seen other modalities in other media have an impact in different ways over time as we learn how to use them to teach people or express concepts. Can games do that? If they're not doing that how do we get them to do that? If they're doing it a little, do they want to do it more? How can we encourage this?"

What we can take away from DeLoura's statement is that the government doesn't look at games as a violence breeding media; they see it as something that can address the subjects that are hard to broach. How they can be used for education?

Read the full interview at GamesIndustry.biz.