Looks like games may be going the way that smoking, drinking (and in some places) gambling - it’s a thing that governments don’t really like but they don’t not like it quite enough to ban it, so they might tax it instead.
As has been quite widely reported, a politician in the US state of Texas has recently proposed a state tax on video games.
The state senator takes an odd line. Quoted in the The Brownsville Herald, he says “You have all these kids buying video games, and sometimes they are good, some are bad and that’s not my call […] But I think that we can generate (money) to put toward the schools they go to.”
The equivocation on the worth of video games is interesting, and the fact that it’s a tax seemingly intended to focus on children (though I’m not sure, in fact, how the distribution of spending across age maps out), and that it seems to be a hypothecated tax.
But my broad point is the gradual shift we are seeing in the Western (or at least north American) construction of the idea of the video game, the start of a new ‘Game_wave’ maybe.
First it seems that video games are gaining gradual acceptance as an economic fact, even if their cultural acceptance amongst the establishment (more on that in a future post) lags behind the economic clout.
Second, and I might be reading this in, it does look like another ‘sin tax’ or ‘vice tax’ – games, apparently, are naught but not quite that naughty.
Is this the place that society feels comfortable with video games a revenue generating naughty fact?
No, I think its where politicians feel comfortable with games, as the Gamer Generation (Generation-G if you will) starts to gain power across the corporate and socio-political landscape this othering of gaming culture and it’s artifacts has to decrease.
Yay not a single mention of WoW or Second Life.
Oh.... Doh!
