Q&A: Video game convention homes in on policy

SJ: What products were you most excited about and what are
your main post-convention takeaways?

MG: I come at this from two perspectives. One is the host for
a great industry. Another is as a fan and as a gamer.

I was really excited to have 45,000 people come out, which was
terrific. That part was great. … We had thousands of international journalists, hundreds
of retailers. As a host, I’m very pleased about that.

As a gamer, we saw some remarkable technology. One [development]
is in, how do people play the games? … How do you interface with the game? Now
you are in the game. It’s not spears coming at you. It’s much more about
putting you in the game and adding depth to the experience.

…We saw Kinekt by Microsoft, which is no remote control required. …That
was very cool. Microsoft really had a breakthrough in approachability.

…Sony had Move. That was really strong. When you use it with
Tiger Woods Gold, it’s as close to the real thing you can get. Nintendo had
3DS, with no glasses required.

…The thing about our show is for the lucky 45,000 who get to
go, you actually get to play the games. We got to go use the 3DS. It has a 3D
camera feature, so that was a hardware innovation.

…We also had driving games — one by Ubisoft, another was Hot
Pursuit by EA. In Hot Pursuit, the quality of the graphics was terrific. We saw
some very, very good games.

SJ: What were the first video games you played?

MG: I had Pong, and I remember when the big deal was to have two
paddles. When I moved to Washington and was working for Rick, he had a one-year-old, a three-year-old, a five-year-old, and we were
playing Nintendo 64, Zelda. Here’s what would happen: the three-year-old could
manipulate Link better than anyone and was a master with the controller. But
the five-year could read. So she would read and the three-year-old would
control Link and together they would strategize. And the one-year was watching
the whole thing. It was like a cartoon. … Another Rick story is when he was elected in ’94, we
networked Doom, the game, in his office. E-mail was just getting going and we
networked a game like Doom.

SJ: How does the convention play into your policy agenda?

MG: We, for the first time, had policy as part of the show. We
were delighted to have the White House CTO Aneesh Chopra come to the show. We
had a MacArthur Foundation education workshop. We talked seriously about what
can do to help close the gap for STEM education.

…Another [policy priority] is the importance of intellectual property. The billions of dollars
in investment in the products on the floor are all built on intellectual
property and we need to make sure we are protecting that.

…We also emphasize that gaming is a connected
experience. So that’s about broadband adoption — wired and wireless — throughout
our country.