February 10, 2008 -
There has been much speculation in recent days that British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is preparing to launch a major political attack on video games.But, apparently, even Brown's own home is not immune from the allure of games.
The Sunday Times reports that Brown was bested at Wii Sports by his four-year old son:
Gordon Brown does not have a reputation as much of an athlete, and now he has confessed his four-year-old son John beats him on the Nintendo Wii video game console.
Said Brown:
I have played a game of tennis, but I didn’t succeed, and my son has challenged me to a game of boxing. It didn’t leave me out of puff but that was because I was probably beaten pretty early on by my son - and he is only four.
GP: Brown has been catching a lot of heat from the U.K. game industry since word of the impending crackdown leaked last week.
Given the timing, we have to wonder whether this charming little vignette involving his son and the Wii is merely a public relations contrivance designed to portray him in a less menacing light where games are concerned.
Comments
I think it was a DS
Doubtful, in that video games aren't really a topic over which politicians are concerned about their image. The percentage of their constituents who are genuinely concerned about video games is statistically insignificant, especially compared with the number of people who are potentially swayed by feel-good sound bites along the lines of "We're going to crack down on those violent sex-charged videos they're selling to our children."
More likely is that Brown simply saw an opportunity in an interview to relate a family anecdote that ties in with a popular family toy that's been in the media. Journalists get a trendy hook for their pretend-politics story, the Prime Minister gets some warm and fuzzy press, everybody wins.
Golly, what a shock that he lost.
Golly, what a shock he was playing in the first place.
@Canary Wundaboy
A squirrel might also have shot up his arse at this point.
I assume you know that television pictures are flat and not actually 3-dimensional. ;3
Bush can never be beaten. He's that funny in those pictures.
Fangamer
Due to Europe's arse-raped release dates, we don't get that until.. The back end of the month.
"I still can’t get over how much of a dick Brown looks like in those pictures.."
It's astonishing, isn't it? I would've thought that such persistent colossal dickery would have broken all laws of physics, but evidently not…
I thought we were done with those jokes.
It's just a game, not a murder simulator.
Unfortunately the European release of No More Heroes has all the messy violence cut out.
3... 2... 1... *ding ding*
Instead of taking care of all of the chavs in our streets, closing the borders to ethnic people (no offence to them, I have lots of ethnic friends, I just think that we are getting overfilled as a country and the last thing we need is MORE immigrants) and fixing the shoddy roads in our country... He focuses on the much more immediate issue of videogames!
Of course it was the videogames that turned 75% of teenage Britons into chavs, it was the videogames who said "hey select cultural minority, come here! Triggering a huge influx of ethnic people which you will all LOVE!" and also videogames which flooded our country, causing the roads to get broken up and potholed!
He's great is our elected PM isn't he?
"closing the borders to ethnic people..."
Please, engage your brain before you open your mouth. You've touched upon a highly sensitive topic and whilst I don't necessarily disagree with you entirely, I do wish you had chosen better wordage to express yourself. It's too easy for people to get the wrong impression and twist your words, so you really ought to work on your phraseology next time.
nah
the thing is I always have to be VERY careful around my coloured friends, Immie can fly off the handle if I even miss say Radamanandam or whatever it is, heck Basharat is cool but I learned fast that he can interpret any mention of bombs to some form of discrimination against... well you see where I am getting at
and as for closing borders... well its like the quarians in mass effect isnt it? England is filled to breaking point with our own 100th generation brits, so somehow getting even MORE people in, coloured or monochrome, does not seem like a good idea to me!
so bring on the lynch mob, I don't care, we do try to stand for what we believe in, and I just happen to think that a person to country ratio of 5:1 is not very good, when you see people jam packed into single apartment buildings in Birmingham and Leeds and they think it is natural for our country, then you know something is going wrong don't you?
and for the record I do engage my brain before I open my mouth, a lot more so before I TYPE with my HANDS as well!
Pominator
Pomwing2000 hardware
I come from across the pond where orriginally America was founded on the idea that we will take whoever wants to come over here, as long as you pay taxes. Turns out some people have no problems coming over here, but paying taxes isn't something thy want to do. I only start having problems when the official language is getting changed. Now I can't read half the bill boards, and three of the radio stations.