Not much came out of the meeting President Trump hosted with video game execs at the White House on Thursday, but it did yield a sort-of greatest hits of violent video games: A compilation video produced by the White House was posted to its official YouTube channel, meant to depict how violent the games are.
The closed-door meeting, by all accounts unproductive, was purportedly part of the White House’s response to gun violence in the wake of the Feb. 14 school shooting in south Florida that left 17 people dead. The president and attendees viewed the 88-second reel, which features clips from violent games like “Call of Duty,” “Wolfenstein,” and “Fallout”, and later in the day the reel appeared on the official White House YouTube channel — without a word of explanatory or contextual copy.
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Some of the clips were ripped directly from YouTube and still bear the YouTubers’ watermarks.
During the meeting, the president reportedly made vague remarks about the games’ violence but mentioned no specific games by name. “This is violent, isn’t it?” he asked after the reel was shown, according to the Washington Post.
At the meeting were representatives from the videogame industry, and their critics. Rockstar Games’ CEO was there; so was a rep from the Parents TV Council, and group of conservatives who mostly focus on the political bias in media, rather than its egregious violence. The meeting focused more on what the industry itself could do to mitigate violence in their games and keep them out of the hands of young children rather than on any significant government regulation of the industry.
The meeting was put together after Trump’s comments on video games’ influence on “young minds” after the Parkland school massacre by a 19-year-old former student. “I’m hearing more and more people say the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts,” Trump said. Politicians, the NRA, and other observers have a decades-long history of citing the gaming industry as a catalyst for violent acts.
Still, there’s no conclusive evidence of a correlation between teens committing violent acts and playing violent games.
The video had been viewed over 400,000 times as of press time. Just over 1,000 people had “liked” it, and 38,000 had “disliked” it.
Cover image: Still from a compiled video reel posted March 8, 2018, to the White House YouTube channel.
