Last Updated on January 21, 2020
Ex-Vice President and presidential hopeful, Joe Biden, recently made the suggestion that video game creators “teach people how to kill,” in an interview with the New York Times.
Biden also referred to video game creators as “little creeps” during a conversation about Big Tech.
According to Consequence of Sound, he mocked “one of the little creeps sitting around the table” who claimed to be an “artist.”
The interview with the New York Times formed part of a conversation which both sides of the political debate have mentioned: regulating Silicon Valley.
Biden brought up his role in the Obama Administration which he believed to have been tough on Big Tech.
He mentioned the campaign to pass Leahy-Smith America Invents Act of 2011.
In one particularly tense meeting, he recalled:
[Joe Biden]: And you may recall, the criticism I got for meeting with the leaders in Silicon Valley, when I was trying to work out an agreement dealing with them protecting intellectual property for artists in the United States of America. And at one point, one of the little creeps sitting around that table, who was a multi- — close to a billionaire — who told me he was an artist because he was able to come up with games to teach you how to kill people, you know the ——
CW [Times Opinion writer Charlie Warzel]: Like video games.
[Joe Biden]: Yeah, video games. And I was lectured by one of the senior leaders there that by saying if I insisted on what Leahy’d put together and we were, I thought we were going to fully support, that they would blow up the network, figuratively speaking. Have everybody contact. They get out and go out and contact the switchboard, just blow it up.
This isn’t the first time Biden has been tough on video games.
In 2013, Biden proposed a tax on violent media, which included video games, in an effo rt to combat gun violence.
The Obama administration also blamed video games and “violent media” for school shootings.
