Vice President Biden Meets with Gaming Industry Execs

Today, American Vice President Joe Biden -- along with administration cabinet members Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius and Attorney General Eric Holder -- met with gaming industry executives to begin a dialogue about gun violence in the United States following the tragic shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut.

The Wall Street Journal confirms that executives from Activision Blizzard, Electronic Arts, Take-Two Interactive, Epic Games and ZeniMax Media were present. Researchers from Texas A&M and the University of Wisconsin were also present.

WSJ spoke with Christopher Ferguson, a researcher at the meeting, who said he was “cautiously optimistic” about the meeting’s ultimate outcome. The report notes that Ferguson “felt Biden had done his best to avoid turning the meetings with game industry leaders into ‘a witch hunt’.”

“I couldn’t say that the vice president had his arms around the industry and was saying how wonderful it was on the one hand,” Ferguson told the Wall Street Journal. “But on the other hand, I didn’t detect that instantaneous rush to judgment and say the most negative thing either. I think he’s in a sort of neutral or agnostic position, which is probably quite reasonable with where they’re at right now.”

Biden is reported as saying that he knows “that there is no silver bullet” to curing violence in America. “I come to this meeting with no judgment. You all know the judgment other people have made,” Biden said.

The ball still very much appears in the air in terms of what the ultimate outcome of Biden‘s meetings with the gaming industry, other entertainment industries and several other interest groups will be. “When asked if he thought there was a ‘coarsening of our culture’ at work in violent entertainment,” the Wall Street Journal reports, “Biden said, ‘I do not know the answer to that question.’”

For more on the current conversation swirling around violence in video games, read our article on talking about video game violence and a blog post from our editor-in-chief, and then watch the video, embedded above, for a 40 minute discussion about the issue.

Colin Moriarty is an IGN PlayStation editor. You can follow him on Twitter and IGN and learn just how sad the life of a New York Islanders and New York Jets fan can be.