Wii Tennis didn’t leave Brown out of puff.

When not planning an offensive on the UK games industry (allegedly), British Prime Minister Gordon Brown likes to engage in a bit of Wii Sports action in his living room with his four-year-old son.

Turns out Brown is just as bad as Wii Tennis as he is at real tennis. Speaking in The Sunday Times, Brown said, “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.”

What really struck me about the story is how much of a non-story it is. Read it for yourself and you’ll see what I mean. It just reeks of a PR stunt that has been put forward to soothe the tensions in the UK games industry.

Brown has famously announced he wanted to ban all depictions of knives in games to curb surging numbers of stabbings in Britain and is suspected to be planning action against the industry based on Tanya Byron’s report, yet he happily has a console in his house that has the potential to provide the most physically realistic experience of stabbing someone.

To my mind, it goes to emphasise the perceived divide that has sprung up between ‘core’ gamers, who are frequently subjected to the vitriol of folks like Kay Hymowitz, and the new demographics that have bought a Wii for its fitness keeping prowess, surgeon training potential, and general motion sensing japery.

I guess no one’s told him that there are several Wii knife add-ons then.

Tags: British, politician, Wii

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1 Comment » Bruceongames on February 15, 2008 9:58 am It really beggars belief, when the world economy is coming off the rails and we are involved in two wars, that the Government is putting time and energy into suppressing video games. When there isn’t any problem. RSS feed for comments on this post. Comment Now Note: Commenting on Ripten does not currently require registration, however to be eligible for contests on the site, you must be a registered user. Name (required) Mail (will not be published) (required) Website Commenting Rules: No hate speech allowed. If you must argue, please debate intelligently. Comments containing selected keywords or outbound links will be put into moderation to help prevent spam. Ripten reserves the right to delete comments and ban anyone who doesn't follow the rules. Thanks. Notify me of followup comments Tired of the Goomba? Upload your own custom comment avatar.