The ESA Saved Video Games Once. Can It Do It Again? (Stanley Pierre-Louis)

Hey, everybody, a real quick note.

I have included the entirety of this episode.

That means you get the full show and what would normally be a Patreon exclusive act.

Ultimately, I felt it was important that I include the Patreon section in which I break

down what happened in the interview, what was said, what wasn't said, what are issues

that we should be thinking about moving forward in terms of how the ESA doesn't support

the entire breadth of the video game industry.

So I just want to thank the Patreon subscribers who really make this show possible.

The ads definitely cover some of the costs, but most of this show, the vast majority of

this show is funded by Patreon support.

If that is something that you would like to contribute to and you want all those bonus

sections and you want the monthly bonus episodes, please, please consider subscribing to

the show on patreon.com forward slash post games, or just leaving a review as a great way

of lending a hand so that we can do these extra big media and important episodes.

With that, let's get to the show.

Welcome to Post Games, a podcast about how and why we love video games.

I am your host Chris Plant and I am so happy to have you here for this very special episode

in which I interview one of the most consequential people in the video game industry.

I got to be real with you, the show has come a long way since packing.

For the past 15 years, it's been pretty easy to take video games as existential stability

for granted.

Yes, we still see private companies like Valve prohibiting some titles from appearing on

their platform, but the vast majority of games, even the hyper-violent and the sexually

taboo, can be made and sold online and purchased and played in your home without fear of government

oversight.

Our relative freedom of both artist and audience is relatively young, guaranteed in 2011

when the Supreme Court ruled in a 7-2 decision that video games deserve the same protections

as other art forms.

Until the decision on Brown vs Entertainment, games had been perpetually threatened with

oversight from local, state, and national governance.

The United States Congress, briefly but intensely, considered national oversight on what games

could and couldn't be sold.

It was out of that congressional showdown, actually, way back in 1993, that the Interactive

Digital Software Association, now known as the Entertainment Software Association, or

the ESA, was born.

Throughout the 1990s and the odds, the ESA served as both stick and carrot.

It was the muscle defending a relatively young medium, the ESA team traveling from state

to state throwing themselves into the muck of lawsuits and legislation around most often

the assumption that video games caused violence, and therefore they should be strictly limited

in sale of not outright censored.

The ESA also, in this time, threw the industry's big annual party, the Electronic Entertainment

Expo, aka E3, a decadent affair, and attracted a mix of retailers, investors, politicians,

and press to a gaudy conference hall full of loud screens, bored models, and desperate

publicists trying to draw attention to a medium that every other day of the year was dismissed

as frivolous kid stuff.

With this mix of spicy and sweet, the trade organization performed a relentless nearly

two decades-long sweat act.

Something to win the hearts of consumers and influence the minds of the US government

while they were at it.

And damn, if it didn't work, it felt in that moment, as I remember it, as if the ESA

spoke for the entire game's industry, a centralized voice demanding cultural acceptance.

But every so often, in situations like this, the dog actually catches the mailman and

the budding art form gets, well, it's right.

After securing a designation as protected, speech in 2011, the ESA's function had to

shift from survival to more complex questions.

With the game industry's wealth and power growing each year, and the largest tech companies

on the planet inserting themselves into the space, the notion of a unified games industry

became a core challenge for the trade organization, consider again that the ESA's members are

the biggest and most financially flush game companies in the world.

How can it find middle ground between rivals like Epic, Roblox, and Nintendo on political

issues as divisive as child safety policies, limitations on generative artificial intelligence

usage, and the growing cost of RAM in the age of tariffs and data centers?

And what does it even mean to speak for the video game industry when your members are

EA, Ubisoft, Amazon, Konami, Nintendo, and practically every other big name that you

can think of?

To learn how the ESA navigates unifying and protecting the game's industry amid arguably,

greatest existential threats to the medium since Brown vs Entertainment in 2011, I spoke

with the current ESA president Stanley Pierre Louis.

He has a long career in media, beyond games, including working for music companies and

the age of Napster and Viacom during Brown vs Entertainment which had him involved in the

case albeit from a unique outsider position, we dig into that in our chat and so much more.

This week on Post Games, the ESA saved video games once, can it do it again?

Act 1, the ESA's fight to protect games from mortal combat to the Supreme Court, Act

2, the president of the ESA on AI, child safety, calls for unionization, and all the other

hot button issues.

This is an extensive interview, nearly an hour long, so there won't be a news of the

week segment on also like Let's Be Real, this is some fresh gaming news.

I do, however, have a special Patreon bonus.

After the interview, Patreon supporters will get my post-game thoughts pun very much

intended.

There's a lot said in this interview and also a lot that goes unsaid, so I have recorded

my take on some of the most interesting quotes and also provided some broader industry

context to a few of the touchiest issues like AI, the ESRB, and unionization.

A head of this chat though, before I even got on the phone with Pierlui, I came across

an interview with his predecessor, former ESA president Michael Gallagher, and it has

been rattling around in my head ever since.

In a 2018 interview with Waypoint, Gallagher was asked about calls for unionization, but

his answer gets at something even bigger, a world view out of time.

It goes as follows, so this is fortunately an issue we haven't had to deal with much

my time as the leader of the ESA, and I think there's a reason for that.

The wages in the video game industry are very high, the barriers to exit from employees

are very low, and the opportunities to create within the industry are abundant.

The returns and the revenue have never been higher, when you put all of those elements

together, it's created great opportunity for individual laborers, or the game makers

at whatever level to make choices that empower themselves.

He would go on to say, in this interview, about issues like unionization, you have to pay

attention to them when they're small, because they can become big, and then when they're

bigger, they're much more difficult to manage.

Gallagher's words are a message from those early years after Brown vs Entertainment, when

the growth appeared infinite in government intervention, just totally defend.

But times change.

The problems now are much bigger.

How does one even begin to manage?

It is a question, frankly, bigger than any one interview.

But for that reason, I think it's worth caring in your head throughout this entire conversation.

With that, I would like to thank my guest up top for appearing on the show.

And I would like to thank you listeners for making post-games a place where someone

like the president of the ESA wants to speak, and feels that they will be heard.

So let's get to it.

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Act One, the ESA's fight to protect games from normal combat to the Supreme Court.

Today's guest is the president of the ESA Stanley Pierre Louis.

Over his decade long time with the trade group and multiple roles, he and his team at the

ESA have led public policy efforts to, in their own words, showcase the dynamic impact

of the video game industry on business, entertainment, and culture, or to put it bluntly.

When a politician wants to make policy about video games, Pierre Louis and his team are

given a call.

We'll be opening this interview mid conversation with the president of the ESA recounting the

events that led to the video games biggest companies sitting before Congress in 1993 arguing

for their lives.

In the second act with full historical context, we'll hop into a conversation about the

many, many challenges facing games today and in the not so distant future.

I think most people listening to the show right now know that video games faced congressional

hearings at some point in the early 90s, and that people brought up moral combat as a problem.

But video games had been around for two decades before this, so what leads to this moment?

So throughout the 70s and 80s, video games were really in a period of exploration.

You had the amazing invention of not only arcade play, but later on Jerry Lawson and the

Fairchild Channel F of creating a console and creating a whole market.

So all of a sudden, it democratized the ability to play.

You didn't have to be out of the house to actually play a game.

The issue games had was they were still viewed largely as child's play.

And so our industry was at that time trying to gain visibility and respectability in a number

of fields. How do you attract people from other industries to come into our industry and make

these really fun games? And I think you saw people making games that weren't just space invaders,

but with other themes, including how do you attract an older audience into games?

But with that came a lot of scrutiny, because as these games became more popular, more and more

lawmakers were responding to the reactions that some critics had.

You know, there were critics in the 80s around the impact that television and movies had,

on American culture, but particularly the youth. And then as you got into the late 80s,

early 90s music started getting a lot of that attention. A lot of people don't think back to

the 40s and 50s, but this actually started with like pinball machines and people being concerned

that kids were spending time after school or during school really and playing pinball. And so it was

this juvenile delinquencies being caused by pinballs. And so there was always some factor within American

culture that led some critics. And then thereby lawmakers to say, I need to fix this problem.

As you got into the late 80s and into the 90s, it was the video game industry that started to

feel that heat. A lot of lawmakers made their names on going after different industries. And as you

got into the 90s, there were legislators looking for something different. You know, so when you talk

to the staff members as I have of Senator Lieberman and Senator Recol, they were looking for something

different. Television had already been conquered in their hearings and so did music.

Everybody needed their two live crew, you know? Yeah. And yes. And so this was their moment to say,

let's look to see what's going on with video games because that's becoming popular. And games

like Mortal Kombat, Doom night trap, we're all coming about and they had more adult beams and that

caused critics to want to regulate what was going on in video games. And I think in particular with

Mortal Kombat, as I think is famously known, when the blood spout at the end of the game of

someone being defeated, it was this red explosion on the screen. And that caused a lot of concern

among parents about what does that mean for kids. And so what it started off as child's play

grew beyond this initial sandbox and now was a much broader and growing industry. And that's what

caused a lot of the legislators to start to focus on what's going on in video games.

What's fascinating to me about this moment is you talk about these games and you say

Mortal Kombat and you say night trap and these are games made in the US. But again, these are,

it's two Japanese companies. And it's hard not to assume that there is some interest in

regulating that in a way that maybe there wouldn't have been with American companies at that time.

You know, I don't know that it was such a divide back then because the legislators were just

looking for an issue and these happened to be the games. Now, I will say as you fast forward

into the hearings in 93 going into 94, the hardware companies, they were definitely being aggressive

towards one another, including at congressional hearings. You had Sega and Nintendo comparing,

well, look what you use for .com. So they're showing these devices that look like replicas of

guns. They don't look like real guns. You could tell it's a toy. But they're really assailing each

other at this open hearing. And there wasn't this sense within the industry of camaraderie of

wearing this together. They were all competing for sales of devices and games. And really it was

a few people sitting back watching these hearings with an industry saying, this is not going well.

Like trying to actually attack one another is not what's going to progress our industry. It's

actually trying to figure out a way to manage the crisis and allow us to make and sell games

in a productive way. Talking about not going well, the stakes here is is government oversight.

What would government oversight have looked like for the video game industry? And why were,

I guess, were and are game publishers averse to it? It's really interesting. If you look from

30,000 feet up, regulating content is anathema to our constitution. Like it is plain and simple

that when you're making creative works, the first amendment is there to protect that or

take expression. There are two issues with that. The first is that doesn't always matter to

legislators where they're at the state or federal level. And they may try to do what they do.

The second is you may challenge that and you may win. But do you have three to five years to

get to the Supreme Court and achieve your victory? Or do you try to figure out a way in a shorter term

to address this existential threat? And then if you take a step back, if the result is you get

more information to consumers, particularly parents, then you've benefited your industry by being

able to continue to do work, but also you've benefited the general public by providing

information that they find valuable. So I think out of it comes a self-regulatory system that

happens to also provide great information to consumers and in particularly parents and care

takers. But in that moment, you're really trying to figure out as an industry whether you're going

to survive an onslaught. In this instance, it's Congress threatening to have basically a national law

that prohibits the sale of certain games, which are attracting an audience for your industry.

If you look at some other industries, there are some interesting parallels. When HBO was

starting out, they wanted content that attracted a wide audience and they pushed the envelope

because it was cable and not regulated the same way that broadcasts regulated. I don't know that

the games industry was trying to do the same thing. I think they were generally trying to create

different kinds of games that attracted broader audiences, but they were exploring themes they

thought were important and fun. And if you wanted to bring in people from all these other

great engineers, like if I'm going to get you to come and leave your safe career at IBM in the

80s and 90s to come work for one of our basically a startup industry in the US, how do I do that?

Well, I do that by saying you not only can have all this technical freedom to try things,

but you can also create really fun and interesting content for people.

You can make a game where you rip a demon's head off, and that's okay. It's fun sometimes.

And it's funny. I know we're going to get to the Supreme Court down the road, but the kinds of

things in video games were not new to literature or film or music or you're talking about industry

trying to figure out how to express these themes through a new medium and being challenged

because of concerns by critics because there are legitimate concerns about how you make sure

that the right consumers have the content that's appropriate for their age, but how do you do that

in this early age where you're experimenting trying to figure out what it is? So I think that's

what the era was about. How then does the games industry get through this congressional moment in

the kind of early mid 90s? So as I mentioned, Senator Lieberman from Connecticut and Senator Cole

from Wisconsin, a Democratic Republican, pushed the industry to find a solution or they're going

to regulate. And they're not really concerned about the infighting that they see in front of

them at these hearings. The industry decides the better course of valor here is for us to unite

as an industry and then come up with a model that shares with consumers but mainly parents and

caretakers what's in the game because that's what Congress really wants. At the end of the day,

they want a system that allows people to know what they're getting so that they can make decisions.

If I go back even higher than 30,000 feet but 60,000 feet, the US system of legislation is largely

based on stopping things that we have seen or a problem, which is different than the European system

which is trying to prevent things before it becomes an issue. And it's a difference of geography

and it's also legitimate of history. Europe is a smaller, concentrated area when there are world

wars in Europe. It affects the whole continent, right? The US experiment back in the 1700s was

escaping tyranny, escaping rules. And these 13 colonies had freedom to figure out what they wanted

to do. And so that tradition carries on even now as we think about our privacy laws versus

the European privacy laws. We try to regulate what we see or bad and try to get information about

what's happening. In Europe and in other places, they regulate how you communicate and how you do

things. So if you think about that era in the 90s, there is an openness in the American system

to self-regulation because it is very much the American way. We want to do things that

solve the problem and not anticipate all of the potential problems but then the gate innovation

are like. So it's very much in the tradition to do self-regulation. This works out for the games

and mystery we're talking here today. The IDSA is formed which becomes the ESA and also the ESRB

is formed. And I think a lot of people listening to this might not know that the two are different

and that they kind of have to be different. Can you explain why that is?

So when they form the IDSA, the Interactive Digital Software Association, six months later,

the industry formed the ESRB, the entertainment software rating board. Now the ESRB is actually part

of the ESA. It's just run separately because it needs to have an arms-length relationship with

the industry in order to provide objective independent analysis on what's in the game,

how it's judged to be age-appropriate and all of the other information they provide. But what was

really important to Congress wasn't that a trade association be formed. What was important to

them was that that group find a way to provide the information to the general public.

And the industry looked to the other examples. They looked to see what the film industry was doing

for example. And those particular categories work and work for games, but they found a way to adapt

a different way of finding age-appropriateness, but also adding content descriptors like comic

mischief or blood and gore, which you'll see on the side of the box periodically. And later on,

develop things like you're interacting with others. So what are the interactive elements of a game?

Are you are you paying for things? Are you communicating with people? Can you shut that down?

So important to this dialogue with Congress was not only forming a trade association,

that's just the group that collaborates to seek a redress for industry. What they really wanted

to see was what are you doing about it. And once the Congress saw what this development could be

and the rigor that was going to be behind it, they were very impressed and decided that legislation

wasn't required. Periodically, the Federal Trade Commission would examine how the various

entertainment industries were doing on their ratings and how they enforced those ratings.

Over and over, the Federal Trade Commission found that the video game industry was the gold standard.

Now important to this story, because this at least 2011 is Congress is satisfied,

but what they do doesn't preempt a state from doing what it wants to do. And we're seeing a little

bit today and in politics of what does the federal government do and what do states do.

And the states were free to say, well, Congress may be satisfied, but they didn't pass a law

preempting us from pursuing concerns we had. And so what followed after 1994 were a series of

state actions ultimately leading to a Supreme Court decision in 2011. And you'd like to think that

2011 solves all that. As we'll find out in the second half, that is not the case. I understand

the trade organization is a bit of a hearts and minds organization. You know, that I can say

got milk or beef its wets for dinner, right? Cotton the fabric of our lives. They have all succeeded

in some way of infiltrating my brain. But early on in a trade organization's existence,

it feels like it's real job is existence itself. It is creating the self regulation of the ESRB.

I guess the other piece of the puzzle is E3, which the USA co-launches in 1995.

Now a video game conference is like a fan event. It serves a very different purpose today.

What was E3's function in those very, very early days?

One of the great things about forming a trade association is it allows competitors

to collaborate in areas that are sanctioned by federal law opportunities for your industry to engage

in certain areas, you testifying hearings and the like. So it allows competitors to do things that

they might not ordinarily do. It also allows them to provide a showcase. So even before you get to E3,

the Major League Baseball, National Football League, NBA, those are all trade associations.

And what they showcase is baseball and a big event at the end of each of those seasons.

And so in many ways, that is what E3 allowed USA to do was to host an important showcase

for the industry that lasted unfortunately until COVID, but really provided an amazing showcase

for industry. And it actually grew out of a different show. The video game industry used to

demonstrate their hardware and games at the Consumer Electronics show. But as that show grew,

games became less relevant to their purpose. And you know, off of the main floor and off.

I've read about like the Sega Genesis being outside in the back and like literally a rainstorm

coming through a chart. Yeah. And that usually tells you that maybe it's time to do something

different. And that's exactly what the industry did. So USA is formed in 94 and they thought,

why don't we launch our own show? We're a large enough industry now to demonstrate to retailers that

they can come to our show at a different time, a different location and hit the sales season.

And so E3 for years was the place where you've heard about what's next. I've heard from so

many people about what E3 meant to them and how exciting it was. And a lot of people actually

didn't get a chance to go to E3 because it was particularly the early years focused on sales

to retailers and to other partners. And the focus was on how we make sure people know what's coming

so that they can help their sales cycle. I think as those relationships solidified

E3 transition to invite more fans and to have fan experiences. But it's different than the

other shows that are really focused on consumer first experiences. But people like the idea and

the nostalgia of it because you got to see things really early. You got to see the early clips

or early versions of devices before the public got to purchase them. And there was something

exciting and really relevant about that. It's something that we dearly miss. But we also understand

that as the major video game companies were able to reach their audiences in new and exciting ways,

having a show where everyone convenes at a certain time made less and less sense. One because

your release cycles started to change. You weren't selling everything in Q4. And in fact,

some of the biggest games were sold in Q1 and had sales throughout the year. And then two

what COVID really demonstrated was there were different ways of reaching audiences,

particularly as video games became a very digital distribution business as opposed to a

physical distribution business. And so if you've got digital showcases going on,

why do I need to assemble people into one hall to show them what's going on, particularly with

a retail group that is primed for the sale. So I think COVID accelerated what was probably

going to happen. But with COVID, it made it very clear that this was the time to pivot.

I do want to talk about you mentioned states and the issues that the video game industry was having

at the state level here. What are some of the earliest political battles for the ESA leading up

to Brown versus entertainment? Our industry is really complex. So I have a background in film

television and music. And I went to law school and worked as a lawyer before becoming a CEO.

So I'm really steeped in a lot of the issues that we deal with. And a large number of them are

intellectual property because games are an artistic expression. But games are also very innovative.

We're not only making games, we're making them with ones and zeros. And we're playing them on

devices that we create in part because consoles are created by the console makers, but also play

it on PCs and mobile. And so you have a number of issues that affect this industry in meaningful

ways. But until the Supreme Court decision in 2011, almost the entirety of the focus of the

public policy for ESA and the member companies was on survival because a series of states

passed what they called harmful to minor bills. We think that certain games that have certain

kinds of content are harmful to minors and therefore shouldn't be sold in our state. And

that meant ESA and member companies had to spend a lot of time lobbying in states and having

success in some, but losing in others and then having litigations. I think there were 13 different

federal cases due to all these state laws being passed and all of them were successful except

the case in California. And that's the one that ended up before the Supreme Court.

And it was important because California is the spiritual home of the video game industry in the

United States. It's certainly the largest state for sales, for employment, and where most of the

companies exist. And so talk about existential threats. You had Congress create an existential

threat and you were able to navigate that really definitely at the end. It was very impressive

that they were able to not only navigate out of legislation, but to come out of it with something

that's beneficial and still lasts today. We're still improving on all the systems back in 1994.

And it helps us today, which we'll talk about. California was an interesting case because you had

a particular legislator who just really was focused on passing it and we had success at the lower

level and then at the appellate court, not so much. And the industry had to figure out how do we

navigate this problem and how to win at the Supreme Court? It was a tough decision. I was not in

the industry at that time, but I was part of a group filing an amicus brief in support of the

industry because we saw what that threat would be. If you go after video games, you're going to

start going after other forms of content. And at the time, I was in the film and television

business. So we were very supportive of the industry at that time. And the oral argument was really

interesting because you had lots of views about what video games are, but when you read the opinion,

it's written by a justice who's passed away named Antonin Scalia. And for those unfamiliar with

the Supreme Court, it is typically defined by what they call conservatives and liberals.

There are nine justices on the court. And the key to a case being heard is that four of them have

to agree that it's worthy of being heard. And then the key to winning is getting five of them to

agree with you. And it's not always very direct. You have on the one hand, a conservative

justices who might be concerned with what is the state of entertainment today and how does it

affect our youth. And even though you might think liberals are always about the First Amendment,

they may have other concerns that you have to navigate for policy reasons or doctrinal reasons.

Because Supreme Court cases aren't always decided on the hard issue you think it, it, it asks.

Sometimes there are a lot of procedural things that happen in a case. Sometimes there is a precedent

that conflicts with something you're trying to accomplish. I think the fortunate thing here is

the industry kept it really clean. They didn't go into any extraneous issues. And if you read

Justice Scalia's opinion, and it was a seven to decision, you know, he talks about the fact that

there are books like The Brothers Grim that are pretty scary for kids and much scarier than any

video game, right? So he's bringing in these real world examples and highlighting that literature

of any kind, of any medium showcases different aspects of humanity. And it's all valid and it

all is worthy of protection. And being scary or gory is not the differentiator. The medium is not

differentiator. It does it past the test. And there are our First Amendment tests, but this was

clearly within the ambit of protection. And so I think that was a huge win because not only was

it a clear and decisive victory, but you had a conservative justice writing the opinion,

and which also sends a signal to, you know, policymakers and others that this is a bipartisan

win of the highest order. There's just three things I want to pull out for listeners really quick.

One, seven to victory, can you even remember a time? What a different world we lived in to the

state senator who brought this case was Leland Yee who would go on to plead guilty to felony

racketeering charges, which just I can never get over. And again, to show the political complexity,

the full name of Brown versus entertainment is Edmund G Brown, governor of the state of California,

and Kamala Harris, attorney general of the state of California versus entertainment

merchant association and the ESA. So the AG of the time was Kamala Harris, former VP of the United

States. So it just it really does hammer home how complicated all of this is and how it feels like

a miracle. I remember when this decision came through and I remember being stunned. Like I truly

didn't think it would be a seven to I think anytime you go into a Supreme Court litigation, it means

it's a hard issue. And you, you have to marshal every resource, every bit of help you can

to win. So one of the things the team did was seek what they call amicus briefs from a number

of parties. So they got I believe in amicus brief from senators Lieverman and Cole to say the ESRB

is exactly what we wanted and protects kids the way it should. They got them from the entertainment

industry at the time I was at Vicom and so we supported and said, if you go after video games,

what else are you going to be able to go after which is protected by the first amendment and a

number of industries. They got a number of state attorneys general on a bipartisan basis to

come in and say, this is not the kind of thing we ought to be prosecuting. So you are trying to

load up as much as you can so that they understand they have air cover as justices. Like if you're

ruling for us, you're doing it in a way that really meets where the American public is.

You're not out of step with where everyone else policy makers, members of the public and the like.

So I think there was definitely trepidation because you never go in feeling extra confident.

But I think the oral argument was very strong and I think the fact that Scalia wrote the decision

made it very definitive. I will say every once in a while there's a state or two probably every

other year that comes up with some legislation and we usually talk to one of the sponsors to say,

I don't know if you're aware of this decision. You may be new to this because we don't want to

have to challenge it in the court because we'll win but it's an opportunity for us to provide

background and context so that they understand what we do and why we do it and the safeguard to round

it. So we don't go in litigation first. We go in hoping to at least explain why we are where we are

and all the things that we do and that usually solves the issue. That's very polite of you.

Whenever I get a phone call and somebody lets me know that they're giving me an opportunity to

learn more, that's where I know I've done really bad. So I'm glad that you put it that way.

Let's take a quick break and then we're going to come back and we're going to talk about ESA

in the modern era and your era of things. Video games were survived but it's a lot more

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while subscription is active. Act two, the president of the ESA on generative AI, child safety

and calls for unionization. So much has changed since 2011 and the Supreme Court ruling.

Video games are popular. They don't require a trade show per se to attract attention from the press

or from retailers. E three, as you mentioned, has come to an end. I would say that the

iron of parents and politicians has largely shifted to social media. What function does the ESA

have in 2026? And how has that evolved since 2011? What 2011 did was widen the aperture of what

the industry could focus on as they grew their businesses? I mentioned before, back when I joined

the ESA as general council in 2015, subscription service models were just starting. That's become

revolutionized now and not just in games, but in all of business and all of our lives. If you think

about how many subscriptions you personally have in your life, it's much different than it was 11

years ago. So I think we started looking at what are the intellectual property related matters

and then what are the technology matters that we could help on? And that's allowed us to understand

the business models as they developed to provide protections there. And I would say the biggest

thing that's happened recently is as you look at social media, there is such a concern among

parents and legislators that the proposed laws cover just about anything electronic.

So that's been the big challenges. How do we show the distinction between the concern they have

over potentially a social media platform and what our industry does? And so again,

a great learning opportunity to say on top of the ESRB information you get, most of the companies

have some type of trust and safety mechanism within their framework. So if you're a council,

there are a number of trust and safety tools that they use, you know, some are human and human

monitored, some are technological. You're beginning to see the use of AI a little bit and some of that.

So how do we demonstrate that we are in fact different? There was actually a bill in

middle of a country maybe three or four years ago to regulate algorithms. And I remember

I said, you must have that mistaken. We said, oh, no, no. This legislator in this state

house wants to regulate algorithms. And what we had to explain was, you know, do you like Google

Maps? Like do you like your weather app? And I think they were trying to get to the algorithms on

what they saw as the doom scrolling. That's an extreme example. But each day as legislators are

looking to regulate, particularly online kids safety, what we have to demonstrate is we're doing

things in a way that they actually find helpful. So how do you legislate in a way that does

it impede our ability to continue our efforts in online safety? So I think that's one big area.

And any other big one today would be how are we managing AI legislation? Because the industry has

been using some form of AI, maybe not AI in this sense that we're talking about today, but some

form of AI for five or 10 years, at least, maybe more, depending on what you count as AI.

Some of that is reared at said in some something that helps in gameplay, but a lot of it's

where back end low balancing or trust and safety, all those types of things. But the language being

used in so much of the legislative language today is pointed at just everything on the internet.

And so we spend a lot of time trying to educate and edify what is happening with our system so

that they're more calibrated and more targeted at what they're trying to address.

Well, let's dig into both of these challenges because one, child safety, like you said,

rapidly becoming one of the biggest concerns for both parents and politicians. But the approaches

among game companies are all over the place. I mean, you have Nintendo on one end, which is very

careful. Very slow to adopt certain things, always prioritizing, I wouldn't say, child safety,

almost to a fault of being able to experience the games less so recently. And then you have the

very opposite approach, which is Roblox, where the CEO has said that the company flat out,

isn't waiting for others to figure things out. I would say has attracted a fair deal of heat

for some of the things he said around child safety. How does the ESA balance

these different desires for publishers where some might want lax laws around things like

in-app purchases in others outright see that as as predatory, right? How does the ESA exist

in the middle of that? There are a couple of layers. One is our job is to build consensus.

It's not always to find the one answer that everyone will agree to, but rather what are the

legislative mechanisms that allow these to coexist? Because everyone will agree that online safety

particularly for children is critically important. If you have a discussion with that, you

shouldn't be in the industry. And you shouldn't be online, right? That's got to be an important

default for everyone. And that's what's great about working with all these companies. Then I

don't only talk about it, you get to see what they do. And on our website, we actually have a

list of what the various companies do based on their capabilities because what an Nintendo can do,

maybe a publisher can't or maybe isn't a position to do unless they have a platform. So

we're constantly monitoring what's happening, keeping it on our website and letting legislators know

about our industry efforts. Part of what we do is divine what is not the bare minimum, but what is

a consensus position that allows us to advocate for the industry while allowing them to experiment

in ways that improve what they're trying to do. A lot of Silicon Valley beyond the game

industry is an experimentation mode. And I think in private markets, that can work. I don't know

that it works in public markets or in other areas, but when you're talking about private industry,

trying to develop new tools, you want there to be innovation. I think the second overlay is all

of these companies are global. So we have to monitor not only what's happening in the United States,

but how are they impacted by regulations and legislation in other countries? And does that change

the emphasis of how we advocate in the US? Because for the most part, if companies are doing something

in one jurisdiction, they're just doing it, right? Not always, but for the most part, it is too

difficult to manage different rules and different jurisdictions. It's much easier to say, this is our

platform. And so what are the the through lines that help advocate for what we need here,

but also accommodate the fact that there may be some play in other jurisdictions that change the

course of how heavily we advocate. So we're constantly doing outreach with some of our partner

associations. We manage the US, but we've got partner associations in various regions around the

world. And we're constantly trying to learn what's going on in Australia, what's going on in Canada,

what's going on in France or Germany, so that we can anticipate where we're going to land and see if

we can find a consensus position that accommodates where our companies may be headed. So that's the

special sauce of a trade association is finding something that helps as many people as possible,

but hurts as few are none and advocating for that because we, at least from the US standpoint,

like to try innovative things. It's self-regulation inherently going to have to change

as all of this is happening because I look at something like the ESRB and it definitely reflects

the era in which it was made, but now many of the games that I play don't have ratings. They don't

go through the ESRB process. You have games that are inside of Roblox, right? They don't go through

this process. And at the same time, the things that are attracting heat right now are like you said,

child safety, where Roblox is being used by some people for child predation. So how do you,

how do you self-regulate in that environment? So a few things. One, the ESRB has updated its

guidelines over time to accommodate changes in both human behavior and company development.

So when loot boxes became a very big legislative matter, one of the things ESRB did was update its

interactive elements descriptors to say may have in-game purchasing so that as a consumer, you were

aware that your purchase might include in-game activities surrounding money and you can block that.

Like in fact, today on all the major consoles, you can use an app. You don't even need to be on

the device. You literally use your app and with a click of a button, you can block spend or

limit spend, limit time, limit the kinds of games. What the ratings would be on the kinds of games.

So I think one of the great things about industry is we're always innovating and we're also

providing that information. That's one important component. I'm not involved in any of the Roblox

lawsuits or matters. I know that a lot of the issues emanate from communications rather than the

gameplay and that's one of the areas even outside of Roblox that's happening sometimes in the

communications and we can't always control that if it's not on our platform or source. I know

Roblox continues to innovate on age verification, ID and the like. That's always going to happen

in our industry where people are experimenting with different kinds of tools for users. So I think

one of the jobs we have to do is understand what's happening so we can explain it to legislators

and as best we can but really to put companies in front of them where we can so that they're understanding

where the concerns lie. And then I think the other thing that ESRB has done is collaborated with

rating agencies around the world to form something called IARC, the International Age Rating

Coalition. And this was developed about 10 or 11 years ago in large part to address the growth

of mobile apps. As you said, the traditional model of a box game, physical sales going through ESRB

wasn't occurring in the mobile space but there were many platforms, Google Play and others

who wanted to figure out how ratings could work on their systems. And so there was a new system

developed that coordinated the top rating agencies around the world, some of which are self-regulatory,

some of which are government agencies, like the group in South Korea or Indonesia, Germany,

those are government agencies, right? And so collaborating and finding a form that allowed you to

upload your mobile app, go through the questionnaire and within each jurisdiction have a rating,

right? And so on those platforms, they found an innovative and efficient way to rate apps that

we're going to mobile stores. Now, Steam doesn't use the ESRB system. Apple doesn't use the

ARCB system, right? And so they've developed their own ways of dealing with that, but the other

major players have largely used it. And I think that's the kind of innovation that the industry

continues to do is to figure out where are consumers? How do we help people with the information

they want to learn? And how do we innovate around there? And we try to work with as many

companies and platforms as possible to make that awareness possible and to make that tool possible.

Now, I run the ESA, not the ESRB. And so they are the ones who primarily do this. So I'm

speaking more as someone who explains this to third parties than the person who actually is involved

in that process. I do want to talk about what makes you unique. Your first job was as a lawyer

who is working for music companies in the Napster era. So you are very familiar with

extinction level threats. And I would say widespread intellectual property theft.

Is there less concern about AI in terms of, I would say copyright infringement?

In terms of AI, I think it's an interesting issue for industry because we've used it

in a variety of ways. As you look at generative AI, I think there's definitely a concern with

how it's being used and the kind of content that gets used in those systems. I also think our

companies, like all industries, are trying to figure out how do you use this in a way that's

productive, but also in a way that values human creativity. What I've heard from all of our

major CEOs is yes, we always want technological advancement for game making and for reaching

customers and for protecting our systems. But the human element is so critical to making a game

fun, innovative. And I think that's been the focus in our industry on how AI gets used.

I think a lot of the experiments we've seen haven't necessarily been game development as much as

showing what cutscenes might look like, for example. I know that there was some issues surrounding

the take two stock price. And I think they had an earnings call soon after that where they basically

said, this isn't a game. This is actually just showing certain scenes and we're, you know,

there are years away from AI creating games. So I think the current focus has been, how do we

maximize technology to make games better faster smarter with human intelligence at the top of

that pyramid? And that's been a consistent thread that I've heard from the leadership of the

companies. On the human element of it all in a 2018 interview with your predecessor. This

is on Waypoint. Michael Gallagher said about unions. This is fortunately in the issue we haven't

had to deal with much in my time as the leader of the ESA and goes on to cite, you know, wages being

high and all these great opportunities in video games. Unfortunately, you are now the leader of the

ESA and it has become much bigger of a concern, wages being an issue, lots of layouts, a number of

problems. Does the ESA currently support calls for video game unionization or where is it

stands on it? We typically do not get involved in employer-employer relations with our companies

because our sweet spot, as I mentioned before, we started with a focus on, you know, the state

legislation and then that we've grown into these other complex issues of intellectual property

and technology. So we have not been engaged on labor issues related to our companies. It's also

not a consistent issue with all the companies we're going to talk about labor representation. So it

hasn't been an area of focus for us. That's really a bit left to companies and their employees

and their workforce and not something ESA really has engaged in it all. I want to go back before

we wrap up to the beginning of all this, which is violence in video games. It seems like a distant

faint memory, but on the long spectrum of current political concerns, where does video game

violence fit in in 2026? One of the things we have noticed over the past

six, eight years is unfortunately violence hasn't subsided. We still see these awful stories

in American society. We're seeing it in Canada now. We're seeing it in other places.

ESA has not gotten the same level of calls that we've gotten, you know, 10, 15, 20 years ago.

And I think the message has gotten out to policymakers that the same video games sold in the United

States are sold everywhere in the world. And we're the only ones with a gun violence problem.

And so it can't be games. Obviously no one wants their product, their content, everything else

to instigate anything that happens in the world of that nature. And it's always sad to hear

when those things happen. We've been in the fortune position of being able to establish, you know,

not only does the science support it, but logic does. You know, our industry was called to the

White House in 2018. When there was an awful shooting, I believe in Florida. And the president

wanted us to explain what happened. And when we explain this, it made sense. And I think also

as subsequent incidents to happen around the United States, you saw a group of legislators

on their own saying games are not to blame. There was a whole hashtag games are not to blame.

So I think we've been able to establish that games are an important part of everyday life.

And if you look at the statistics that we release every year based on the demographics of the US,

everyone is playing. In fact, more people play over 50 than under 18,

which means that you had a group of people who played as a kid. Maybe they tailed off a little bit.

And then in their 50s, 60s, 70s, even 80s have either come back to games or gone to games.

So now we're, you know, we really reports about, you know, people 80 years old and older,

increasingly playing games. And not only us, the ARP finds that the most popular page on their

website is the video game page. And so we've been able to really establish and demonstrate that

everyone is a gamer or gamer adjacent. You know, there's not a legislator I talk to who doesn't

have someone in their family who plays games. And that changes the course of the conversation.

Yeah, to wrap things up then, what is the biggest political or industrial threat to the video game

industry right now? What is the ESA aware of and what is its plan to counter whatever this big

thing might be? Well, number one, we want to create a platform and an environment for games to be

created with, with as many opportunities for growth as possible. So, you know, we didn't talk

about tariffs at all, but obviously tariffs have had an impact on the console market and that can

impact games more broadly if people don't want to purchase at the same level. Fortunately, we're

in a position where we show growth this past year. So we're over 60 billion again, first time since

COVID. And so that just shows the kind of consumer spend in games. So those market regulations,

I think are important. That includes being able to hire and develop as much talent as we want

and being able to keep those jobs in the U.S. both homegrown and through really smart people

from abroad who want to work here. So I think we want to grow that market. We also want to make

sure that legislators and regulators and parents and all groups understand what we're doing to

provide the safest environments possible on video game platforms. And that's a constant effort.

And then we just want to make sure that we create a landscape where people can hear about

the positive impact games have because that doesn't get talked about enough. But there are so many

people who have found that games provide them with community, with personal value, with connections.

You know, we had a congresswoman from Alaska and she came to our office for an event and she said,

oh my goodness, you guys with the people who represent games, my kids would not have been able to stay

in touch with their cousins throughout COVID, but for games because that's how they connected

with one another. And so we just want to continue demonstrating the global impact games have on

social, cultural, and economic value to the U.S. And I think when we do those things,

the other issues start to line up in a way that's easy to explain.

I have to pull one thing that you mentioned because we did talk about tariffs and you mentioned

AI earlier. Between tariffs and the RAM shortages, our industry is beginning to have to almost

compete for space in these conversations. I mean, is games now having to make a competition against

tech, against cars who need RAM? You know, one of the great things about history, it is global.

And you know, some of the industries you're talking about might be purely domestic. I mean,

they have global sales, but they're focused here. And we're able to source from all over the

world, which has been a great thing for our industry. So it seems like we're well positioned,

but I think you're only as well positioned as today is long, right? Like you still have to always,

we're always competing against each other, against other industries. So that's not new. I think

what is exciting about our industries is there's always an innovation around the corner to help

master the next problem. And where should people go if they want to learn even more about the

ESA? Well, our website is VESA.com. There are two ESAs and also THESA.com. We have all

matter of information about our industry, our policy issues, and how we can help our industry grow.

So we are excited about what we do. We serve the greatest industry in the world. And we have the

happiest, most engaged fans of anyone. And just to give you the opportunity, if you want to announce

that E3 is coming back, this is your chance. Looks like no. We don't have E3, but we are excited about

icon, which is our new global summit in Las Vegas, April 27 to 29, where we will bring together

people from different industries to demonstrate the impact games have. One of the things that's

excited us about video games isn't just the growth we have, but the growth we

spread in other industries and the innovation we spread in other industries. There's a reason

the NFL NBA, WWE and other sports leagues want to have a video game component. And it's not just

about licensing. It's about expanding their fan reach and engagement during the off season.

And there's a reason why NFL coaches love having NFL players who've played Madden because

they know playbooks and they come in understanding the different language. And so

we want to demonstrate across education, finance, sports, health, you name it, the impact games

happen. So we're going to spend a couple of days with leaders from all these industries and

showcase how our industry impacts others. So we're very excited about icon. And you can learn

about that on iicotn.com icon. I know where I want to be in April. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Patreon bonus section. An interview post game. You know how this works. This is where we split up.

If you are a patreon supporter, I have quite a bit of stuff to dig into here.

I performed this interview about a week or two ago. It's been a little while. And I've had the

chance to really think on it and think about my takeaways from a variety of the things that we

discussed. And my thinkings are complicated. We'll get into all of this in the actual section.

But I think that you will enjoy it. If you're not a patreon supporter though, no worries. The

interview is still all yours to make sense of it. However you would like. I think there's a lot

of details there. I mean, it is a big meaty, meaty interview. You'll still want to stick around

because I've got a great song for you this week. We'll get to that in just a moment. But in the

meantime, let's split. There were three things that we talked about in this conversation that I

wanted to pick at a bit more with you. That's cool by you. Union representation, ESRB ratings,

and general questions around the use of artificial intelligence. First, union representation.

Now, you might have been disappointed, I would say, to hear the ESA doesn't proactively support

calls for video game unionization. And that is a very fair feeling, though I will also say the ESA's

response is hardly surprising. The ESA is ultimately a collaboration between a bunch of gaming

companies across a very wide spectrum from Mattel and Wizards of the Coast to EA and Ubisoft to

Capcom and Konami to Epic and Roblox to Amazon and Netflix. These companies use the ESA to protect

their interests as companies in the United States. Now, I still wanted to ask about unionization,

even knowing more or less what answer to expect, because I think it's valuable for people to know

where the ESA's efforts to protect the game's industry extend, and also where they don't.

If you would like to know more about the organization's advocating for workers,

the United Video Game Workers CWA is a great place to start. And yes, you'll be hearing

much more about video game unionization on post games later this year. In the meantime,

you should also read Nicole Carpenter's Video Game Union scene, a project that I was fortunate

to edit a couple of years ago. It remains the best single stop source for unionization's history

function and also offers practical steps towards organization. Another topic that came up was the

ESRB and the lack of ratings on digital products. I have long seen the absence of the ESRB ratings on

steam as a problem for the ESA and the ESRB, but after this interview that opinion has shifted,

not requiring ESRB ratings on steam allows for far more small developers to release games on steam,

because they don't have to get that rating. But it also, I suspect, places responsibility on steam

itself, which is to say, should politicians one day see the lack of ratings as a problem?

Members of the ESA will be able to claim they've done their due diligence,

getting their big games rated by the ESRB, and that it's steam alone who should be the target

of any regulation rather than the broader gaming culture. But like also, let's be real,

politicians can't figure out how to enforce moderation on social media. I suspect the only way

this becomes a political issue in gaming is if credit card companies refuse to work with steam

again and again and again, which won't happen as steam continues to bend to request for

de-platforming very specific, not safe for work games. None of the above is to endorse

steam's decisions or to say this is a good situation. I just think that the players seem to

all be aware of how to avoid a certain level of political discomfort.

Last bit, questions about AI. If there is one section I'd like to follow up with today's

guest on, it is this one. As an interviewer, you are always balancing different needs. Do I want

to give the audience a broad understanding of the subject or do I want to drill down into a

single important issue? There's a version of this interview that entirely focused on learning

where the ESA and through it, the industry stands on generative AI. I am not surprised that the

answers I did get were a bit muddy and that I think the industry itself doesn't have a unified

stance on this topic. I know that it feels like every major executive has jumped on the AI

but I think companies like Epic, Konami, Amazon and Wizards of the Coast have very different

positions on when and when to not use the technology and have experienced different levels of

combustion in their fan bases that have shaped those stances. At one point in our conversation,

Pierre Luis said this line that I think is the key of what we can and can't expect from the ESA

on the matter. Quote, part of what we do is divine what is not the bare minimum but like what is

a consensus position that allows us to advocate for the industry while allowing them to experiment

in ways that improve what they're trying to do. A lot of Silicon Valley beyond the game industry

is an experimentation mode. That quote tells us that the ESA and its company members want

as minimal limitations as possible as they figure out what they want to do with AI.

It's easy to see how that is pretty ideal for corporate leadership. It's also very easy to see

how that's not great necessarily for the average mid-tier game developer which gets at something

this conversation really hammered home for me. The ESA is not a trade group that acts on behalf

of people who make games or even all people who design games. It is a trade group that acts on

behalf of its official members, a global collection of powerful game publishers and developers.

I think in the past it was easy to see ESA as this great defender of all aspects of games because

in an existential war everyone could easily align shoulder to shoulder. But the world and the

games industry are more complicated in 2026 with more conflicting interests between players,

game creators, publishers, investors, tech companies, and state and national governments.

And so the ESA is still doing exactly what it's always done. But we've all changed.

Video games is no longer a monoculture that wants to survive. It's a culture that wants to flourish.

It wants to be art. It wants to be product. It wants to be predator and prey. It wants to be a

wide variety of things because it is no longer even it anymore. The games industry is a collection

of many different points of view. I think it is broadly good for video games that the ESA

is advocating for them politically. But I also think that in time we will see more and more voices

advocating on behalf of the many different points of view that the games industry has to offer.

And that's a good thing.

That is a wrap on the ESA's uninhabitable task of representing games when games mean something

different to damn near everybody, including the ESA's biggest members. Next week,

the scoring systems within video games fill us with joy and they motivate us to express

ourselves through play. Metrics, on the other hand, have with chilling efficiency,

turned work, school, and social media into a woeful struggle to meet goals that feel disconnected

if not in literal conflict with our interests and beliefs. How can two things so similar

have such friction? And how can understanding both scores and metrics make our lives more

fruitful and less stressful? I talk with philosopher and academic C. T. Nguyen, author of the brilliant

new book The Score, which might sound like another addition to the bookshelf full of

insipid self-help manuals on gamification, but listener, it is anything but.

Until then, though, a reminder, post-game supporters get the show and the newsletter

early on Fridays at 5 p.m. Eastern, they get extra acts and bonus materials. This week,

Patreon supporters got a post-game reflection of sorts, in which I tried to make sense of some

of the more complicated topics from the interview. Plus, each month subscribers get a bonus episode

in my ongoing series Past Games, in which I share deep-dive histories in the gaming

anniversaries of 2026. The most recent episode just went live, it tells the history of the original

Legend of Zelda, but really expands much further than that to encompass the entire history of the

series and also the history of its fandom. And, no ads on anything. Subscribe to the Patreon

at patreon.com slash post games, it's only five bucks. Subscribe to the newsletter for free

at post.games, post games logo by James Verum, theme by Mark Sparling, all interviews are edited

for clarity and consideration. In a special thank you to this week's guest, the president of the

ESA Stanley Pierlewee. Like the show, please leave a review on Apple or Spotify or just share

the show with a friend, it helps a ton. And, to take us out, I have something really cool.

It is a new song from the game Big Walk, which is House House's follow-up to the beloved

untitled goose game. This is the song Jumping Voices, aka The Big Walk theme by AKSFX.