Brian Crecente received a response from Microsoft saying that, “A conflict mineral free supply chain is a priority for us in our supply chain management policies and practices.”

Nintendo responded to earlier pressure from another group, Raise Hope for Congo, and completely dodged the issue saying, “Nintendo does not purchase any metals as raw materials. As a remote purchaser that buys finished components made from many materials, Nintendo requires its suppliers to comply with its Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) Procurement Guidelines, which stipulate suppliers comply with applicable laws, have respect for human rights and conduct their business in an appropriate and fair manner.”

The problem is that while these statements sound mostly nice and hopeful, they are bullshit. Why? Because the problem is not a conflict over the minerals but a conflict between the laws that set forth the financial responsibilities of corporations and their social responsibilities towards people and the earth.

In the US, by law it is illegal for corporations to do anything that would hurt their ability to maximize profits. Shareholders can sue the company if they think the company is spending too much money on being socially responsible and thus cutting into profits. Corporations often have “social campaigns” to green their products or give funds to cancer, etc. But that is just a distraction to the real atrocities they commit by employing slave labor or funding wars.

Their goal is to extract human and earth resources for as cheap as possible and they are required by law to do so. You can read or see The Corporation for more info. If you don’t have time to watch the 2.5hr film, watch the extra features radio interview with the Majority Report. That segment does a great job of summarizing how the market forces work to compel corporations to act in ways that abuse both people and planet.

If we want to stop corporations from using minerals extracted from conflict zones which funds the perpetuation of violence and killings, then those laws that compel them to behave in such ways must be changed.

That’s how the system works and if being a game designer has taught me anything it’s that any system can be changed.

© 2010, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

We dump dead diseased animals into rivers. The rotting flesh, organs full of parasites and bacteria ooze into the water.

Thirsty, we drink.

Dirty, we clean.

We consume useless products we don’t need, to impress the people we don’t like, only to throw them out or lose them within months. They leach toxic chemicals into the earth and rot for hundreds of years.

We abuse our soil, which lacks nutrients for the food we grow. The food, stunted, lacks ability to fight pests.

We spray pesticides.

We eat pesticides.

We are pests.

Corporations bound by law to profit exploit and cut corners in order to keep shareholders happy, while they spew pollution into our waters, our air and our land.

Hungry, we consume.

Blind, we demand more.

We cannot continue this any longer. To do so is bringing a slow, but certain total destruction to all life.

Enter Exhibit A: It began centuries ago, one example being the poor treatment of cows. Their raw milk turned deadly, leading to an epidemic of Tuberculosis. This led to pasteurization and ultra-pasteurization, which can cause further disease and allergies. This disrespect for nature continues today. We harm our planet and it harms us.

Enter Exhibit B: The disastrous BP owned Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The air, which is 100 times more toxic than normal due to oil dispersant chemicals is making the people of Louisiana cough, gag and unable to sleep. Symptoms just like those who lived near previous oil spills.

Government and local authorities at this time of writing have yet to provide health services. If the toxic dust after the Twin Towers fell in NYC is any indication, it will be years before the people of Louisiana see any relief, if they live long enough.

Enter Exhibit C: The Red River in Winnipeg, Canada, an area known to have the highest incidence of Crohn’s disease, a devastating inflammatory bowel disease. In 1997 I was diagnosed with it.

That’s me, having the time of my life tubing and wakeboarding on the Red River up in Winnipeg, Canada. I’m the one showing off to the camera, unknowingly ingesting bacteria that would work over my gut for the next 6 months. Then symptoms of diarrhea and gut pain were frequent. My friend warned me not to drink the water, which I didn’t think I had. It wasn’t until years later that I learned from her and a UK doctor that farmers liberally use the river as dumping grounds for waste and dead animals.

Don’t you see? The system is out of whack, out of sync, on the verge of collapse. What the planet needs, what WE need, is to unplug from Western society. Forgo consumption in place of contribution. Skip the rat race towards piles of monopoly money that only exist on Wall Street computers. Rediscover the value of things that cannot be valued; relationships and community.

When this disrespect of all things living ends, no longer will we have increasing rates of disease and decreasing rates of longevity.

UPDATE #1: Huffington Post has an article that is along the same lines as the above, posted on May 19th, but I didn’t see it until today, May 23rd.

© 2010, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

1. How stupid is the US government for thinking there wouldn’t be any retaliation? The US has had some famous individuals who have caused massive damage, like Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber). A single person who wants to retaliate against government actions is entirely capable of doing so. The article uses the analogy of stirring up a hornets nest and thinking the US won’t get stung. 9/11 was the biggest sting we got from previous transgressions and all these wars and Predator drone attacks are just begging for more stings.
2. In this current system of government, there are NO anti-war presidents. There may be anti-war candidates, like Dennis Kucinich, but Obama was never an anti-war candidate either. To all the liberals who thought they were electing an anti-war president, try watching the debates next time. President Obama clearly said he’d continue fighting terrorism militarily.
3. The article states, “Figuring out cause-and-effect when it comes to the motivations of Islamic militants is always tricky.” Huh? These are not aliens from another planet, as much as the mass media seems to indicate, they are people who simply don’t like it when a much more powerful, resourceful and rich country humiliates their entire culture for generations and to top it off kills many innocents with reckless abandon and doesn’t show any regret. The US military frequently SAYS they regret the killing of innocents, but they never SHOW it. A good place to start might be to stop dropping them in the first place.

If you want to play an interactive version of my thoughts on this subject, you can play, “What Goes Around”. It’s not a proper game, but more an experimental game that communicates my thoughts on this.

© 2010, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

In summary, there’s a ton of small bits of plastic debris floating in the ocean that comes from the plastic bags and other trash we throw away. It’s so small that fish mistake it for plankton, their food. It ends up killing many of them. If not, it could wind up poisoning them and us if we end up eating the fish.

Here’s a video from KQED’s Quest about this growing problem.

The email which linked to the Environment Oregon page calls attention to encourage our local representatives to ban all plastic bags, mostly found in food stores. When I lived in SF, they did this and I didn’t noticed it one bit. That’s because since 2004 I’ve been using a large tote bag from LL Bean.

I always have my huge LL Bean tote bag when food shopping. I freaking love that thing! It’s HUGE. I’ve been using it since 2004 and it’s super sturdy. I can’t tell you how many times people have stopped to ask me about the bag or just to comment on how huge it is.

I also have another, smaller bag, the kind you see sold next to the checkout lines in the food stores.

Just to be clear, I don’t have any stake in LL Bean. I mention their bag because I love it and I think whether or not our governments can act to save the oceans, we don’t have to wait for them. We can act now by using reusable bags instead of plastic.

© 2010, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

However, because of competition, the weak global economy and not knowing the law, employers may be illegally using internships to not pay for work that is benefiting the company. The New York Times(1) reported on April 2nd, 2010 that this trend has been accelerating in recent years and that there is a crackdown, particularly in California and Oregon to put a stop to this.

In November, 2009 The Employment Tribunals in the UK ruled that an intern, Nicola Vette was due back-pay for her work on a film with London Dreams Motion Pictures Ltd(2). The ruling sets a precedent that “workers engaged on an expenses-only basis are entitled to payment at least in line with the national minimum wage, in addition to payment for the holiday they accrue.”

Dana John, a senior at N.Y.U., had this to say about her unpaid internship, “If you want to be in the music industry that’s the way it works. If you want to get your foot in the door somehow, this is the easiest way to do it. You suck it up.”

That sounds exactly like the kind of thing people say about the video games industry. That you do whatever you can get in. I hear the phrase “suck it up” often during discussions about the games industry’s frequent exploitative unpaid overtime.

An important point from the New York Times article is that even if the company offers college credit, it doesn’t free companies from paying for the intern’s work, especially when it benefits the company.

Unfortunately, with how competitive the video games industry is, I believe this illegal practice of unpaid internships may be common, especially in the smaller, lesser known development studios. I’ve already contacted one developer in the US to let them know their unpaid internship may be illegal. A quick search of internships from Activision, EA and Ubisoft found that on some Activision internships, particularly at Raven were listed as being paid. Some others had no mention either way. At EA, it appears all internships are paid. Information on pay for Ubisoft internships could not be found.

Even though you may be willing sacrifice a lot in order to get a job in the games industry, you need to stick up for your rights and make it clear that if your work is going to benefit the company in anyway, you have a right to be paid fairly.

Sources:

(1)http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/business/03intern.html?hp
(2)http://www.bectu.org.uk/news/548
(3)http://wdr.doleta.gov/directives/attach/TEGL/TEGL12-09acc.pdf (Page 8 is especially relevant)

Also posted at my Gamasutra blog…

© 2010, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

The other contributor to the nervousness was not knowing how one leaves a comment or speaks their mind to politicians and such. I always over complicate it for some reason. “What am I going to say? How will I say it? Who will I talk to?” Maybe it’s a self defense mechanism to prevent me from actually facing my fears. But the call to the comment line was really easy, what a relief!

I waited on hold for a just a few minutes, no more than five and then a woman answered and I told her I wanted to leave a comment about the President considering using military commissions instead of criminal courts for terrorist suspects, but I didn’t know what the process was and what I needed to do. She understood and concisely told me that I state my position on the subject of terrorist trials and then they record it and pass it along.

That’s what I did. I told her I wanted to President to use the criminal courts instead of military commissions because I feel they can handle the facts of the case and make appropriate decisions better than the military commissions. She summarized my position for confirmation, I agreed and then we said goodbye. It was easier than I led myself to believe. It also felt empowering.

I feel that speaking up, especially during the very contentious political climate we have in Washington, is really important. It’s taken me a long time to feel comfortable speaking my opinions with those in Washington, but it’s also my job as a citizen. It sure beats signing a petition and not knowing if it does any real good. That’s not to say I think my call will change things by itself. But it at least feels like I’m doing something about it rather than complaining. It feels more direct and if more people called with the same position, it would have an impact I think.

© 2010, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

But my inspiration wasn’t Avatar, nor was it FernGully, or Dances with Wolves, or Pocahontas or any other movie one cares to compare Avatar to. My inspiration for the environmentally and socially conscious video game was real life. It was the many actual real events that I have read about or watched short videos on.

It always upset me when people couldn’t talk about anything besides making comparisons to other films because they were completely missing the point. Avatar isn’t a rip-off of FernGully or Princess Mononoke; it’s a rip-off of what is happening right now all over the world in the United States, the Amazon jungles, coasts of Somalia and the remote regions of India. Mega corporations based in the US and UK are mining for minerals and resources, just like the fictional RDA mining corporation in Avatar. And just like the fictional RDA, they are destroying the environment and harming, if not killing, the people who live in it.

I wish that Avatar wasn’t so escapist and that people after watching it could make the connection that what happens in the movie is reality and that it needs to stop, sooner than later.

With the greed of corporations driving the pollution of the planet, bit by bit, we are slowly killing ourselves. The rivers become polluted and we who drink from it or swim in it, contract diseases, which happened with me. But that is a story for another post.

In the meantime, educate your thinking with these links below.

• India’s indigenous are threatened by Vedanta’s mining (video 8 minutes)
• Amnesty International UK’s Take Action page about Vedanta in India
• Crude documentary (I ordered this and should be getting it soon)
• Amazon oil pollution by Texaco (now Chevron) and Chinese oil companies (video 14 minutes)
• Somalia pirates try to stop illegal dumping of radioactive waste
• Pollution in China photography essay

© 2010, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

I found the episode inspiring because it uses a popular media format for social good. My chosen medium is video games and my passion is to use it for social good. Several comments from the actors and producers of the show really struck me. One of them was “re-humanizing” people who may be different in some way. The other was that people often resort to violence because they feel they are out of other options, that violence is their only solution.

When 9/11 happened, I was gun-ho blood thirsty for some vengeance and retribution. As the years passed I read more about war and terrorism and came to the conclusion that the US was going about it all wrong. That one can never stop terrorist violence by trying to kill the terrorist before they kill us. It only fuels the fire of hate that lead towards their participating in terrorism to begin with.

The people who are drawn to terrorism are no different from anyone else, but they have suffered greatly and believe they have no other options left than to commit an act of terrorism. The “global war on terrorism” is into its ninth year and in my eyes it’s only spreading. First it was Afghanistan, then Iraq, then Somalia and now it sounds like we’ll be focusing on Yemen for some time. Oh, and then there’s Pakistan, how could I forget? That’s five countries in 9 years where we have launched counter-terrorist operations, usually in the form of drone attacks that kill innocents. There is no slowing if the US continues this behavior and our vulnerability to a terrorist attack is more likely. The war is making us less safe.

Most terrorists are well educated and they must be to go to terrorist training camps. You think they pick up wooden clubs and beat each other like mindless brutes? No, they area in fast paced classes learning calculus and trigonometry and chemistry and dozens upon dozens of weapons names, stats and functionality. They’re smart and their anger is often justified.

The whole point of using military is to scare the enemy into quitting. But with most terrorists, they are fearless and actually welcome death to become a martyr. We can’t win with violence when the enemy welcomes it. We have to listen and by listening, we’ll be able to give them better solutions than resorting to terrorism. One way to stop the expansion of the “global war on terror” is to “re-humanize” the terrorists. We must understand where their hate comes from and it’s not because of our freedoms.

© 2010, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

I added the emphasis because in my experience, living with a hearing loss of mild to severe levels, I have a unique perspective on disabilities. I also have Crohn’s Disease, but I should say instead, that it lives with me. Having both Crohn’s and being hard of hearing, I know from my own experience that is it those things that give purpose to ones life. That the act of living is the purpose of life itself.

The quote above angers me so much because no one should think that anyone with a disability doesn’t deserve the gift of life or that they have no purpose. It’s a complex issue to be sure, but it’s a slippery slope I think to start saying one person’s life has more purpose over another. Doesn’t matter in my opinion whether someone will be disabled or comatose, life itself, is the purpose of life.

© 2009, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.

Bill Clinton said it wasn’t Parkinsons, but that when he writes for a long time or plays videogames the tendons can act up or something. He even motioned with his hands out front, holding an imaginary controller, pushing buttons. From the shape of his hands, I think he’s an XBox 360 or PS3 fan.

© 2009, Reid Bryant Kimball. All rights reserved.