Why voting isn't worth the wait

FROM BEHIND THE LENS By RYAN SMITH

The entertainment industry failed miserably, again, this election year to capitalize on the largely untapped resource that is the youth vote.

No big surprise there.

Threaten the youth with liberty or death and they’ll take their chances sitting at home on election day.
And try to entice them to the polls with high profile concerts and they’ll miss the message, mistaking the voter registration effort as an opportunity to download the concerts to their new iPods.

While “Vote or Die” and “Rock the Vote” failed to drive home the point, the award for biggest youth vote blunder of the election goes to Bungie and Microsoft for not pre-releasing copies of Halo 2 at the polling places on Nov. 2.

Had polling stations offered, upon turning in your ballot, early releases of the most anticipated game in Xbox history, tech savvy youth and video gamers across the nation would have undoubtedly flocked to the polls by the thousands last Tuesday.

Instead, hundreds of Halo crazed fanatics lined the outsides of video game stores across the country a week later, including a number of places here in Fresno hoping to be the first ones to receive a copy of the game when the doors opened at midnight Monday.

At GameStop, a video game store across from River Park shopping center, a handful of diehards showed up almost six hours early to be at the front of the line.

However, six hours later, the line felt reminiscient of the massive voting lines at polling stations in Pennsylvania a week ago.

The scene was unbelievable.

There were people sitting in lawn chairs, people holding space in line while friends made fast-food runs, homemade cookies decorated with the Halo 2 emblem, free sodas and snacks-the whole spectacle soaking in a childlike eagerness that saturated the atmoshpere the entire night.

If anyone was curious about where the youth vote was on Nov. 2, they were at home salivating in front of their computer monitors watching the latest Halo 2 trailers and game demonstrations on www.IGN.com.

What seemed like the entire 18-24 demographic of Fresno lined up 400-deep Monday night, the last thing on their minds was government, voting, or the war in Iraq.

And they didn’t seem disappointed in the least that their age group sagged in the polls once again.

Their whole reason for living Monday night lay beyond the entrance to the store, packaged neatly in clear plastic with Master Chief standing boldly on the cover.

Ask these people to name two propositions on the ballot last week and they would have probably looked at you with a blank expression.

But ask them to explain the physics of a plasma grenade (one of many weapons in the Halo arsenal) and you’d have thought you were having a conversation with Stephen Hawking.

The collective mind of the youth vote seems impenetrable to politics.

If they can’t be reached with music and P. Diddy (making him youth ambassador to politics was the first mistake) then video games are the key.

Subliminal messages are used all the time. Who knows, maybe when Halo 3 is released, Master Chief will come with the option to have a donkey or an elephant tattooed on his shoulder.