To much acclaim and publicity,

December 20, 2000 10:20 PM

To much acclaim and publicity, a town in Illinois organized a program where people could bring in their violent video games, and trade them for other merchandise at local retailers. The program ran for 6 days.

Not a single person took advantage of it.
posted by Steven Den Beste (7 comments total)

The last line of the post made me laugh out loud. I am so very glad Metafilter is back on line. I should be working right now, but I have to keep hitting reload.
Re: the article, I am surprised NOBODY used the program. If I had know, I would have brought in some of my PS shooter games that I will never play again, just to get some fresh games. Then again, knowing me, I probably wouldn't want to give them the satisfaction.
posted by thirteen at 10:26 PM on December 20, 2000

I'm curious if they would have forked over goods if I had brought in the violent Combat.
posted by gluechunk at 11:01 PM on December 20, 2000

FYI, Wilmette isn't a "town" in the boonies, it's a modestly upscale suburb on the lakeshore.
posted by dhartung at 11:12 PM on December 20, 2000

Sounds like you couldn't trade for other games. Only "equal-value gifts of pottery, books and candy." Maybe it would've been a bit more successful if they were trading something besides flower pots and Mars bars.
posted by waxpancake at 11:26 PM on December 20, 2000

Wow! I'm from Wilmette, and We'd definately take GREAT offense to being called "modestly" upscale. Anyone from Chicago knows the deal with the North Shore. Anyway, i didn't hear a peep about this program from anyone in my family, so i can only guess it didn't have as much publicity as you might think. This is the sort of thing that would crack my mom up, so she would've mentioned it. Now i'll send her the link and see what she has to say for herself.
posted by dcodea at 11:20 AM on December 21, 2000

(I'm in Evanston, dcodea, make of it what you will.) Median home price: $450K, median income: $144K. Though there are very nice areas near the lake, that's low-end for the North Shore.

It got a blurb in the Tribune as a failure. The comment one parent made was "we didn't have any violent videos to trade in the first place".
posted by dhartung at 1:26 PM on December 21, 2000

Yeah, but you can't count anything west of Green Bay Road. We don't. And we'll always be morally superior to Winnetka and Kenilworth. It's not our fault we're twice the size of both of them.
I'm actually sort of surprised NO one brought anything in. knowing some of our school boards, you'd think they'd jump at this sort of thing.
posted by dcodea at 6:52 AM on December 22, 2000