Comments on: Comments on 4882

Post number 4882

Steven Den Beste — Wed, 20 Dec 2000 22:20:43 -0800

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.

By: thirteen

thirteen — Wed, 20 Dec 2000 22:26:11 -0800

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.

By: gluechunk

gluechunk — Wed, 20 Dec 2000 23:01:46 -0800

I'm curious if they would have forked over goods if I had brought in the violent Combat.

By: dhartung

dhartung — Wed, 20 Dec 2000 23:12:13 -0800

FYI, Wilmette isn't a "town" in the boonies, it's a modestly upscale suburb on the lakeshore.

By: waxpancake

waxpancake — Wed, 20 Dec 2000 23:26:51 -0800

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.

By: dcodea

dcodea — Thu, 21 Dec 2000 11:20:51 -0800

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.

By: dhartung

dhartung — Thu, 21 Dec 2000 13:26:36 -0800

(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".

By: dcodea

dcodea — Fri, 22 Dec 2000 06:52:42 -0800

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.