You might find this statistic surprising, but there's something like one billion active gamers living in the U.S. today. Okay, that might not be the exact number, but there certainly are a great many people in this country who regularly play digital games of some sort, from World of Warcraft to Super Smash Bros. Brawl. In my past life as a political hack, I spent some time trying to crack the nut of how to reap some sort of political benefit from such a large segment of the population. You're talking about tech-savvy people who can devote hours of attention to their interests and have at least enough disposable income to afford a PS3 or Xbox and new games now and again. That's an attractive constituency.

But a challenge here is that there is, I think it's safe to say, a strain of disdain for politics in the world of gaming. I had settled on the thought that the best approach to tapping into the power of gamers was to forget about leveraging any sort of ideological consensus. Instead, the way to make inroads was to (a) take sensible stands on such meat-and-potatoes issues as video game ratings and then (b) focus on a few relevant political problems that -- and this part is important, I think -- have tangible solutions. Gamers, like many tech people, enjoy and are very good at solving things.

All that is why I was particularly interested to hear that the Entertainment Consumers Association has launched a Gamers for Net Neutrality campaign, to fight for "the principle," says ECA "that ensures that gamers are free to go where they want, do what they like, and connect with whom they choose online." The effort is still fairly barebones. But it's a solid step in starting to start harnessing the political power of a distributed class of people, power that's now laying largely latent. (Alliteration unintentional, I swear.)

It's kinda neat, when you think about it, to be using digital technology to connect people with similar digital interests in the hopes of solving a digital problem. (Photo thx kelly-s)