Ok, so I know that you have probably been bombarded by stories about SOPA and PIPA over the past few weeks; if not, you were probably really irritated when Wikipedia went down. Well this incarceration is now dead, the internet has won and celebrations are being had by all of the townspeople. These two bills have caused a hell of a lot trouble in a relatively short space of time and here is one more chapter in this ever-growing saga.

The gaming community, especially journalists, have been against this bill from day one. In fact, the first time I heard of either SOPA or PIPA was from online gaming magazine The Escapist, not from my Washington Post. The reaction from gamers has been venomous, and swathes of people, from the designers who make games to the people who play them, have declared their unwavering allegiance against Congress’ cause. It comes as a surprise then that the king has turned all Cepheus on us and is feeding the townspeople to the sea monster – look it up. The Entertainment Software Association, the gaming industry’s lobbyist in Washington, has actively been supporting these two bills. Piracy is a crime, that softly-spoken man before your Disney videos told you that much, and the gaming industry is hurt by that crime, but that is not an excuse for gaming’s biggest shield - the same organisation that got video games declared as an art form in the US - to support shoddily made bills that hurt the free internet.

Unsurprisingly, the rest of the gaming community did not take kindly to the ESA’s decision. A campaign was started by Mark Kern, the CEO of Red 5 studios and the brains behind the phenomenally successful Firefall, to boycott the ESA’s biggest money maker: E3 the world’s biggest gaming expo. This may seem to be the gaming equivalent of cancelling Christmas, yet 32,000 designers, journalists and gamers signed up to not cover, exhibit or even attend the annual megaexpo. Within the same week ESA removed all of its support for both SOPA and PIPA; another SOPA chapter is closed. Although such a reaction was probably uncalled for, the gaming community is proving how much it can do. The next step is to see if anything better comes from Congress as a result of this outcry.