Whatever Happened to 80s Anti-Videogame Advocate Ronnie Lamm?

In the last post I mentioned I was doing some researrch on history of gaming for a side project. In the history of videogame censorship, one of the earliest and most notable people was Ronnie Lamm who was quoted in lots of interviews and appeared in many tv segments back in the early 1980s.

When I read about people from decades past who fight for a losing cause, I often wonder what became of them. I think it would be an interesting project to do a real “Where are they now?” with people involved in news events in decades past. Interestingly, I ran across a 2009 article from the Long Island Press that did talk to her. In the article, she is quoted as saying:

“It was a very interesting time of questioning,” Lamm, now a grandmother, tells the Press. “This is something new, something that parents were embracing, possibly for the wrong reason, and school districts at the time had concern about children cutting out of school to go to [play] video games. But our initial concern was the safety of children in bar lobbies, in luncheonettes. Where were these machines? Were they in the backroom? Were they being watched? Children are hanging out here… What was their supervision?”

 

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