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The DeanBeat: Should you bring up Trump’s travel ban politics at a video game award event?

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 6 min

Video games are a great form of escapism. And the game industry celebrated them last night at the DICE Awards, the equivalent of the Oscars of gaming, and the DICE Summit 2017 conference this week in Las Vegas.

Amid the celebratory fun, I noticed something was missing. The show normally confronts issues head on, particularly when it affects the lives of game developers. But nobody mentioned Donald Trump and his controversial travel ban against visitors from seven Muslim countries. At the awards show, none of the winners said anything political, even though there were winners on stage from all over the world. By contrast, consider Meryl Streep’s speech at the Golden Globes.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.