Some of you may have heard about the Entertainment Consumers Association, and some of you may even be members. But what is the ECA and what are they really about? I spoke with ECA President and Founder Hal Halpin at PAX to get the scoop.

Founded in 2006, the ECA is a non-profit, non-partisan membership organization for video game players and video game consumers. Its focus is to protect gamers’ rights and ensure they are well represented in the media and the political arena. The ECA stemmed from a board meeting of the Interactive Merchants Association, a retail trade association. It dawned upon Halpin, then president of the IMA, and his colleagues that one crucial sector of the gaming industry was being neglected.

“We realized that the publishers had a really good trade association and the developers, the retailers. But the most important constituents of all, the consumers, had no representation,” Halpin said. “At the same time, we were starting to see a shift in the political landscape where bills were being targeted at gamers, as consumers for the first time, rather than retailers and publishers.”

Developing the ECA was a bit challenging for Halpin and his colleagues, as they were essentially trailblazers, with an organization that caters to consumers of entertainment products. “In looking around the rest of the entertainment landscape with music and movies, there hadn’t one before, so there wasn’t really a lot to model it against other than the AARP or AAA,” he explained. As a non-profit, membership organization, the ECA chose to mold itself after these two groups, which provide perks such as store discounts, access to job listings in the game industry, and other benefits to its members.

Rewarding loyal members with discounts and exclusive content is just one small feature of the ECA. Its main focus is on the protection of gamers’ rights, as evidenced in their participation during last year’s Mass Effect sex controversy. A FOX News segment claimed that the game featured graphic sex acts, full nudity, and was being marketed to children and teenagers, none of which was true. Gamers were furious at the inaccuracies featured in the segment. Halpin explained that while the trade associations represent game developers and publishers as a whole, they don’t get involved in situations regarding individual companies. The ECA came to Mass Effect developer BioWare’s defense, demanding that FOX news retract their story.

The media scapegoating a form of entertainment as a corruptor of youth is nothing new. Music, television, literature, and film have all at some point been accused of scarring the minds of our more impressionable members of society. There’s no ECA counterpart for any of these other entertainment venues, yet they perservered over the last several decades, even centuries for some (music and literature). Why do gamers in particular need representation? Halpin believes that in fact, similar organizations would benefit other entertainment industries as well. He cites the music industry as an example.

“I think the reason is that we’re such a new media, with games being so brand new and so cutting edge. A lot of people say, ‘Well, you have to take your lumps, like comic books did or like rock and roll did.’ Frankly, I think that if there were an ECA around for the music industry a few years ago, they wouldn’t be in the trouble they are now. They would have had a consumer group to counterbalance the scorch-the-earth mentality that they had, which was really detrimental to the sector as a whole,” Halpin said.

He continued, “The games business is coming up against a very similar struggle with regarding individual rights, and if the ECA wasn’t there for the last couple of years when they were going forward, I think they may have had the same challenge where they’re reaching with taking away too many rights, intellectual property rights. But now, because we’re here, we’ll probably have a really good balance where both sides can be happy.”

What’s next in store for the ECA? While Halpin explained that they’re tackling many different areas, their latest major concern is protecting the digital rights of both consumers and product owners.

“As we transition from packaged goods products to digitally downloaded, digitally distributed products, the challenge for consumers is maintaining the rights they have now,” he said. “The content owners are going to be concerned with piracy, making sure they’re getting paid fairly for their work.”

If you’re interested in joining the ECA, check out their website. The general membership fee is $19.99. Military personnel and college students get a discounted rate of $14.99 when they sign up with an .mil or .edu  email address. Halpin mentioned that they’re currently running a special back-to-school promotion throughout September. U.S. or Canada college students with an email .edu extension who sign up will get a free trial, one-year membership. The coupon code that students need to use is “college”.