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Games As The Mainstream Media's Demon
1up has an editorial up exploring the biased nature of mainstream media gaming coverage, especially in light of the recent Hot Coffee scandal. From the article: "...Are CBS, Donny Deutsch, and Ed Bradley actually informing their viewers--or just inflaming their fears in a culture already on edge? Many, certainly many in the videogame industry, believe it's the latter. There's no shortage of gaming coverage, but it seems that what's out there, outside of enthusiast coverage, focuses disproportionately on certain kinds of games or on partial information that does no justice to the industry's successes. "
It happened with comic books. Now it's happening with games. Ultimately, some new form of entertainment will come along that will attract the eyes of moral crusaders, and the game industry will spend less time in the spotlight.
Less time, sure... but it won't escape entirely for quite a while. You could replace every instance of "video game" with "comci book" (and change the examples to match) and you'd still have a largely factual article. Neil Gaiman made a great comment a few weeks ago about how mainstream coverage of comics books alternates between "Wham! Bam! Comics have grown up!" (which is 20-year old news) and "OMG! This comic book not meant for kids has material unsuitable for kids in it!"
There's an advocacy organization, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, that works to raise awareness and raise funds to help defend comic book authors, artists, retailers etc. from attacks against freedom of expression. Retailers have been arrested for selling adult comics to adults. Artists and publishers get sued for parodies. It doesn't get as much covereage as video games anymore, but what coverage it gets is still as biased as it was in the 1950s.