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Mainstream Press Still Needs Help With Games
Just when things seemed to be looking up, we have two prime examples of poor reporting on the gaming hobby. Chris Kohler, via a Game|Life blog post, points out an ABC report entitled Health Alert: Pulling the plug on Videogames. They list the dangers to your health that gaming can cause (excessive blinking, of course) and include a handly list of things to do besides game. Like 'Learn to change the oil or a tire on a car'. Meanwhile, the Jacksonville Daily News reports on those massively multiplayer thingies. From that article: "Anderson is one of an unknown number of individuals who split their time between the reality most inhabit and the virtual realities conjured by Internet role-playing game designers whose dreamscapes have become increasingly engrossing and even addictive."
I hate to break it to you, but the mainstream press needs help with everything. As anyone who's ever dealt with them can tell you, they tend to run into a situation with their preconceptions firmly in place. They'll use up hours of your time just to get a badly worded sound-bite rather than any useful information. They'll leave, print your sound-bite, and still be as wrong as they were when you were first trying to explain it to them.
:-/
For a perfect example of this, dig up the old "Google has confirmed a web based OpenOffice!" Any idiot who had listened to the broadcast would know that Sun and Google merely annouced a bundling deal. Yet the press was convinced, so they printed it.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Non-gamers will never understand gamers and will always think that games are a waste of time. I have a friend who has said that she feels like she is wasting time when she plays games and would rather watch tv...because she can get more done......seriously she thinks that...so we'll just have to remember that just as other people think we don't make any sense playing games we'll continue to think they are retarded.
Mr. T carries a postage stamp in his wallet at all times on the back is a list of all the fools he doesn't pity
Whenever you despair over politics, or the news, or video game legislation, remember this:
People die. Usually as they get older. They are replaced by younger people.
At some point most of the government, the media, the police, etc. will be from your generation. There will probably be a president that has played Super Mario Brothers, or World of Warcraft.
Whatever videogames are "doing to our kids", they have already done to us, and we're not exactly helpless.
If you'd like to worry about something long-term, think about this: the population of China is almost a quarter of the world's population. India and China combined is over a third of the world's population. In the grand scheme of things, our petty concerns over here have almost nothing to do with the state of the world.
While I agree that journalism has it out for video games (and porn, and gambling, and...), those aren't the only things that they have trouble with. In fact, there are a lot of other things that should be understood first in journalism, before understanding video games.
Let's start with little subjects, like Politics, fact-checking, and real news.
Then we'll worry about video games.
It is evident that the article didn't go through any proofreading or editorial process before it was published. Heck, I've seen better proofreading done by Microsoft Word (Hiss!).
It is not suprising that there was no by-line on the article; anyone with any self respect left would fear being found out and laughed at.
It is not a big leap to go from "lack of proofreading" to "lack of any critical examination at all".