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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
there are a ton of things your children can be doing instead of playing video games. Fun and exciting things like changing the oil in your car or changing your vehicle's tires. Of course my 9 year old daughter has been struggling with the hydraulic jack, but in the long run it'll be good for her health.
You must learn to be still in the midst of activity and to be vibrantly alive in repose. -Indira Gandhi
Or did I miss a D&D makeover, somewhere?
/rolls a 6
VOTE!
While it's clear that many members of the media don't grasp basic computer concepts beyond using Windows/MacOS for web surfing and office applications, this has very little to do with their ignorance of the gaming community and games as an entertainment medium.
This is all about ratings. If they ran a story that took a fair and balanced look at gaming and its pros and cons, nobody would pay attention. Gamers wouldn't pay attention because they understand it, anti-game advocates wouldn't like it because it didn't share their irrational bias, and the average viewer/reader wouldn't care because they wouldn't feel it was relevant or interesting. But if they run a sensational story about how games *might* be dangerous to *some* people who have *other problems* that are aggravated by excessive, obsessive gaming, people pay attention, the get ratings, and advertisers give them more money.
The public are the ones who need help. Help the people, you help the media. This applies to just about everything: Schools? Fix the parents, you fix the education problems. Environmental concerns? Get the people to care, corporations will follow the money and give the people what they want.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
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.
See, I tried that. I stood in my driveway for like, geez, 30 minutes yelling "LFG change oil or tire" and the people in my neighborhood just kept shouting "shutup n00b" at me. I eventually gave up and went back to playing video games.
Slackware
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.