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Jake is an up-and-coming radio and television journalist. He’s also a gamer, which makes his insights from both sides of the fence all the more interesting. He likes long walks along the beach and piña coladas. Especially piña coladas — journalism makes him drink.
BY JAKE STORMER
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amers, quite frankly, you’re useless… at defending your beloved industry to the media. Time and time again I witness people posting a story from the ‘reputable’ news.com.au on their forum of choice. Said person then proceeds to bash the story and complain about how ridiculous it is. I agree with them. The way gamers are portrayed in the media is, quite frankly, crap.
We aren’t all the psychopathic, incomprehensible nut-jobs that we’re made out to be. Well, excluding the 14 year-old American boy screaming into the microphone about his gay sexual desires with the man he just killed.
But why are we portrayed like this by the mass-media? Exactly the reason I mentioned in the lead. There are no formal, organised gaming groups that can be easily contacted for comment. Instead we all bitch and moan on forums, perpetuating the whiny, pathetic stereotype.
When we in the media need someone to comment, we have to dig through pages and pages of Google search hits to find the contact details of some editor of some nothing magazine — we just don’t have the time and so we’ll run the ‘Family Association’ line; that Grand Theft Auto et al are evil, violent games. That the media effects theory is a reality.
When talkback hosts get callers, the only people that defend video games are people on a disability pension who don’t have a job – easy bait for the hosts who are deliberately incendiary when representing games (much
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like this article). The media (sans Aunty) will, unsurprisingly, take a populist viewpoint. If they can whip up a bit of moral outrage then their job is done.
When TV news crews get a whiff of an upcoming game that has ‘school-yard violence’ or ‘gratuitous pornography’ it’s ridiculously easy to make people feel outraged. It’s only us gamers that understand the medium and differentiate between reality and fiction. We’re not all going to go and beat up hookers on the street. Interestingly, and I know this will come as a surprise to many gamers, we can differentiate games from real life. What may come as a surprise to you is that most of the media know it’s a shameless beat up too. That’s why you see the news.com.au stories because they get people talking, get people viewing. We know you aren’t going to steal cars and helicopters, but we
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don’t care. We’ve got a job to do: get listeners, viewers, readers… whatever it is – so we go about doing it.
How can we fix this? Get the editors of the gaming press – Hyper, PC Gamer, the ‘official’ series of publications – to form together and make themselves available for media comment. Instead they’re buried in their reclusive shells, impossible to find when
they’re needed.
Is it going to happen? No. We’re all going to continue to bitch on the forums; maybe about this article, maybe about News Limited’s latest investigative foray into the gaming world. Who knows? But we’ll all be there, so see you online.
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