Xbox 360
If it were up to the tabloids I'd currently have a menagerie of cancers, immigrants would be stealing my job, and I'll have been blown into eighteen different pieces by four different suicide bombers while being molested by the paedophiles that live next door and still be gawping at Kelly from Colchester's exaggerated chest expanse. Thankfully some of those aren't true and most sane people take hyperbolic headlines with a touch of salt. However when a recent tabloid headline caught our and the gaming communities collective eyes we were shocked not only at the pointless and unfounded accusations of lazy journalists, but also to discover that more reputable news sources had also jumped on the rickety bandwagon. It got us thinking, why are people so desperate to -often unfoundedly - demonise the gaming industry?
What the papers say.
The controversy in question is the claim, by a number of publications, that leading scientists claim that gaming is causing a rise in rickets. "Video Gaming leads to surge in rickets" Exclaimed Ross McGuiness across the front page of the Metro. It was a clear, demonising headline distributed across public transport everywhere, more than enough to scare an easily influenced parent. It wouldn't be the first time someone had given gaming a beating though and it's only a free newspaper so surely there was no real harm done.
The British media wasn't done however. Tipping its bowler hat into the ring, the Times announced smugly: "T.V. and Computer games blamed for the return of Rickets." Not just games, but T.V. too? Clearly Rickets has a 50 year dormant phase then. What united both articles (and a number of other news stories) was the actual lack of content related to the headlines. Neither explained a direct correlation between gaming and rickets, instead preferring to give us little more than a synopsis of an academic press release upon which their headlines were based.
The inconvenient truth.
The source of these accusations was an article in the British Medical Journal by Prof. Simon Pearce and Dr. Tim Cheetham with the slightly less sexed up title of "Diagnosis and Management of Vitamin D Deficiency" In this they claimed that several hundred new cases of rickets were occurring in the UK, mainly because of Vitamin D deficiency (Science: Rickets is a softening of the bones in children caused by a lack of Vitamin D and Calcium. Our main sources of Vitamin D are oily fish and direct sunlight, leading me to believe that kryptonite is pure concentrated rickets) .The causes for this are present both in our lifestyle and diet.
What is evident in this press release (it clearly being the articles' source) is that while computers are mentioned in passing - it draws no direct correlations between gaming and Rickets. The articles above also fail to note the points made about excessive sun screening, the changing ethnic make-up of the country and the fact that children can be indoors and not be playing video games. What also seemed beyond these hacks was approaching the topic without the slightest degree of logic or sense. Unless computer games (in their bid to turn our children into a race of ultra-violent, anti-social, obese lumps) literally sap people of vitamin D and calcium, they cannot be identified as leading directly to Rickets.
In a letter to Gamesbrief, the authors of the journal article even sought to debunk the ranting hysteria of the papers. Both Pearce and Cheetham claimed that the reports were incorrect, adding: "we were actually saying lack of outdoor activity in childhood is a risk for poor D nutritional state... we do not say that gaming causes rickets". Prof. Pearce adding that "The average age of a child with rickets is around twenty months old: too young to use a keyboard and mouse!" Prof. Pearce even claimed to MP Tom Watson that this was "a classic piece of dodgy journalism". What is clear is that a number of articles in supposedly popular and reputable news publications have taken inspiration from a press release for a journal entry on Vitamin D deficiency that doesn't even directly mention video games, to run headlines blaming games for rickets. The question is, why?
What on earth did we do?
We can really only offer hypothetical answers to this question. Firstly there's the culture of blame. A headline about Vitamin D simply isn't going to draw in the punters, even when your paper spends most of it's life folded down bus seats, emphasise danger however and then you've got a headline and who's easier to blame for something than games? It's still a minority form of entertainment and while times are changing, it's easy to bash because enough people still aren't well informed enough. The misconception that games are aimed at children too doesn't help.
There's also the lack of positive treatment of the industry in mainstream media. Large headlines and poorly written articles condemning gaming are raised to front page grandeur, while games columns in mainstream newspapers are still restricted to two or three fifteen word long vignettes huddled somewhere between club nights and a list of the top ten lamps available for under a tenner in some weekend supplement. Until a big publication is willing to give games even a fraction of the serious attention given to films and music things are unlikely to change.
The bottom line is however that gaming is here to stay. It's a growing industry providing entertainment and employment when many others are floundering. Yet while it continues to be treated as a catch all scapegoat for violence, depravity and, apparently, juvenile bone conditions, it's going to remain a second class form of entertainment.
Craig Wilson