Saint Cuthbert? Or a modern videogame designer?
It shouldn’t by this point be any surprise that the mainstream media does a lousy job commenting intelligently on videogames. When they aren’t talking about videogames as a business (in which case they are always awesome) the standard narrative remains that playing games is bad for you. Games either actively damage you in some way or prevent you from engaging in activities which are supposedly a lot better for you. Sure, the mainstream media does occasionally flirt with the idea that games may be beneficial on the individual and social level. But this is really the equivalent of the fake compliment, something they know they have to say to keep the wheels of conversation moving, when what they really want to say is that those jeans do make you look fat. When something new and game-related appears, however, the media reach for their default frameworks. It took all of two days after the release of Pokemon Go, for example, for the Washington Post to come up with a story built around the stock “games are dangerous!” frame. Like all such stories, it takes a few anecdotes and while it never explicitly argues that this is a trend, strongly implies it, and relies upon readers’ familiarity with the broader frame to come to the necessary conclusion for themselves. (The Pokemon Go phenomenon is obnoxious but for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with the supposed potential to make people so self-absorbed that they walk into lamp posts or in front of cars; in terms of massive levels of screen-based self-absorption society has left orbit on that one already).
But there’s at least some evidence to suggest that it may be making videogames that is hazardous to your health.
