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Victor Godinez (who covers technology for the Dallas Morning News) sent me an interesting response to the article I linked to on Friday titled "Why Mainstream Media Hates the Internet, Games, MMO's, and You." Here it is:As much as we all love a good conspiracy theory, the idea that the mainstream media feels threatened by games is absurd. Ha! I wish games commanded that kind of attention in the mainstream media.
The truth is that the vast majority of media professionals haven't played a video game since Pac-Man.
The news business is a predominantly middle-aged profession. And while we like to talk about the proliferation of older gamers and Wiis in nursing homes and so forth, gamers are still largely young people. So most of the people in the news biz roped in to write the occasional game article simply have no experience with the medium.
They don't understand games, and so they report poorly on them. But it goes unchallenged, because most consumers of mainstream media are also older than the average, so all they know about games is what they see or read from the uneducated reporters.
It's a vicious circle. And I'm not even sure it's one that will be corrected as more young gamers become journalists, because, frankly, young people aren't going into journalism. When I started at the Morning News in 2000 in the Business section, I was one of five or six reporters in our 20s. Today, every one of those young reporters has moved on to jobs elsewhere, and I'm the youngest reporter in the section at 30.
Games don't get bad coverage because the mainstream media hates games.
Games get bad coverage because the mainstream doesn't understand games.
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