My Hero (if you're 8)

Getting Real about Kids and Gaming

From escapistmagazine.com:

When I heard Wil Wheaton punctuated his keynote address at PAX with the cry "don't be a dick," I was wildly enthusiastic. Finally, I thought - he must be talking about reaching outside the gaming community with a positive message.

By the end of the speech, he was, sort of. The problem is starting a keynote by telling Jack Thompson to suck your balls isn't exactly going to get you the nod from Miss Manners. In fact, it's going to make a lot of people immediately stop listening - the ones who need to listen the most.

Oh, I agree with Will's sentiment; if I had balls, Jack Thompson could suck them. He's a hateful, abusive, violent human being - utterly unlike all the gamers and game developers I know personally. But responding to his negative energy with more negative energy isn't ever going to shut him up, and what it is going to do is cause more people to view the videogame community as abrasive, violent, thoughtless, uneducated and dangerous.
I'm really not even going to get into the censorship issue, because it's complex, under-researched and thorny.

What I do want to talk about is a critical audience that has been somewhat reassured by Nintendo's positive branding: parents.

I played Primal Rage (with the blood setting on) when I was in that dangerous early teen phase, yet I can't watch gory movies without getting nightmares, and I've come close to passing out at the sight of my own blood. But while we, as a gaming community, have a more direct experience with the dangers, or lack thereof, of videogames, the parents of the current generation don't, and they're terrified of them. This doesn't, however, make them bad parents.

Good Parent, Bad Parent

The most common counterargument to the videogame censorship force is that only bad parents would allow their children to have violent videogames. Obviously, good parents don't need censors, because they'll protect their kids themselves.

This argument is flawed for a couple of reasons. First, while most people are concerned about their own children, they also aren't happy if the "wrong" kids are devouring a bunch of videogames and practicing to become an army of the next generation's Unabombers. By throwing out the "only bad parents let their kids have violent games" argument, not only are we not responding to the issue - you know, with data - we're further alienating these parents motivated enough to engage in a dialogue about games with us.

And through that alienation we are feeding their very precise fears: If they don't exert some control over this force that they utterly don't understand - by removing it from their kids' environment entirely - they are going to be bad parents.

For more click here.

NVDL: I have a suggestion to combat crime in South Africa (which is infamous for its violence). Introduce violent TV games to those communities especially susceptible to violent crime. At least that ought to keep the criminals indoors, able to voyearistically do justice to their most violent fantasies. You think I'm joking?

Editors 'out of touch' with citizens

Citizens offer new take on news
From the BBC online:

Sites such as Digg are setting a new agenda A news agenda formulated by citizens would be radically different from that put together by journalists.
That is the conclusion of a US study which compared what made the headlines in the mainstream media with that of three diverse user-driven news sources.
The study - conducted by a wing of the US Pew Research centre - compared stories over seven days.

Its results will make interesting reading for news editors as well as the new breed of citizen journalists.

The report - released by the Project for Excellence in Journalism - took a snapshot of news stories from the last week in June 2007.

Raw information

It compared the stories making the headline in 48 mainstream news sources, including TV, radio and online, to that of three user-driven news sites - Reddit, Digg and Del.icio.us.
It found that the interests of users was markedly different to that of traditional editors.
Seven out of ten of the stories selected by the user-driven sites came from blogs or non-news websites with only 5% of stories overlapping with the ten most widely-covered stories in the mainstream media.

"Users gravitated towards more eclectic stories. There was a sense that users sifting through a lot of raw information; rumour, gossip, propaganda and the news were all thrown into the mix," said Tom Rosenstiel, one of the authors of the report.

In a week dominated by stories about Iraq and the debate about immigration, users were more interested in the release of the iPhone and the news that Nintendo had surpassed Sony in net worth.

This technology bias was partly down to the fact that it was early adopters of technology that lead the way when it came to "playing with the potential of the internet to empower users", said Mr Rosenstiel.

Citizen editors

Traditional news gathering is not redundant quite yet. In all, 40% of the most popular stories on Digg and Del.icio.us, were devoted to technology with the second most popular category being lifestyle stories.

One of the biggest differences noted by the researchers was the emphasis put on a single story. While the mainstream media tended to revisit the same story from a different angle each day, users were happier dipping in to a variety of topics.

"It was more hit and miss with a sense that they wanted to know a little about a lot of things," said Mr Rosenstiel.

News editors need not hang up their notebooks and pens quite yet though. The report found that traditional news outlets such as the BBC still accounted for a quarter of the content on the user news sites. Interestingly, original content accounted for just 1%.

"That suggests that people are re-aggregating the news in the style of citizen editors rather than journalists," said Mr Rosenstiel.

"These sites offer people a different take on the news but it doesn't mean that traditional journalism has become irrelevant. They are forming more of secondary conversation about the news," he said.