[HoE] Re: Help [OT]

["Eric Young" <ecyoung@mediaone.net>]

>      On the flip side, gang, Eric has a point.
> Publicity for gaming is almost always negative. With
> the exception of the local Ren Faire (which buys
> advertising space), I've never seen a news report of
> article that was complementary of gaming. The local TV
> stations have carried reports about LARPs in the area
> that almost always make the people involved look like
> imbiciles. (The ones I've seen covered are Vampire
> LARPs and the SCA in general.)

Well of course it's always negative, that's what people want to hear. Who
wants to hear that their kid killed all his friends because he's messed up
and it's probably the parents fault. It's so much easier for both the
parents and the general society to place the blame on this strange game in
which we pretend to be someone else. Obviously pretending that you're
someone else must be some kind of psychological problem and THAT'S why he
killed all those people. Not because his parents were always too busy to pay
any attention to him and he went off and killed all those people as a cry
for some attention...
Actually, this isn't a problem that's exclusive to gaming. The media itself
is really to blame. I've found from personal experience (working as a police
officer), that the media very rarely reports anything remotely like what
really happened. They'll often change facts, edit them in ways that it
changes the appearance of what happened, take things out of context, or in
some cases completely falsify them in order to make the story more
interesting and thus make themselves more money.

Of course this really has nothing to do with HOE, it's just one of those
topics that really gets me going.

Eric Young