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02/15/2005 Archived Entry: "Seattle PI puts foot in mouth, ticks off gamer"

(This is Jack William Bell, doing a rare guest entry on Anita's blog)

Today one of our local newspapers, the Seattle Post Intelligencer, really belied the 'Intelligence' part of their name with an incredibly stupid article attempting to classify people's personalities by the kinds of video games they play. The story is not only bogus, but it veers deeply off into insulting.

Normally I would ignore this kind of ignorance as being par for the course with the MSM (Main-Stream-Media), but when the article mentioned a game I play (Unreal Tournament) and classified those who play it as 'Alpha Dominators' - powerless individuals in real life who attempt to be king of the hill in virtual space - I got a bit ticked off. It 'torqued my jaw' as we used to say. Speaking only for myself I can say that I don't play UT for personal glory; I'm too crappy a gamer for that. What I do is play the team maps, the Capture-The-Flag and Assualt games, where the focus is on team-play and assisting other players to attain goals. Pure Death-Match fragging holds little interest for me.

The rest of the article is just as bad, calling those who play GTA 'Sociopaths' and those who play The Sims 'Control Freaks'. And on and on; read the article and, if you are a gamer, I am can pretty much guarantee you will find something there offensive. So I wrote the author and copied the PI's reader representative with the following:

I don't know if your article "What do the video games you play say about your personality?" was tongue in cheek or just really bad writing. Based on the content I am guessing 'really bad'.

Why? First off I think you did zero research on something which you then presented as fact. Second off I think you gave no thought to how gamers who don't fit into your bogus classification schemes might feel about it. Finally; even if you meant the article as humor it failed as such rather miserably - coming off more as a hit-piece unfairly stigmatizing people as sociopaths and failures.

Care to argue with this characterization? I would be very interested to see the sources for your article if so. If not, I would appreciate a retraction.