In the Media's eye, the worst parts of a socio-economic background, or a group, is the stereotype it applies to all poeple from that group. I'm talking about the gamer that is 25, morbidly obese, and lives with his mom (Always a guy, mind). The (by the way mostly Liberal, which isn't a bad thing) Media see's 99% of gamers as that type, it's frowned upon as being a social tumor. They also expect every gamer plays WoW. Well, sometimes they're right, a LOT of gamers play wow, it's crack on the computer. The (Medias) generalization of games is to kill the most the fastest. (The Media says) that they are unrealistic in every aspect of themselves, and that they frown on social life. Sure they do, its just that Halo has 200,000 accounts online at any given time, and WoW has even more.
The startling lack of realism is apparent, they just dont want to scratch the surface because that would be too empathetic for an apparently unbiased news medium. They emulate the picture of gaming based on what they see. Do they read about Bioshocks amazing plot? No, they read about GOW's huga amount of gore, because thats what they hear about the most. If you got locked up for everything you did in Oblivion, the realistic consequence would be a life sentence or Death. That would be stupid, where would the game go? But no, what they do is let you out after a while. So on and so forth. In real life, you get shot once and you NEED medical attention. Even a shot in the leg will kill you, and most people dont know this. But that's not what this is about.
The bottom line is the only redeeming qualities of games are far below the surface, at least in society's eye. In order to realize these qualities,they would have to investigate past journalism, they would have to become gamers. That is not their job. In even shorter terms, It's not their job to read the book, its their job to tell everyone what they can interpret from the books cover.
Pennyy