I've been playing games since the 1970's. My first 'video game' was an Atari Pong system my dad got from a coworker; it was broken and we fixed it and played Pong until the 2600 came out. I wish to all hell that I still had that Pong console as it would probably be worth something now. My first game of D&D was over the 4th of July weekend in 1982, just in time for the Stanic Panic to kick in.

I say these things so that the people reading can understand where I am coming from. Games and gaming and gamers have always been shit on. My parents burnt my D&D stuff, literally burnt it in a fire pit in 1984 because they were told I was worshiping the devil and that D&D was a system training me to be able to kill without remorse. Video games were rotting the minds of the youth of America. Then, the early 1990's happened. Us weird kids who played games and loved technology started making million of dollars and started buying advertising on traditional media. For a few years, encouraging your kids to play video games was seen as a gateway to a career in computers. I was no longer a kid by this time of course but I was working building computers, playing games and yet there were still people who thought it odd that a "grown man" would be playing computer games and Dungeons and Dragons. Yet my brother, a guy who would paint himself in a full body color scheme and scream for a sports team for four straight hours was considered normal and acceptable.

Maybe some people should just stop letting their videogame hobby consume their lives so they don't have to get so defensive?

My post leads up to this statement and my rebuttal. How is the video game 'hobby' any different than any other hobby? Why doesn't the media act this way to all obsessive hobbies? People who decorate their whole homes in sports team trinkets? Normal. Slap a few dozen team decals on your car that you bought because it is your team's color? Normal. Spend $10,000 on cameras for a photography hobby? Normal. Buy broken down motorcycles and fix them up to the point where you are riding a new bike every 6-8 months? Normal.

Play video games? LOL manchild basement dwelling neckbeard loser. (Yet the LAN events that I co-run have to change layouts to accommodate all the families that come.)

This in your room makes you normal This in your room makes you, something else?

This attitude is apart of the whole social consciousness of our culture. Video games make people violent! (Yet the crime rate in the Us, Canada, Europe and Japan has plunged 80% since Doom came out). Video games make people aggressive! Aggressive does not mean violent, yet the two are always linked in these stories. Video games are rotting the brains of the youth of the nation! Actually.... the opposite may be true. Doctors are now being encouraged to play fast twitch games that use controllers as doctors who play games are faster surgeons, make fewer mistakes and have better hand-eye fine motor control Note this is from 2007.

The traditional media is dying. Nobody seems to disagree with that. Fewer people read newspapers to the point that there is a legitimate concern that newspapers may not survive the decade. Newspapers do not get the internet at all, even now twenty years later, and seen to not understand how the internet works. Fewer and fewer people are watching traditional TV. Cord cutting is starting to be a thing that is impacting the bottom line of television and cable. Teenage boys are not even turning on the television anymore as they have moved onto other media for their news and entertainment. Hell, my circle of friends does not watch TV, go to movies in a theater or even watch sports. And now this dying traditional media is attacking Netflix as if Netflix is the cause and not the symptom; see the Chicago Netflix tax for one of the more nutty examples. So here comes the moral panics to try to stay relevant. This is nothing new, the first one was in 1938 Videos like this make me happy as they are bringing awareness to how people who play video games and live and work on the internet are being treated by so-called 'normal' people.

Gamers and gaming are the same old whipping boy they have always been; the man wielding the flail has been swapped out is all.