Just when I thought the British media couldn’t get more pathetic, a newspaper finds some way to both surprise and sicken me. A national paper is offering “hundreds of pounds” in exchange for stories from the public about how videogames turned them to a life of crime. This is the full advert. as it appears on a “talent” Web site for actors and actresses:
“A national newspaper wants your story and will pay hundreds of pounds to the right person.
Write a few lines about how computer games turned you to crime and if it’s something we like, we’ll call you straight back.”
Tanya Byron said we need to stop blaming videogames. That is what she said. She suggested we need to stop the mass panic that surrounds games and actually get people educated, but she got ignored because that’s not news. Instead, her report has been used as an excuse to not educate, but actively propagate the exact kind of scaremongering she wanted to see ended. If I were Byron, I’d be feeling pretty sick right about now, since all her hard work has been perverted by a bunch of braindamaged, subhuman parasites to promote the opposite of what she’d intended.
Actually, I don’t have to be Byron to feel sick at this. Anybody with a shred of integrity would be disgusted by this grotesque little move. Offering actors money to claim that videogames turned them into criminals is possibly the most harmful and nasty scheme I’ve seen cooked up by the media yet. They say videogames encourage violence? What is this paper doing, if not that?
And the worst thing is, the paper will get its little story, and yet more people will completely ignore the intentions of the Byron Report. I can’t even work up the bile for this anymore … I’m simply ashamed to live in the same country as these scumbags.
