Flit

ANOTHER HALF-ASSED COMPUTER GAME ADDICTION ARTICLE

It's not that I don't mostly believe the piece in the New York Times on computer gaming addiction my old colleague Adrian pointed me to today... but I'll confess I've never heard of the games "Strike Force" or "Mu," referred to in the quote below. That doesn't mean they don't exist, but it's hard to imagine Lineage not being in a list like that, and it isn't. (The absence of Lineage, the most popular game in Korea at the moment, suggests this particular reporter didn't soil themselves by spending any longer than he had to among Korean computer gamers before he wrote this.):

As they teamed up, using separate consoles to take on the forces of evil in popular shoot-em games like Strike Force, Starcraft and Mu, some of them could be said to be engaging in group activity, but just barely. Utterances like "quick, shoot!," or "look out," or especially, "attack!" seemed about the extent of it.

As opposed to football players, for instance, who engage in long-winded dissertations on "Hegelian philosophy and the crisis of man" in between tackles...

Starcraft, of course, approached the level of mass cultural phenomenon in Korea a couple years back, so I can see it being in any such list; still... it'd be nice if the attached hyperlink above, the one link in the piece really, could actually go to a web site about Starcraft the game, as opposed to Starcraft the car company... I'm sure it's just an honest... ah forget it, they're f*cking ignorant, end of story. Note to mainstream media... if 80 per cent of a population does something, you're in the minority, not them... stop laughing and pointing at gamers like you're gawking hillbillies, for Christ's sake. (And while you're at it, hyperlinking involves more effort than running your proper nouns through Google and picking the first thing that comes up, you dorks.)

The New York Times is a letterbox that hums incessantly!