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Sep 16, 2009

Comments

1.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him... The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself... All progress depends on the unreasonable man."

Shaw

Good job on being irritating, keep up the good work!

2.

Well said! Irritating, perhaps, but highly necessary.

(On a loosely related topic, Ben Goldacre's blog Bad Science is dedicated to the misreporting of science in the media.)

3.

Link for my previous comment:

Bad Science

4.

Steve - yeh I sent Ben an email about it too. Following the 'rape' reporting the Telegraph seem to have form when it comes to their reporting / use of science to back a political position.

5.

This just in from the PCC - correction is now up under the original URL so anyone that links to the story should find the correction instead: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/6041337/Average-age-of-adult-computer-game-addicts-is-35-US-study-show.html

6.

I am a journalist. I do not write about video games. And you are not irritating. This is very well analysed and even better argumented. *hat tip*

7.

Hey Ren

I don't think you are irritating I think you're behind the curve. When you realise that undertaking this excercise for every single report, conference paper, newspaper, blog posts, magazine article and journal article then essentially you create infinite work and you totally give up.

Also, these errors aren't restricted to video games you find them in mass media coverage of almost every field COS PEOPLE ARE FICK AND NEED IT ALL BREAKING DOWN INTO SIMPLE TALK.

Also, we can't expect English graduates to know everything about everything.

8.

What Cunzy said. The more you know about a field, the less likely you'll be happy with mainstream media coverage of it.

Growing up with my father, the doctor, was a treat in this way. I can't remember the number of times we'd be watching TV or he'd be reading the paper and he'd start fuming about how inaccurate the reporting on medical science was.

There was one TV report, years ago, about a drug that was causing side-effects, and the report didn't mention that the side-effects were only really a problem if you were taking another type of drug in addition to the one being examined. If you didn't have my dad next to you, you would have though the drug alone did the "bad things."

Boils down to lazy. And, as in any field, lazy is easier than thorough.

9.

WHAT !!!!!!!
The actual line of which WOW appeared in 1994.It is true that the online concept only appeared in 2005. You can check
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Warcraft

The only reason why there might be a confusion is because it was only called "warcraft" between 1994 and 2005.

10.

sinuic
no, the section is on 'internet addiction' i.e. online games, and the video is clearly about WoW not the Warcraft franchise generally.

11.

While I appreciate the standards you're holding journalists to, you're right about being irritating: you grammar and syntax are sometimes irritating.

12.

Ren, you might appreciate this:
http://xkcd.com/386/

13.

Grammar Mama needs a comma or an "r" in there.

Just saying.

14.

Ren - Warcraft is an online RTS game that uses Blizzard's battle.net as a game matching service. It is online, it is multiplayer, but it is scenario based, not a persistent world MMO.

It's a very different game from WoW though, and I was actually disappointed when WoW came out that they didn't emphasize the years of rich Warcraft lore in the MMO based on the same IP.

On the other hand, I doubt the journos thought that the guy had been addicted to the RTS game and moved on to WoW.

15.

There is also that good old "fact:" Gaming is bigger than Hollywood.

Sadly, journalists aren't the only ones who mangle sources and misstate quotes. I've recently found two academic papers with "quotes" from articles which don't say anything like that at all. In one instance I seemed to track it down to someone paraphrasing an article, then someone using that paraphrase as a quote and then a third scholar paraphrasing that "quote" and thus rendering it quite unlike what the original author wrote.

16.

Ren, I am so with you here. We really need those T-shirts. Mathcing, we'll be a lot more irritating than just anonymously disappearing in the crowd.

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