The issue of how video games affect people’s understanding of the world has been raised over and over again.  Dr. Carole Lieberman was interviewed by Fox News about violence and sexual situations in games.  Dr. Lieberman has been active in evaluating the effect of exposure to violence in the media on children for many years and is considered by many to be an expert in the field.  So when Fox News asked her about the violence and sexual situations in Bulletstorm she gave them her honest opinion.

Dr. Lieberman said:

• “Video games have increasingly, and more brazenly, connected sex and violence in images, actions and words.”
• “This has the psychological impact of doubling the excitement, stimulation and incitement to copycat acts.”
• “The increase in rapes can be attributed, in large part, to the playing out of such scenes in video games.”

And Fox News twisted this into “sexual situations and acts in video games — highlighted so well in Bulletstorm — have led to real-world sexual violence. ”

And journalist with even the slightest sense of integrity can see what happened here.  Fox News wanted a juicy story to drive page views.  Dr. Lieberman told me that she asked them to correct this perversion of her words and they outright refused.  Of course, I see this as backing up my statement that they weren’t after “the truth” and instead just wanted to fan the flames of controversy.

And fan the flames of controversy they did.  Dr. Lieberman has received hundreds of threatening emails from gamers and has had her recent book Bad Girls: Why Men Love Them and How Good Girls Can Learn Their Secrets been Amazon bombed.  For those of you who don’t know, Amazon bombing is a phenomenon where trolls who have nothing better to do post negative and non-truthful reviews of a product.  In this case, you get Fox News creating a problem and a bunch of people overreacting to an inaccurate quote by attacking Dr. Lieberman.

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One of the unfortunate consequences of the revolution in publishing brought on by the web is that journalism has changed dramatically. As barriers to entry for starting a media outlet went down from high cost stuff like paper, shipping, real art, etc and eyeballs redirected onto the web, the value of the printed word has deteriorated.

It’s great that we can go online and find whatever we want. Sure, blogging and sharing opinions, user generated content, all that stuff is great to read.

The thing is that it has all become about eyeballs. Page views. It isn’t about quality content. Sites need keyword rich content on timely topics so they pop up in search engines and news feeds. A monkey can spit out something apple iphone, microsoft, cisco, new product keyword rich.

But where’s the expert analysis? There’s no way to get expert and helpful to the top spot on Google.

Now that page views are all that matter the quality of the content has become close to irrelevant. I’m sorry to say it. I wish I didn’t have to say it. Why can’t we do something smarter like measure how long someone reads a story? How far through something do they get?

I’m all for leveling the playing field, but I know a hell of a lot of people who are out of work now because the written word has decreased in value. Editors, writers, lab techs, even sales and marketing types. don’t forget the creative art people. Copy edit has been decimated.

So it occurred to me today, where do all those smart unemployed people go? How can we harness that energy? There must be a way we can band together to preserve the value of expert opinion, well written, well edited, well produced and on target content. I still believe content is king, but the king is being devalued at a dangerous pace.