The Televised Video-Gamer Stereotype: The Inaccurate Portrayal It Really Is

(Originally posted at The Voice of Heard on July 16, 2011)

Are you familiar with the video game player stereotype? The one portrayed on TV as a lazy, couch potato who spends most of his/her life in a dark basement playing video games for many hours at a time and who is uninterested in other people? As a gamer myself, I find such portrayals as inaccurate in terms of what they do and offensive in terms of who they are as human beings who just happen to play video games as a hobby and a past time. In my old blog, I have covered this issue on a number of occasions, including the ones below:

My Review of Grand Theft Childhood

Perverseness, Obesity, and Depression: Just A Few More Forms of Negative Stereotyping of Video Gamers

I have decided to write this because I just came across a 1up feature called Why Television Hates Video Games, which covers the whole issue of stereotyping video game players on television shows, as well as portraying the video games themselves, console and otherwise, in technically inaccurate ways. News stories regarding the “risk” children face when they play their PlayStation Portables (PSPs) and Nintendo DSs (Duel Screens) are also discussed. The feature can be found here. On another note, I have also covered other issues regarding video games as featured in some news stories, which I will discuss as part of my next feature.

From G4 TV to the Esquire Channel: A Missed Opportunity for a Video Game Channel

(Note: This post is one of two posts that were originally posted three days prior on The Voice of Heard. I reposted them here as start-up entries and as an attempt to make them accessible to a wider audience with The Escapist's Realm.)

In recent years, the video game industry and community has experienced both good news and bad news. But no bad news is more significant than the recent announcement that G4 TV, a television channel originally geared towards a young gamer audience, is to become the Esquire Network, which is geared toward a more "sophisticated meterosexual male" audience, by late April this year. (Note: the term 'meterosexual' is used to describe an urban modern-day heterosexual man who is mostly concerned [and perhaps even obsessed] with his personal appearance, which is reflected by the amount of time and money spent on the most fashionable clothes, the best beauty treatments, and the most fastidious grooming his money can buy.) In order to paint a clearer picture as to why this is happening, I will give a brief history of G4.