Gamers are unemployed, maladjusted weirdoes who live in their parents’ basements and never see the light of day — or so most portrayals of video games on TV would have you believe. It seems that the entire medium of television doesn’t get games. Maybe it’s because Baby Boomer TV producers are lashing out against their biggest competition as their own networks become increasingly irrelevant by the day. Or possibly, they’re just too old to understand. It could be, perhaps, that their shoes are too tight. Or it could be that their heads aren’t screwed on just right. But I think that the most likely reason of all may be that their brains are two sizes too small.
From Donny Deutsch’s inane ramblings on The Today Show to the embarrassing list of terrible TV moments we’re about to give you, it seems that gaming can’t get a fair shake on TV. As gamers, we have to wonder — do other people have to put up with ludicrous portrayals of their hobbies on television? What amount of research and editing goes into the episode of that one TV show where the one guy plays a video game? Who does one have to pay off to get Johnny Arcade’s glorious throne? All these questions will be left unanswered after this hard-hitting investigation into television’s worst portrayals of video games, but we’ll at least be able to tell you why games and gamers are depicted so terribly on TV.