Ars Technica has an excellent article, titled Being a better gamer: a guide to changing the world. It’s a great article worth reading if you’re interested in gaming in general, whether you’re a casual gamer into solitaire and Bejeweled, or a hardcore gamer into Call of Duty and Halo. It covers a lot of ground, and points out how gamers can help give all gamers a better impression in the media and to get politicians to stop their fear-mongering, ignorant ways.

If the mainstream media is to be believed, video games are about as healthy as cigarettes, except they cause psychotic breaks instead of cancer. Politicians use this artificially created fear of games as an excuse to pass legislation to criminalize the sale of certain games, although so far, each of these pieces of legislation has been successfully challenged and overturned in the courts. While more people than ever are playing games, and the audience for those games is expanding to include people of both sexes and all ages, the media’s reporting on the industry and its effects on children remains reactionary and woefully misleading.