17th August
(And not the song by Pink)
The topic of games being a “bad influence” hasn't interested me much, mainly because I always knew it was never true and mainly because a lot of the articles came from the Daily Mail, which perhaps isn't the most...reliable of sources to say the least. Video games that contain violence, guns or explosions are not tainting children's minds. As some of you may know, I've done some articles for a few magazines before. Last month I did a piece for one of my school projects to get my final grade. The article wasn't about games but the site was planned to make a brief entrance as being called “my video game website”. The original I sent forward had no mention of any hobby, however the editor replied asking me what it was since he wanted to include it. I told him it was a website, and he replied again really interested in this, was it a personal website? Or was it a fashion website? Or a story website? A week after I told him that it was about the video game; Tomb Raider, I received the first copy of the finished article in the layout it was going to be published in. Not only has the author changed from me writing the article to it being an “edited entry” (also means I didn't get paid and I can't put it on my CV due to his other changes he made) but the video game site that the editor wanted to mention didn't even make an appearance. When I asked him why it wasn't included, (out of curiosity) he stated that he did want the readers to have a negative opinion of the author and the magazine since games have a “bad influence” on people.
Tomb Raider does indeed have an influence, but it is anything but bad. I played my first Tomb Raider game at the age of four after “acquiring” it from my sister. The range of locations was awesome. One level I was in a jungle, wading through mud and then on another I was leaping around disused train stations in London. And I can say that those adventures really inspired me to write at at early age, It wasn't good fan fiction mind, the word “said” and “nice” was repeated far too often. This later led me to search for Tomb Raider fan fiction online. Skip along a roughly decade and to when my site was first being planned and created. I met some absolutely amazing people through the Eidos forums and Katie's Tomb Raider Forums and later through my site.
With that said, I've decided to take on the media by proving them wrong by using a few games including Tomb Raider. For this I am taking the Daily Mail Newspaper(any more and it would be an incredibly long piece) The Daily Mail doesn't actually contain all that much interesting news, and they seem to be out on a mission to make the gaming industry look bad.
