Believe it or not, I’ve shown up behind some bloke’s head while standing with a load of other “addicted” people on this week’s panorama episode, which looks at Video Game addiction;

The programme here basically follows the same predictable pattern of making video games look like a hate crime worse than heroin, pornography and women talking about periods.

As the blurb goes, Panorama hears from youngsters or whatever f**kwits they happen to find who’ve dropped out of school and university to play games for anything up to 21 hours a day.

They describe their obsessive gaming as an addiction, because they have no willpower, or judging from their appearances, can’t get on with what life has handed them, therefore just prefer to hide online.

The reporter, whose name alone is comical, Raphael Rowe, while ensuring we know he is a concerned parent, perhaps trying so hard to curry favour with those who don’t care about games, meets a variety of people whose lives have “been destroyed” by games, and then goes onto listen to the leading experts calling for more independent research into this “media-only-based controversial” subject, and reveals the hidden psychological devices in games that are designed to keep us coming back for more.

They have some people who state this is for a small number of people a problem, but that seems to be thrown by the wayside once more for alarmist drivel, and for the most helpful way to illustrate the point the BBC are trying to make, they go to South Korea, and instead of remarking on more important things such as the build-up in tension in the region, go and see some people on a beach who again happen to be addicted.

The negative slant on it all becomes all transparent when a remark is made stating that instead of people going to nightclubs, people are going to pc bars and playing games instead. Having no experience of the nightclubs in Korea, if they are anything like the crapholes, coupled with the zombie nation that dwells within them in this country, well, it’s difficult to blame them for doing something else.

Hell, the BBC goes as far as stating games kill people, though it seems to be just the mental cases that they are able to find to bring to light. At what point does it state someone should have come in and intervened themselves? Once with a family in the UK, and basically the rest, well err….never mind.

Blizzard Entertainment could in theory also bring the BBC legally to task as well, as the programme also goes out of it’s way to state it is also responsible for all this silliness.

Why, oh why can’t we just accept that some people can be addicted to basically anything with flashy lights, much like in the same way of slot machines, and move on from here, as opposed to drudging up the same old rubbish over and over again?

It’s not the first time that the BBC Panorama programme has demonised technology related products, and as long as they like to frighten people with content like this for a couple of extra viewers, it will probably continue.