Junk Punch

You have been sucker punched. As a gamer, you’ve been categorized and used as a negative stereotype to illustrate points about terrible movies. Video games and gamers get a bum rap in film criticism. Film critics seem to like to use video games and the people who play them as a culturally understood idiom. This practice makes the critics look as bad as what they might be criticizing.

Roger Ebert, with his starkly ignorant opinion of video games as art, might have brought this mistreatment to a head in popular media. This lack of actual cultural awareness has been around for a long time, however, with film critics decrying just about anything that’s based on a video game or seems gamish. The trend degenerates from there, with critics using the term “video game” to condemn crappy adventure movies, as well as the term “gamer” to refer to insipid consumers of such dreck. This sort of condescension is a refuge only of someone who can’t come up with a meaningful metaphor and, therefore, takes the lazy route of uninformed comparison.