This time it’s in the Dal­las Morn­ing News and the arti­cle is called Video Games Encour­age Teens to Check Out Libraries.

The good news: We learn that the Forth Worth Pub­lic Library is cre­at­ing a room ded­i­cated to gam­ing. Can’t wait to learn more about that!

The bad news: Yet another news­pa­per story that lets some­one (this time a pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­sity of Mary­land) get away with sweep­ing gen­er­al­iza­tions about gam­ing. Melanie Killen claims, “a vast major­ity of the games have neg­a­tive con­tent and the con­se­quences can be destruc­tive, includ­ing increased impul­siv­ity, aggres­sive behav­ior and shorter atten­tion spans,” with­out pro­vid­ing any proof at all.

Whether that’s her fault or the newspaper’s, let’s just nip this in the bud right now in case you encounter this argu­ment at your own library.

First of all, 85% of the games sold in 2006 were rated E (for Every­one), E+10 (ages 10 and up), or T (for Teen). That means only 15% of video games sold in 2006 where rated for adults, so that’s hardly a “vast major­ity.” Only 4 of the top 20 games sold in 2006 were rated M (Mature) (PDF). That would be 1/5, which means the “vast major­ity” of games sold were actu­ally appro­pri­ate for kids and teenagers.

Sec­ond of all, let’s define what we mean by “destruc­tive” and “aggres­sive behav­ior,” because as video games have become more pop­u­lar, youth vio­lence has actu­ally dropped, despite those sto­ries that grab all the head­lines.

Third, “impul­siv­ity” and “shorter atten­tion spans” can be attrib­uted to many things, not just video games. If I’m not mis­taken, these argu­ments were made against tele­vi­sion forty years ago, so it’s not like this is some­thing new and it’s not like you can blame video games as the mas­ter evil behind these prob­lems. In fact, one won­ders if shorter, less com­plex news­pa­per sto­ries that fail to pro­vide facts or links for fur­ther infor­ma­tion or, you know, evidence/data/research might con­tribute to that trend, too.

What’s really ironic is that Killen is later quoted as say­ing, ” ‘There is a con­cern in our soci­ety about the prepa­ra­tion of the next work­force in terms of read­ing and math and sci­ence skills,’ she said. ‘We should be doing every­thing we can to facil­i­tate that, and I think that allow­ing video games to go in libraries is a bad sig­nal.’ ” If you run into this mis­guided assump­tion your­self, you can point folks to this report or this report or this report (PDF), which dis­cuss how gam­ing can help with exactly those things.

The worst part? They cite a fig­ure for the num­ber of libraries offer­ing con­sole or PC gam­ing pro­grams that is flat out wrong, all the more curi­ous since the sum­mary of the sur­vey is avail­able online (PDF). Had they both­ered to point to it from the arti­cle, they might have got­ten it right. Sadly, the DMN doesn’t allow com­ments or track­backs, so their read­ers will never know just how wrong the paper got this story. Luck­ily, the rest of us do.