BBC Warns Of Online Gaming Addiction, Uses Image Of Someone Playing Offline Mario Kart

Posted Tue 6th Aug 2013 04:00 by Damien McFerran

Nothing like a bit of fact-checking, right?

Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games — or MMORPGs — are pretty addictive. The allure of a constantly connected world populated by other players and challenges is often too much for some people to resist, leading to gaming sessions which last for days rather than just a few hours.

According to researchers at Cardiff, Derby and Nottingham Trent universities in the UK, some hooked gamers are online for up to 90 hours at a time.

This is clearly a serious situation, and most certainly deserves to be reported on — so what does BBC Wales do? Posts the report up alongside an image of someone playing Super Mario Kart on the SNES — a version of the game which is only capable of supporting two players at any one time and certainly isn't connected to a persistent world (at least that's what we remember, but 1992 feels like a long time ago).

A classic case of some insightful and vital mainstream news reporting being undermined by sloppy research, or an honest mistake? We'll let you decide in the comments section below, but we doubt that Nintendo will be happy about being mistakenly associated with such a worrying piece of research.

http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2013/08/bbc_warns_of_online_gaming_addiction_uses_image_of_someone_playing_offline_mario_kart

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Should have posted a pic of GoldenEye 007 on the 64.

Oh BBC... when did you start turning into some other choice NA stations? Was this always the case or something?

Granted, if they get enough comments then I'm sure (if they notice how the picture doesn't necessarily compare with what they are talking about) they would take it down. Right?

I think they took it down.  I can't find the pic in the link to BBC.  Up to 90 hours per session of Mario Kart. 

Mario Kart, huh?

http://www.cbc.ca/newsblogs/yourcommunity/2013/08/boys-mario-kart-skills-save-great-grandmothers-life.html

Why should a stupid picture discredit the article? What they're saying makes sense, online gaming addiction can be a huge problem for some people. The person who wrote the article may not be a fan of video games, but that shouldn't be a problem. I've never smoked meth in my life, but if I wrote an article talking about the dangers of meth would you automatically discredit it simply because I've never smoked it?

It doesn't discredit the article but it would be like posting a picture of a bong on an article about meth addiction.

The moment you falsely associate a product of another company with that problem it does turn into a problem (ugh, what a terrible sentence :/ ). Which is why this picture was taken down, I assume.

Their Technology news section is and has always been completely terrible.

Rory Cellan-Jones has no clue.

I'm blessed with a resistance against MMORPG. No matter what MMORPG from which dev - I can't play anymore after reaching ~LVL 30. I've tried Rift, Runes of Magic, World of Warcraft, Guild Wars 2, Star Wars TOR...at that point of the game it just stopped being fun. Boring quests, Grinding (boring quests :P), Level-Ups taking too long. I think I spent only ~200hrs total in MMORPG's and am definitely glad about it^^

I'm sure this is talking about MMO's and the person probably knew that Mario Kart wasn't and MMO and that specific one was offline. I think the picture was used so more people would click and/or read the article.