"Youths learn programming at camp"

The Advertiser today runs a short, front page story on the Lafayette Ninjaneering Game Camp that talks to the kids and Zuzolo, the camp director. A pretty good little story with some good quotes from Zuzolo and the kids.

"There's a perception that games are made in a garage and are a silly hobby. The truth is that gaming is a $50 billion industry and takes teams of people working for years under a lot of pressure to make a product that's fun and will sell," he said...

"I really wanted to get into programming so this is a good way to get started," Breaux said. "Some of the most important things they showed us was getting an education in computers and the value of teamwork. For the design we kept putting ideas out there and some of them stayed and some didn't but it's a lot of teamwork to make it happen."

But, the story would have been even better had not been tucked beneath the headline and photo for another longer story by the same local author entitled "Violent video games drawing fire" subtitled: "Local players say not all games are bad." It's good to know that the games are not all bad...According to the players.

My guess is that if the Game Camp story wasn't being discussed nobody would have ever thought to work up a locally-based story on violence in video games. I worry about the understanding about what is important about new technologies that gets us from a story about kids learning about how to design games at a summer Game Camp to a locally researched story on an issue like violence in video games. And the editorial mindset that pairs the two and makes the violence story the dominant one.