I happened to be playing World of Warcraft last night prior to the airing of this episode. As you can expect, the Looking For Group channel (often mistaken to be the global chat of Azeroth) was a flood with angry gamers out to shake their virtual fists at ACA. Why? None of us had seen the episode yet. Who knows what take ACA was going to have on this family's situation? True, if you had seen the ad or were even vaguely aware of the gutter journalism ACA exhibits when it comes to popular beat-ups you could have taken a pretty good guess but that doesn't mean it was going to be the case.

As gamers we often criticise the knee-jerk reactions of the media any time there is a school shooting in America and a copy of Grand Theft Auto is found in the perpetrator's household yet here was a community of gamers guilty of the same crime; even if it would later prove to be justified.

Of course pre-judging a media entity with a history of being far from impartial in its reporting is a small sin but a sin nonetheless. However this wasn't the only thing that perturbed me. Not only were people pre-judging the content, they were preparing to take action. What action you ask? Well it wasn't the sensible, if futile, road of sending off a stern talking to in the form of an email. No, instead I watched a number of WoW players trying to gear people up for the following action: crashing the server the ACA website is hosted on. That's right, people were telling others to go to the site and just constantly hit reload until the site went down. Not only was the likelihood of this actually happening quite low (I'm fairly sure that the web-server for one of Australia's most popular current affairs shows would be rather robust) but the mentality behind it was beyond comprehension.

It is so unfair the media portrays us so badly, so we'll respond by acting like online vandals. Heads up kids. That is not going to do our cause any favours, it will only give more ammunition to those out there who think that gamers are a bunch of immature hoodlums. When faced with a similar portrayal the team at Penny Arcade put together the Childs Play charity, they responded to criticisms by publicly acting in a contrary fashion. On one hand we have people taking action that prove 'the enemy' right, on the other we have people taking action that prove them wrong. Which do you think is the most effective?

Don't become what they say we are. I'm a 28 year old male who works two jobs which he loves, has an extensive network of friends and an active social life. I'm not a menace to society nor am I the reason we are experiencing the supposed drop in moral fibre and family values that allegedly plague the world we live in. My story is far from unique. You can randomly pick any gamer and 9.999 times out of 10 you will find someone who is a decent human being without any social problems that need fixing. Of course when gamers start suggesting online attacks against those who feel otherwise you start to wonder who the real problem is.