May’s article, Gaming Communities: Real or Imaginary?, focuses on communities in online games and is a critique on a newspaper article on the same issue.

Why is it that the most visible critiques on video games come from people who are obviously not even casual gamers? I always hear “violence” and “sexually explicit content” thrown around without the writer having an understanding, or offering an in-depth critique, on what those words mean for video games. I find that these so-called “anti-game crusaders” often buy into alarmist extremes, thereby misrepresenting the influence of videogames, without ever asking why such a correlation exists. Most times, this perspective misses the intricacies of the games and, in the case of online games, the gaming communities.