The usually respectable BBC has joined the ‘Do MMOs make you want to kill yourself debate’ (just 8 years late — good scoop, guys!) with the amount of balance and perspective we’ve grown to expect from the press on the subject — namely none. In this article, BBC purports to have a point-counterpoint between the two sides of the debate.

On this side, we have Liz Woolley, a ‘gaming counselor’ who now devotes her life to ending the scourge of online gaming in the wake of her son’s supposedly Everquest-caused suicide, who baldly asserts that we hire psychologists in order to lure people into unhealthy play patterns (we don’t).

Defending sanity, we have… someone who plays games. Um, great, way to call in the experts. How about calling in Jason Della Rocca to represent our industry? Or perhaps, Henry Jenkins an MIT professor whose devoted his entire career to exactly that issue? Or, say, any designer on the subject?

I’m thinking of starting the same tactic in reverse. I’ve heard that many people have killed themselves while BBC was playing on the television set. Now, I’m no psychologist, but certainly I can find a colorful anecdote that’s good enough to scare people to switching channels to CNN.

Incidentally, if you google Liz Woolley and read the accounts of what happened to her kid, you’ll see that he got jilted by an online relationship. Love is the most addictive thing on earth, far more so than any video game, and it causes an order of magnitude more suicides than any hobby. Yet I don’t see anyone advocating us banning romance. Instead, what we do is put Valentine’s Day on the grimmest, deepest day of winter.