Thanks to the mainstream media, most households know the terms “Hot Coffee”, “Columbine”, and “seXbox”, and their relationship to video games. Gamers suffer a poor reputation from the distorted images painted in the news or on television. But have our own journalists done their job in defending us…or are they tossing more kindling to the flames?

In this week’s Robot Punch!, we explore a recent example in how gaming media continues to fail in lifting the stigma associated with video games.

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It began with a tragic, though not entirely uncommon, news story in December: “Johnstown - A quiet, working-class neighborhood in this small town 40 miles north of Denver quickly became distraught over the news of the death of a popular 7-year-old girl, who allegedly died from abuse by her older sister and her boyfriend.

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When I’m not blogging for GotGame, I’m making a living by writing headlines. I try to have fun with them, but I also scrutinize them because they can mislead or overstate, even when you have the best intentions.

That was the case when Kotaku posted an entry titled “This Might Just Be the PlayStation Phone.” Although this headline isn’t innaccurate at face value, it implies something that is wholly uncertain. It might be a PlayStation phone. Or it might not be. At all.

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World of Warcraft has finally jumped on the idea of introducing an achievement system, and the new tactic has appeared in a recent build of Wrath of the Lich King’s (WotlK) alpha testing. Achievement systems are nothing new in MMOs; the Lord of the Rings Online has had an achievement system for quite some time now.

Given successful MMOs tendency to incorporate unnecessary and occasionally inane features, we must always ask when we see this sort of announcement: is this a good thing? Quite honestly, there’s no harm, but it does appear like this is yet another instance of needing acknowledgment for small victories. Those that have played little league baseball or peewee football know exactly what I am talking about: everyone gets a trophy! So now, Blizzard has introduced its own trophy system, and the list of achievements have raised some eyebrows to say the least.

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