ego.istic.org

Regular readers will recall my diatribe a fortnight ago about the age of “the average gamer”. If you don't, follow the link now and read it, then come back here for the second round. I linked to the US Entertainment Software Association's pretty pie charts. Well, I'm obviously not cut out to work for the BBC. When I saw that pie chart, I laughed heavily. But when “Mark Ward, Technology correspondent, BBC News website” saw it, he saved the information away in some pigeonhole in his brain for later retrieval. So when on Monday he wanted to write a few fluffy paragraphs to introduce an article on an enterprise email prioritisation application which is being marketed as “applying game elements to workplaces,” he knows he can say that (paras 2—3):

There are plenty of older folks who shake off the dust of the working day in many different virtual worlds.

Statistics from the the [sic] US Entertainment Software Association (ESA) back this up. It claims that the average player is 33 and has more than a decade of gaming under their belt.

Thanks for letting us know, Mr. Ward. It might have little relevance to the press release you're talking about and none at all to the product it is advertising, but giving us that pearl ensured that canny readers knew before getting into it that the article was not to be taken seriously, or even seriosly.

If I'm to be entirely fair, I should point out that although Mr. Ward's report looks like a retyped press release, it isn't. The content is spread across several press releases, and the quotes from Dr. Reeves, co-founder of the company selling this application appear to be original. (Google couldn't find duplicates, and they don't appear on any of the company's recent press releases.) He does call Dr. Reeves, “Dr Reeve” in section 2, para 5 and describe him as “a professor of education at Stanford University,” (section 2, para 2) forgetting that as Stanford is in the US, “professor” just means “academic staff”, but these are minor offences.

And I didn't spot the “the the” mistake when reading the article, only when Vim's spell-checker pointed it out to me when I pasted the paragraph into this post. Clearly BBC News should standardise on Vim for editing their online reports. If nothing else, it would raise the barrier to entry, which could only be a good thing.