UK Ad Campaign Claims Videogames Cause Early Death

We're getting accustomed to the fact that governments all over the world (well, maybe except for South Korea) don't really understand videogames and the people that play them, although they are now among the biggest groups everywhere that are able to vote. The latest proof comes from the United Kingdom, where a health-oriented advertisement campaign is claiming that if you play videogames, you are well on your way to “early death.”

The ad has been approved by the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research and Diabetes United Kingdom and is part of the Change 4 Life campaign. The ad uses the image of a young boy, who looks very sad, holding a PlayStation controller. The slogan accompanying the ad reads “Risk an early death, just do nothing.”

The ad seems to have made it into various magazines, most of them aimed at young adults and is also presented online. It's not clear on what scientific data the slogan is based.

What makes this weird is that the Byron review, which was commissioned by the United Kingdom government to look into the effects of videogames, concluded that no clear link can be drawn between obesity, especially in young adults and kids, and playing a lot of games. Surely, it's pretty clear that someone who only sleeps, eats and plays games is going to have health problems, but that does not mean that if someone picks up games for a few hours a day, while doing exercise and maintaining a healthy diet will die prematurely because of Fallout 3 or Halo Wars.

The problem with initiatives like these is that they tend to play on the fears of the general public and especially on the fears of parents whose offspring are into videogames. It would have been better for the British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research and Diabetes to offer clear information instead of using scare tactics.