After recounting the impressive achievement, presenter Jayne Secker couldn't resist trotting out the trope, with a rote 'as a parent' qualification while struggling to contain her laughter:
"As a mother, I would just like to say, 'Step away from the screen, go outside, get some fresh air; beating Tetris is not a life goal."
Is she just going for an easy daytime-telly laugh? Probably, but given the massive cross-demographic audience of people enjoying all sorts of games these days, it came across incredibly poorly to a great many.
The good folks over at VGC detailed some of the criticism the segment has attracted online, including a comment from the head of UKIE comms, Bhavina Bharkhada, suggesting that a child chess champion wouldn't have to put up with this crap. VGC also notes an earlier comment from Gibson's mother to The New York Times, in which she says, "He does other things outside of playing Tetris, so it really wasn’t that terribly difficult to say OK."
The reaction from the gaming community has been unanimously critical — feel free to scroll through the quote tweets yourself — and yet it seems like we're stuck with this dispiriting, inaccurate stereotype, one that should have died decades ago.
How long will this go on? Why does it persist when we see examples every day of players interacting healthily, engaging in their communities, and gaming older gracefully? Are Twitch and other platforms contributing to this stereotype's survival by showcasing webcam images of gamers cooped up in stuffy rooms reacting to text chat, starved of 'proper' social outlet? Is the image of a well-adjusted person who enjoys video games not sensational enough?
It's especially perplexing to people around these parts who have witnessed Nintendo broaden the industry's demographic horizons. The company was at the forefront of changing perceptions even before the Satoru Iwata-led Wii and DS revolution and its 'blue ocean' thinking. For argument's sake, let's take the release of Wii Sports as a landmark moment when an imagined cultural threshold was crossed — when people began to realise that not all video game fans were loners or eight-year-olds whose parents needed a talking to.
Wii Sports launched in 2006. It's now 2024, and we're hearing the same old narrative from people young enough to know better.
We live in a time when more people play games than ever before, and more people than ever understand their value, so it's infuriating to see reactions like this from large outlets who judge this story sufficiently significant to report on, but unimportant enough to dismiss with a smug quip as they move on to the weather.