In relation to "A bad rap" & "Don't Blame Video Games"

When I went to Korea for a student exchange last semester, I visited my aunt's house and encountered my supposedly hardcore 'gamer' cousin. This 15 year old specimen showed that despite being an obvious 'gamer,' he wasn't socially disadvantaged or had any kind of criminal intentions as media often portrays. His parents, however, were quite concerned as he would spend hours upstairs on the computer playing starcraft or warcraft or somethingcraft and whilst downstairs hanging with the rest of the family, he would be watching broadcasted games on his television on his phone (and when serious shit got down, he'd rush upstairs to the computer, to get a better view I guess). The poor angry teenage boy would get so moody when his dad told him to stop playing computer games (His dad even put a lock on the computer so that you could only log on to it during certain times of the day).
But to be honest, he wasn't all that bad. He was actually quite good now that I compare him to some other 15 year boys. He was his year's student representative, he regularly got top marks in class, he went out to play basketball every night and he spent time making silly noises and faces at his baby sister. So, why do people, even the parents of such an achieving son, hold this bad reputation of 'gamers'? I don't know the answer yet. Perhaps, it will come to me as I progress further into this course. For now, it seems that video games are an easy and seemingly-convincing scape goat. Perhaps people find it easier or safer to blame something that's non-human, a machine, rather than the person's own personality itself.
Before this course, games as far as I was concerned was building a cool house for my Sim and the rest was someone else's business, but now I'm finding myself interested with the relationship video games have with society, the interaction between the machine and the human player as well the interaction between the gaming community and the non-gaming community.

Julia C