one less idiot on parade

Last month, I wrote about The awesome generosity of Penny Arcade readers, and the lack of media coverage of that story.
Well, today there is a fantastic follow-up to that story. The author of the story that prompted the guys at PA to launch Child’s Play celebrated, and apologized to Penny Arcade and its readers.

This is some combination of a celebration and an apology. First, the celebration.
A week before Thanksgiving, The Herald printed my first column on ultra-violent video games, and then put it on the Web site, www.heraldnet.com. The most important reaction I saw came right after Thanksgiving through a Web site called penny-arcade.com.
An unidentified writer wrote, “If you are like me, every time you see an article like this one — where the author claims that video games are training our nation’s youth to kill — you get angry.”
When readers clicked “this one,” my column on video games popped up.
[. . .]
Among other things they did to inspire giving, Penny-arcade published a letter from one of its readers. He is the father of a 5-year-old boy who had spent most of the previous five months at Children’s Hospital getting chemotherapy for lymphoma.
Almost every parent can immediately identify with that father’s distress, and with his heartfelt “thank you” to Penny-arcade for its Child’s Play toy drive.
[. . .]
Here is the apology part and then back to more celebration. Certainly many gamers read my column as a statement that I believe that they are bad people. For that impression I am sorry. I did not and do not believe that.
In any case, the Penny-arcade Web site and many of their readers, who are apparently gamers, demonstrated that they have big hearts and generous instincts.

Mr. Bill France, who wrote the original story, and the story quoted above has earned a trophy and a pizza from the official WWdN Prize Patrol™.