Gotta love it. The Center for Disease Control has weighed its heavy hand into the video gaming world and come up with a rosey picture of the average gamer. What follows is a cut and paste from a story as it appeared on the Sympatico web site:

It might not come much as a surprise that the average video game player is now 35 years old — studies commissioned by the Entertainment Software Association have confirmed this over the past few years — but 2006 research recently unveiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) claims video game players were more likely to be overweight, depressed and introverted.

Led by researcher James Weaver, this study focused on a random sampling of 552 adults, aged 19 to 90, from the Seattle-Tacoma area. Roughly 45 percent, or 249 people, were found to be video game players, with men accounting for 56 percent of this sampling.

The men who played games weighed more, on average, than the non-gamers, while the women were found to have greater levels of depression and had overall poorer health.

In a CDC statement, Weaver suggested gaming might be a form of “digital self-medication … and self-distraction” for this group.

Published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, this study also found adult video gamers were less social and less extroverted than their non-gaming counterparts.

Here's the direct link:  http://www.sync-blog.com/sync/2009/08/cdc-study-video-gamers-are-fat-introverted-and-depressed.html  Some of the comments posted are far more entertaining than the story itself.

Personally I think they should have taken a broader sampling before releasing any sort of findings, but I'm too introverted to say so. Depressing, isn't it? Well if anyone wants to discuss this, I'll be sitting in the back, one chair for each butt cheek, eating Doritos dipped in chocolate.