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The man behind the report that formed the basis of Metro’s absurd anti-gaming story this morning has slammed the paper’s reporting of it.

Of the headline claiming Gamers ‘can’t tell real world from fantasy’”, Nottingham Trent University’s Professor Mark Griffith told Spong: "For one thing, we never said that in our paper and for a second thing, the findings don’t even hint at that.

The press release I put out yesterday regarding this study was completely neutral, not one negative thing in there.

"The Metro, they obviously had an agenda – because all [the reporter] said was that he just wanted to know about the negative stuff. I told him that the paper was primarily positive, or at least neutral.

He said ‘I don’t want to know about that, I want to know the negative stuff.’ So I just went through what we did, what we found and what we are doing next."

Griffiths also criticised the reporting of the study in one of the UK’s other game-loving papers, The Daily Mail.

"I’ve been doing this for 25 years – you learn to take the rough with the smooth,” he admitted. But I stand by the research.

That paper has exactly what we said and what we didn’t say. The Daily Mail had an advance copy of that paper for about 48 hours, in fact, and the journalist was reading back sections to me. So she knew what was in it, but decided to just write her own story anyway."