I often and unsurprisingly find myself trying to make people understand how videogames are not necessarily bad.
Generally the majority of people unfamiliar with videogames like to argue around the fact that they are violent and/or un-educative, which somehow puts them in a position where after being made aware of some good examples (i.e. Professor Layton, to dispute the two points aforementioned) they usually agree that there are exceptions.
Agreeing that exceptions exist also usually raises the realisation that not all videogames are bad, and subsequentially switches the ideal discussion on how parents and government should take part in avoiding for certain types of videogames to end up in wrong hands.

However some people simply like to believe that the majority of videogames are just bad and like to trump out how they should be eradicated from the world in their totality (usually at this point they also point out how you are just brainwashed to advocate for their cause). It's also quite common to hear people associating popular videogames with some random acts of teenagers' foolishness that we are unfortunately used to read on our newspapers.
I have also come across some even more extreme cases of people who simply wouldn't move from their belief that all videogames were created as some sort of machine for mind control, under the sole purpose of creating addiction in the user whom would then be willing to pay up money to hurt himself to satisfy his need, as in some sort of a variation from what happens with the smokers (at least before it was widely accepted that smoke was related to lung cancer).

Why are these people so much putting themselves against videogames and why are they so much unwilling to discuss or accept any reason to bend their certainties?
My thought is that for many of them it's just so easy not to believe there would be another reason for everything that's bad in the world that they just pick up that something that is relatively new and unknown (and which they can see is so quickly spreading and evolving) to put all the blame on. For many other people (e.g. older people) I believe it might be some case of envy towards something they didn't have in their days and they secretly wish they had, while at the same time are scared of wondering how this would change the lives of young people in their process of growing up.
From this perspective I might agree with them that many years ago young kids weren't reached by violent videogames (while I think nowadays everybody can come up with an example of a young kid being able to reach a Resident Evil or GTA game). It's true that there are now all these sorts of "new media" (being videogames, internet, mobile phones etc) that could be bad for kids and at the moment we are quite unable to foresee how this is affecting them, but I will never step away from my belief that it's up to the parents to control what their kids are exposed to. In my opinion it could never be correct to ban something because it could reach a kid if I am a grownup and could/want to access it. People tend to forget that there are PEGI ratings, or simply don't want to accept their responsibility.

I find it quite frustrating when I hear that as a videogame player I am some sort of evil supporter of derailment of happy childhoods, instigator of hysteric acts of violence, or victim of subtle brainwash and brain cells degeneration.
Maybe some people should start reviewing their external inputs before blaming the others'.