Controversy is brewing over poll results featured in a What They Play article featured earlier this month.

The poll, published in a story titled “Parent’s More Concerned About Video Games than Alcohol or Pornography” generated significant attention from the video game media as well as mainstream news outlets.

Representatives from What They Play told Ripten.com that the polls had been taken from visitors and members of their own community. The veracity of the poll results and the article has been called into question by readers as well as Ben Kuchera of Ars Technica.

“We need to look at this data a little more critically than the way it is presented by What They Play; it doesn’t tell us what “parents” think, it tells us what readers of this particular blog think,” Kuchera wrote in an article published Aug. 12. “This was simply a survey on the site, so not only is it impossible to tell if respondents even have children, but whether these numbers are in fact a truly representative population other than What They Play readers.”

According to Tom Byron, vice-president of marketing at WhatTheyPlay.com, those results were taken from their own community of readers and visitors, a poll created to foster discussion and debate in their community.

“The results were interesting,” Byron said. “We weren’t trying to make a push-poll or seem like we were setting anything up.”

Byron, along with director of corporate communication Tom Sarris, regularly run polls for their website. Both admitted that while the have experience polling within the advertising and public relations fields, they have no professional polling training or experience.

“What we had hoped we do was start a discussion,” Sarris said. “The overriding intent was a snapshot what our community was thinking on these subjects.”

Unfortunately, the experiment escaped the laboratory. The poll was picked up by videogame bloggers and websites, including IGN, Joystiq, Kotaku, The Escapist Magazine, and Games Industry.biz.. Even the mainstream media got a hold of the poll. CBS games news carried IGN’s coverage on the story to the CBS website. The LA Times also ran the story on their website.

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