popular culture gaming

Allow me a non-videogame-related rant here… It is still about moral panics surrounding children and media though so it could easily have been about videogames instead of movies.

I caught a story on the local NPR station last night about someone threatening a lawsuit against Redbox because they sell “R-rated” movies. I searched for something about the story and apparently it got picked up by a few local news outlets including the Indianapolis Fox Affiliate and the Louisville ABC Affiliate. According to stories the whole thing is being stirred up by Vanderburgh Country Prosecutor Stan Levco.

Of course there’s two little details that neither of the two stories linked to above or any of the other stories I saw seemed to mention: First, The MPAA rating system “is a voluntary system” and the ratings are not legally enforced. The only possible grounds for a lawsuit that there would be would be under obscenity or pornography laws. Levco almost certainly knows this. So why is he causing a stir? That leads to the second missing detail: Levco is running for re-election.

So this is just a ploy to get into the headlines so that Levco can say he is “fighting for families” and concerned about “family values” without having to do anything. The minute I heard this story I immediately wondered if the guy was up for re-election because that’s the only time public officials try to start legal proceedings related to media. I guess Levco couldn’t find any easy videogame targets.

Heaven forbid that any of the media outlets that aired this story would take two minutes to wonder why Levco was doing this or anything… That’s some good reportering there…

In my last post I asked, “Where have you gone Jack Thompson?” Well, if you say his name then he’ll appear…
Activision CEO Bobby Kotick’s full DICE speech, Jack Thompson says ‘Gotcha!’

Once upon a time Jack Thompson was the nemesis of gamers. Then he got permanently disbarred but that didn’t stop him as he claimed to be fighting the Florida Bar and probably lots of other crazy things. He also started writing an occasional column for some online conservative site.

Now, however, he seems to have disappeared. Once a search for Jacko on google news showed up all sorts of antics by him but now searching for Jacko on google news just returns the occasional story mentioning him as a foil and stories about other people named Jack Thompson. (I wonder if the actor Jack Thompson ever gets people accusing him of hating videogames?) Jacko hasn’t even posted a column since August of 2009.

I wonder if Jacko has just given up or if he’s planning some new media frenzy. I kind of hope he keeps at it because his insane claims sure were entertaining even if there were some people who believed his lies.

I’ve been interviewing people lately and I’ve been thinking about my equipment. It is a bit dated though and so I’m looking to replace it.

How dated you ask? Well, my main recording device is a Sony Minidisc recorder. It is a Hi-MD model, one of the last ones they made, so it can be uploaded to a computer. Like all minidisc recorders it does a pretty good job but it is six years old.

When I bought the player back in 2004, solid state recorders were pretty expensive but now they are really cheap. I don’t have an ipod or iphone so using one of those to record with isn’t really an option (although I’m thinking about getting an ipod touch since I’m missing out on that gaming experience). Of course the Zoom H4n is really sweet but I think that might be overkill.

The truth of the matter is that I have some affection for my old minidisc recorder. It really is a nice piece of hardware. It is just too bad that Sony waited so long to bring out a model that could upload to computers and that they saddled it with the terrible ATRAC format. Is this technonostalgia?

Last semester I was teaching 5 classes so I didn’t get much writing done. This semester I’m back to teaching only 2 classes so I am going to try to bang out drafts of the rest of this dissertation thing.
Of course that means I would have to look for a job and there aren’t many of those around at the moment…

For the next chapter I really want to get into what I’m calling “mixed-mode” communication. I’m interested in looking at how people will communicate both through computers (including things like phones even though I’m only focusing on gaming) as well as through non-computer mediated ways. How do people sitting near one another chose to talk over ventrillo or something and when do they talk directly to one another. Or when they might talk directly to one another but they are referring to something in the game like telling a teammate to go somewhere and using their in game character to point in the direction or something like that.

Quiet around here lately. I’ve been busy teaching 5 classes. I’m done teaching but I’ve got grading to do yet. I’m meeting with my advisers tomorrow and I hope they don’t yell at me for not writing anything this semester since I’m teaching so much. Mo’ money. mo’ problems…
I’ll post something more substantial soon. …ish

Here’s my presentation from the Internet Researchers conference. The conference was pretty good. Enjoyed the panels. Got some good questions. next year is in Sweden so I probably won’t be attending but 2011 is in Seattle so I hope to attend that one.

So this guy’s girlfriend is so dumb she doesn’t notice the guy pushing buttons on the controller or that certain scenes keep happening over and over when he dies? Or are they saying that Uncharted 2 is full of long cut scenes? It is nice to see Sony stretching out and advertising games to new markets like straight white men… (seriously though who is this commercial for? Any guy watching it who might be remotely interested would already be interested in the PS3. Maybe it is just to generate general brand awareness?)