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You can lie about your age online? Oh no! What about the children?

Now that we have solved all the other problems of the world, the US government has once again turned to the most pressing issue of the day: videogames. This week “Politicians lash[ed] out at video game industry” and “Lawmakers slam[ed] FTC for video game actions.” Most notable were the comments of Illinois Democrat Jan Schakowsky:

Rep. Jan Schakowsky, Illinois Democrat and ranking member of the subcommittee, criticized Wal-Mart for the ease with which consumers under age 17 can buy explicit games on its Web site simply by checking a box certifying they are the proper age.
“That age verification is a joke,” in an era when 13-year-olds can be issued credit cards and other children have access to their parents’ cards, she said.

Yes, finally, an elected official takes on the real issues! If the Internet had been available when I was 17 I know that buying videogames would have been the first thing I would have done. Well, of course as a 17 year old, I would have been more interested in looking at porn, but luckilly, there isn’t any of that online or anything…
However, if we accept for a minute that Rep. Schakowsky’s concerns are valid, her complaint is still horribly misguided. Let’s look at her statement again:

“That age verification is a joke,” in an era when 13-year-olds can be issued credit cards and other children have access to their parents’ cards, she said.

From that quote, it seems clear that Rep. Schakowsky feels that there is something wrong with 13-year-olds having credit cards. So what does she do? Does she attack the credit card companies? No, she attacks the businesses that accept credit cards. Now, I don’t really care about credit cards, but look at her own logic. Kids having redit cards is bad, so we’re going to attack companies that accept credit cards because the worst thing that kids will do with a credit card is buy a videogame. This just illustrates how sad our government has become. Instead of dealling with real issues, we are going to freak out about people buying videogames online. (insert your own joke about how this is a waste of time since the government is monitoring everything we do and knows everything we are doing anyway…)

Chamillionaire is such a poser

So yesterday I got up five or ten minutes before the top of the hour and rather than start watching the end of something, Ihit the music video channels. The first video I ran across was some crappy ballad, so I kept flipping and ran across Chamillionaire‘s Ridin’ video (both links have sound). It was ok. That is untill her to to the lines: “Ride with a new chick, she like “Hold up.” // Next to the Playstation controlla // There’s a full clip in my pistola; // send a jacker into a coma.
However, the video clearly shows the “new chick” holding an Xbox controller. Nice one Chamillionaire. What a poser…

Now I”m seriously getting jealous!

What does a guy have to do to get some press around here? First fellow IU Communication and Culture grad student Konrad Budziszewski gets to teach his class Games, Gamers, and Gaming Cultures this summer, but he also gets written about in an IU Daily News article, “Course examines video game culture” (and called a professor even though he is, like me, still a PhD student!) and has that article picked up by Game Politics and even Gamespy!
Now, CMCL instructor Cynthia Duquette Smith gets mentioned in a IU Daily News article, “Professor studies how online games affect gender views.”
What about me? What about THE Bryan young?
Seriously, though, it is great to see friends and colleagues here at IUs Department of Communication and Culture get some attention. Mad props all around!

Episodic Content – pros and cons

Call me a sucker, or call me hardcore. I’ve bought both SiN Episodes: Emergence (which I found pretty sinful) and Half-Life 2: Episode One (which doesn’t make any sense, does it? If this is episode one of half-life 2, then what was half-life 2?)
Half-Life’s episodic content was a lot more polished (not Polish) than Sin’s. You have to hand it to Valve, their games are allways extremely well thought out. I’ve played through episode one one on normal and I’m playing through it again with the commentary track. The commentary track really illistrates how much thought they put into it and is a nice feature.

The main question, however, is, “Is it worth $20?” The answer? “I’m not sure.”

On one hand, you have the marketing hype: “Episodic content let’s the game makers release games more quickly.” While I’m sure that is true, I can’t help but be troubled by the other hand, the economic reality: “It let’s the game makers suck consumers dry.” I’m glad I bought the first episodes of each game. Nothing ventured, nothing gained and all that crap. However, I don’t think I will buy Sin episode 2. I’m not sure about Half-Life 2 Episode 2.

The fact of that matter is that this episodic content is right up there with subscription model sofware for ripping off customers. Countless others have done the math: 3 episodes =$60. I don’t know when the last time I paid more than $30 for a games! –OK, atually, I do. It was when Half-Life 2 came out…

Another aspect of episodic delivery is the fact that customers will expect better and better graphics as time goes one. Sin is talking about 9 episodes or something. I doubt that gamers will be happy if episode 9 visually has the same look as episode 1. This presents some interesting challenges. It will be an odd situation where the first part of a storyline looks worse than the last part. Moreover, there is the fact that gamers will expect a new graphics advances in every episode. So what happens if the company develop two or more advances? Will they withhold one of the upgrades untill the next episode — risking fans finding out and being further pissed off?

There is also the question of continuing the revenue stream. As the comic book world knows, first issues sell better than second issues and every issue after that generally sells less and less. This isn’t the case for games. In many cases, the sequel will sell better than the original. However, by removing the one, two, or more year wait between gameplay experiences, Valve is certainly moving into the realm of comic books and other monthly entertainments. So how will they get someone to buy episode four if they didn’t buy episode three? With Valve’s habit of endlessly repackaging the original Half-Life, I wouldn’t be suprised if they didn’t offer package deals where you could get several old episodes at a discount — which makes me want to skip the rest of the episodes so I can get them for cheap.

Oh well, only time will tell if these questions get answered or if I cave in and buy episode two when it comes out…

About that Showbizshow clip…

You know that post I made about David Spade’s SHowbiz Show covering E3? Well, they didn’t. Even though they advertised it in the teaser immediately before the show aired!
Never fear, however, the clip is online at Comedy Central’s website.
You can view the Showbiz SHow’s clip of E3 at that link or if you don’t want to look at the ads you can watch the clip directly. It isn’t all that great, but I can’t leave my tens and tens of fans hanging!

Alone in the Dark is Worse Than Silent Hill

Whle I said that I didn’t like Silent Hill, I have to join everyone else and say that Alone in the Dark is horrible. And not in a good way.
A couple months ago I was at the video store and saw Alone in the Dark sitting on the shelf and decided to rent it without looking at the back of the box. I get it home and pop it in and it turns out that it isn’t Uwe Boll’s film, but rather 1982’s Alone in the Dark. Let me tell you, the 82 film with the same title is a million times better than the 2005 version.

As I’m writing this I’m listening to Boll’s commentary and he keeps saying things that make me want to slap him.
First of all, he keeps explaining all the characters’ motivations. Call me crazy, but perhaps it would have been better to, you know, actually have that in the film or something.
Second, he keeps stating what is going on. “And then he goes over to her and then talk…” I suppose that blind people appreciate that, but the rest of us are watching the film, Uwe. We don’t need you to describe it for us.
Third, he keeps bragging about all the product placements he got for the films. He has no shame!
Fourth, he actually admitted that he gets to make movies because of German tax shelters. (OK, that’s actually pretty funny. He comes this close to actually admitting that he’s only in it to make money. Too bad for Boll that Germany has changed their tax laws)
Fifth, he blames videogame companies and fans for the film’s failure. He talks about how he doesn’t understand why the owners of Alone in the dark wouldn’t release an Alone in the Dark game when the film came out and says that it would have helped the film. He also says that videogame fans are too picky.
Sixth, he calls other horror films that have came out recently cootie-cutter and all the same and is mad because he doesn’t understand why people didn’t go see his super original film. He says it isn’t straight horror, or straight action, or whatever.

And that’s the problem with the film. Not only is it not just a single genre, but it is actually several of them put together. Now I said that Silent Hill was like Super Smash Brothers in that it mixed up elements from a bunch of other films. Well, Alone in the Dark does that too, but where Silent Hill uses the differnt elements like paint and mixes them together to create something that at lest hangs together, Alone in the Dark just smashes them together. The result is less like a painting made up of a bunch of different colors, but more like a kid trying to build something with a bunch of different colored legos. Sure you can put red, blue, green, white, and yellow legos together to make something, but you can still see all the individual elements because they don’t go together in any coherent way.

THe film throws todether pseudo-archeological adventure with zombies, with one random fight scene whose setting is an ice factory straight out of Bruce Lee’s Fists of Fury (yes, it even takes place in a random Chinatown location for some reason!), with Starship Troopers complete with soldiers in black outfits and helmets and House of the Dead’s Ona Grauer with redish hair that makes her look like Dina Meyer of Starship Troopers, the end of Resident Evil (or a million other movies, for that matter)and finally fancy light bullets from such films as Blade and Underworld. (Oh crap, he just mentioned Body Snatchers and he said that the people who have these slug-like things in them were puppets!! He has no shame! And he just called the creatures Xenomorphs)

It does have a nice 80’s era Scorpions-esque euro-hair-metal theme though. It’s very European.

Anyway, if you are going to see a film called Alone in the Dark, go see the one starring Jack Palance and Martin Landau. It has a great twist towards the end.

Alone in the Dark
Uwe Boll does not have shame
Watch the other one.

Ashamed to be a gamer, but not ashamed of all my fellow gamers…

While I am still ashamed to be a gamer, I am happy to report that I’m not ashamed of my fellow gamers. Yesterday, the first Sin episode was released. I’m not done with it yet, but the first scene causes quite an impression. Apparently, the programmers at Ritual and/or Valve have spent too much time playing games like Dead or Alive because the first thing you see is the Elexis Sinclaire character bending over you with her breasts sloshing around as if they were water in a glass that is being violently shaken. I mean,not only do breasts not move like that anyway, but look at her, she obviously has a bra on, so there is really no reason for them to move around like that.
Thankfully, I’m not the only one who found that very odd. In the comments over at Bluesnews, at least two people had already posted about it. Now I don’t feel like the lone voice or reason or the crazy man standing on the street corner yelling at people as they go by.
On the downside, however, in writing this post I did a search for “boob physics” and found that not only were the creepy boobs available in Half-Life 2, but I also found one of the most disturbing videos ever. It isn’t pornographic or anything, but manages to simultaneously objectify a bunch of polygons, as well as ignore the effects of the violent actions performed in order to demonstrate that objectification. creepy. Call me crazy but I like my sexiness and literal violence as separate as possible…

Videogame syllabus update

I’ve decided that the answer to my quandry over how to set up my videogame syllabus is to begin with a couple days of ethnography stuff. I’m setting up the class is that each Friday will be a gaming day and that they will keep journals of their experiences and observations, therefore, it seems logical that they get some info on how to take good notes and what to think about before we actually start playing the games. I would share the calendar, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to just show it to people without making them sign into google’s calendar or use an rss reader. If anyone already does those or knows an easier way to let people see a google calendar, leave a message.