A picture says a thousand words ...about the status of videogame studies

I was looking up some stuff about videogames in the library yesterday and I noticed that they had The Meaning and Culture of Grand Theft Auto. Since I have talked to the editor Nathan Garrelts at a couple conferences, I thought I would go check it out. I haven't gotten a chance to start reading it yet, but it looks pretty interesting.

Once I found it in the shelves I took a second to see what was on the shelves next to it in order to see if there were any other good books near it. This is what I saw:

If you can't read the titles they are books about teaching kids with games, tailgating, chess, and mental puzzles. I think that says more about the status of videogame theory than any rant I could write.

Damn you Library of Congress Classification System! Damn you to Hell!!!!!

Must... Defebd... Desktop...

I'm still going to switch over to wordpress sometime in the future as soon as I get back to hacking around on it.

However, I've become distracted by my new addiction: Desktop Town Defense. Just going there to get the url tempts me to play it. I must resist! I must resist! But who will defend the desktop if I don't?

It is basically kind of like the tank game I used to play in junior high where you and a friend would draw tanks on paper with a pencil and then take shots by scribbling dots on your half, folding it over and then scribbling over the back side of the paper where the dot is to transfer the graphite to the other half of the paper and hopefully on top of your friend's tank. (I hope that makes sense)

Only in this one you lay out little automated towers and the little creeps crawl across the playing field in waves. You get points for shooting them and the more levels you go the harder they get so you have to upgrade your towers and such. I'm totally addicted...

Nitro Family may be the weirdest FPS ever

So in addition to the Nitro Family featuring a guy searching for his abducted son while carrying around his wife in some sort of seat, and this combo system where you shoot enemies into the air and shoot them again and again to get points, it also ends weird. Once you beat the final boss the credits start. However, the credits are only on the bottom 3rd of the screen. On the top of the screen you can run around a town out in the mountains with a bouquet of flowers in your hand. As you run around the enemies from the game all stand outside houses (inside fences so you can't get to them) and wave at you. Then you find your wife and if you click the left button you give her the flowers, but if you click the right button apparently you can hit her with them. I say apparently because I gave her the flowers and I didn't feel like trying to beat the final boss again just to try to hit her with the flowers.
Oh and did I mention that throughout the game there is a woman who appears on each level who sells you weapons and tells you that if you find 20 gold credit cards you can get a special surprise? Once you find 20 cards, she fives you the number of her hotel room. On the final level, your wife gets off your back and attempts to break into a room. While she's doing that, you go to the weapon saleswoman's hotel room and they play a movie full of oil wells pumping and rockets going off and moaning. Then you go back to your wife and fight the final boss.

While I'm sure there are weirder games out there, I officially pronounce Nitro Family to be the weirdest FPS I've ever played.

Death to the Doldrums

In the past I was lamenting about the fact that I didn't have any games to play and nothing interesting seemed to be coming out soon. Now I seem to have more games than I know what to do with. They are all old, but they are still new to me. In addition to Freedom Force vs. The Third Reich, I've finished Tron 2.0. On the deck I've got Brothers in Arms and I bought Battlefield 2 and Call of Duty: Finest Hour for X-Box.

Right now though, I'm playing one of the weirdest FPS games I've played in a long while. That game is Nitro Family. Never heard of it? Neither had I. The reason I'm playing it is that it is by the same team that is making Huxley.

In Nitro Family you play a guy trying to rescue his son. The weird part is that you go through the game carrying your wife on your back in some kind of seat. If a bad guy gets to close she automatically uses a whip to sever their heads off. You can also hit a button and she will fly into the air and carpet bomb an area.

It used the Serious Sam engine so it looks like and kind of plays like it, only there aren't as many bad guys at a time. However, they do still just run straight at you. They also get stuck a lot of the time so you hear footprints and have to look around to find the stuck guy if you want to kill him.

It uses a neat combo system where you have two guns at a time with the left and right mouse buttons controlling the left and right gun. If you shoot a guy into the air, you can shoot him again to get a combo which gives you points that you can use to upgrade the guns.

The level design is not that great. There are lots of places where there isn't anything, but it looks like there should be and they just ran out of time. There are also some places where I've been able to get to places where htey obviously didn't want me to go so I could walk through stuff. Unlike Serious Sam where there were secrets everywhere there aren't really any here. Also there are lots of places where it looks like it would be fun to jump up and climb on stuff and either you can't because they just made it too tall, or if you can get up there, there's no point.

It is quite possibly the greatest flawed game ever.

Why are games so conservative in their themes?

Lately I've been thinking about WWII games and themes of games in general. Why are there so many WWII games? In a previous post I talked about the fact that I don't really like them and that it felt kind of odd playing Call of Duty 2 and hearing the enemies talking German.

I think that there's also the fact that the games whitewash over the tragedies of the war. Which got me thinking, why do so many games avoid the hard topics? Why aren't there more games that deal with significant issues? I'm not saying that I want games to be meaningful. I don't want games to be art. I would just like some games to try to touch on these topics.

Have there been any games about slavery? Abe's Oddysee is the only one I can think of that dealt with it in any significant way. What about civil rights in general? If we need another war game, can we at least have one that features people who aren't soldiers and who aren't one man killing machines? Just one. Then I'll go back to playing Serious Sam or Counter-Strike.

Submissions and such

So I managed to get my paper submitted to Digra's 2007 Conference in Japan. Hopefully I'll get in. And then hopefully I'll be able to afford to go!

I'm also working on editing the template on my new version of the blog. It isn't going to look all that different, but I'm just no expert at html and css, so I have to muddle through the best I can.

I've also been putting in marathon sessions on Freedom Force vs The Third Reich. It shouldn't be surprising that I'm really enjoying it. After all, I am a comic book nerd, I liked the first one, and I like City of Heroes. (On the other hand though, I thought Ghost Rider was not that good.) I'll probably go finish beating the final boss as soon as I upload this post!

That's Doctor(ial Candidate) Young to you!

So I'm finally ABD. Now all I have to do is write up the prospectus, get it approved, write the dis, graduate, get a job, and then get tenure! Easy street here I come!!! ...or not...

In other news, I'm following through on my promise to switch over to wordpress. I got it installed, but I want to customize the theme first and then figure out how to redirect the front page to the wordpress blog.

Then people won't get error messages when they try to leave comments and I won't have to approve them by hand! Easy street here I come!!! ...or not...

Google enters the in-game ad market -- does this mean they are here to stay?

According to Red Herring, Google has agreed to acquire Adscape Media for $23 million. Adscape is an in game advertising company (according to their website they do "Real advertising in the virtual world"). Combine this with Microsoft buying their own gaming ad firm and it seems like there's a good chance that we are going to be seeing a whole lot of ads in videogames for the near future.

Of course the fact that I said the "near future" is no accident. While there may not be much consol gamers can do to block ads in games, PC gamers certainly will figure out how to do it. You can already block ads on your browser so why would ads in your games be any different? While the near future may suck for gaming, I see this as little more than the popup and banner ad boom of 90s. If they can crack the copy protection on HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, I'm sure they can figure out how to block ads in my games.

I played a Wii today.

Today was a horrible sleety windy cold day. As I was walking out of the horrible weather into the library I noticed that there was some computer and activities type thing day and I noticed that the IU Gaming Club was set up in a room. I went into the side of the library with the computers, found an empty one, sat my stuff down and went back out to check it out. It turns out they had a Wii set up. So I got to play Wii Sports including tennis, bowling and golf. Over all, ti was pretty cool.

Funny enough, the sports thing brought up an issue I hadn't thought about before. I'm left handed and while I play some sports left handed, I also play some, like golf and bowling, right handed. Switching back and forth from sports is kind of a pain. So I had to think about whether I really wanted to play with the hand I would play the real sport with or would I just play them them all left handed? I've never had to stop and think about which hand to use when I played the Atari 2600! Damn kids these days! I tell you what!

retro gaming

Been busy lately. No posts lately. Submitted proposal to Association of Internet Researchers conference. It is in Vancouver so I hope to get in and make my triumphant return to Vancouver.

I'm trying to get my paper edited for DiGRA 2007 in Japan. I'm not sure if I can afford to go, but if I get in I'm sure going to try. It is right after the Tokyo Game Show too, so I really really want to go. SO click on some ads and click on my Amazon ads before you buy anything from Amazon (I think I'll still get some money even if you don't buy the product that is being advertized, just as long as you click through the link.

I just got done playing Project: Snowblind. It started off as a more action-based Deus Ex spin-off, but when Deus Ex 2 didn't do so well they changed the name. There's still the augments and stuff, but honestly, they are pretty pointless. I got through the entire game and barely used them. The best part about the game is that all the cut scenes are skipable and skip them I did. I got it cheap, and that's about what it was worth.

Since I modded my xbox I've also been doing some retro gaming. Either I stink, or Super Mario Bros. 3 is incredibly hard. Thank goodness for cheats. Without cheats and the emulator allowing me to save wherever I want I would never have been able to beat that stupid game.

While I often hit up gamefaqs.com for help, this is the first time I've really ever used cheats extensively. I never really saw the point of it before, but now I do. Without cheating I would have been so much more frustrated and probably would have quit the game a long time before I got anywhere near the end of the game. mmmmm cheeeaatttssssss.

That's good proofreader there SpikeTV...

Last week was the first airing of the Spike TV Video Game Awards. I saw part of it, but I didn't see the end because Jack Thompson was on Nightline the same night. I wanted to see the end of it, so I went to Spike's site for the awards. It said they would be replayed Saturday, but they weren't. They were on today. I thought that maybe I read the site wrong, so I went and checked out the site again. I saw this and realized why I got confused.

It seems that TV for Men has a whole different calendar of their own where the 17th is Saturday and not Sunday...

(Just a note, the comments are messed up. It gives an error if you try to leave a comment, but they go through. I just have to approve them first. I'm going to switch to wordpress sometime in the next month or so and so I'm not going to bother trying to figure out what's wrong with the commenting system. Sorry! Thanks for the comments though!)

Ratings game followup...

Back in September, I wrote an entry called, The Ratings Game in which I looked at Computer Gaming World's recent decision to stop printing scores along with their reviews. In that post I noted that it seemed that in many cases, CGW was simply rewriting reviews from their 1up.com site -- reviews which actually had scores attached to them.

At the end of that post I noted that CGW was being replaced with Games for Windows: The Official Magazine and wrote:

It will be interesting to see if they retain the "no ratings" policy or if they use that opportunity to reinstate them.

Well, I got the first issue of GFW in the mail a couple days ago and guess what? They have gone back to rating games and printing scores with their reviews.

A letter in the issue addresses the issue and their comment is:

The great thing about magazine redesigns is they let you hit the reset button and when you flip to the Reviews section about two-thirds of the way through this magazine, you'll see that's exactly what we did. The Computer Gaming World Viewpoint section was a grand experiment, and we think it was a successful one. We learned a ton. And the Games for Windows: The Official Magazine Reviews and Extend sections reap the rewards. (Page 18)

Now to be fair, they didn't put back their old 5 star system, but they put in a 10 point system which is totally different, right?

Of course the only thing that really matters is that I was right, right? I am so smart! I am so smart! S-M-R-T!

Are you listening??

I've become a big fan of podcasts mainly since Leo Laporte started putting up his radio show and then started the TWiT podcasts.

While 1up.com and PCGamer and even the IUGaming Club have gaming related podcasts, they are all mostly news-related and talking about new games that are coming out. That's fine, and I sometimes listen to them, but I've often thought that there should be a videogame studies podcast. I've thought about doing it myself, but I think it would be boring just listening to me talk.

One nice podcast with somewhat of a games studies edge to it is the NPR-funded podcast, Press Start, which is hosted by Robert Holt, Kyle Orland and Ralph Cooper. I only wish it would come out more often!

Another podcast I occasioinally listen to is No One's Listening which is not about videogames but about media in general. Now I have to be honest, a lot of times I find myself rolling my eyes at them because they seem so ignorant and naive about media literacy, which is the very thing they are supposed to be talking about.

Recently, however, they did a special about videogames. Although listening to hosts whoh admittedly know nothing about videogames or the issues surrounding them can be very irritating, the episode, called Games Under Fire, is worth a listen. If nothing else, you can download it and fast forward through the irritating parts.

Seriously Odd Videogame commercial.

As nearly anyone who cares about gaming is no doubt aware, Gods of War is coming out for the XBox 360 fairly soon. It isn't Halo 3 coming out the same day as the PS3, but it is pretty good in terms of marketing.

When it come to the advertising, I'm a bit stumped. The latest commercial really has me confused as to what it is that they are trying to get across with this ad:
The music is Gary Jules' Mad World which is probably most familiar to those who have seen Donnie Darko (of course I'm l33t and heard it on WOXY back in the day).

Are they trying to be arty? Are they trying to show some sort of gravitas? Or are they just trying to be emo? Hopefully, someone can clue me in, because I'm just confused. ...And now I want to buy an xbox360.

A close call...

As is appropriate during this Halloween season, I had a very scary gaming-related experience lately. For the past couple weeks, it has become clear that I have passed a milestone that serves as a marker of my l33t-ness: I've nearly worn out the left button on my mouse.

Yes, it seems that those hours of killing demons and aliens have finally taken its toll and resulted in a truly unfortunate casualty (and I say this, without any amount of casualty either). My mouse had apparently died.

I know, I know, "it is just a mouse!" --But it is my mouse. It is an Intellimouse Explorer 3.0. A silver one. Not those lame black monochrome ones that Microsoft is trying to sell now.

After a couple weeks of hoping against hope I could get used to the half broken-ness of the left mouse button, with its seemingly random double clicking, today it got unbearable. I dug out another crappy mouse I had laying around and plugged it in (it was still an optical mouse, and not a ball mouse, though, After all, there are only so many indignities one person can take!)

As I began to wrap the cord around the body of the mouse in some sort of burial shroud, I thought, "I wonder if I can take it apart?" (I mean, come on, it was either that or catch up on my grading!) So I took off the rubbery feet and unscrewed it, unsure of what I would find. Once I had done so, I noticed that the little switches that were under the buttons were all the same, but only in different positions.

My heart skipping, my hands trembling, I pried off the one under the left button, then the one under the right and then I switched them. I put the cover back on, replaced the screws, plugged the mouse back in and hoped that my deadly addiction to dealing death to demons and delinquents would not have claimed yet another innocent victim.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am happy to say that the operation was a success! I don't have to buy another mouse any time soon! My mouse lives again!!!

Don't make the same mistake I did. Let my story be a lesson to you all: Do not take your mouse for granted!

Insert comment here...

LIke I last mentioned, I'm not playing much lately. I've got some console games to play, but if I'm going to sit in my recliner, I'm going to kick back and watch a crappy movie or The Tribe season 3 and 4 dvds I bought.

I have been playing a lot of Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space, but that's a really short game. I loved the predecessor, Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, but this isn't so much a sequel as a remake since it is really just the same game with slightly prettier graphics and tweaked gameplay.

I feel like I should say something about Jack Thompson's latest debacle, but I think I covered my thought on it over at game politics:

Jack will initially cry foul but in 3-4 months he will begin to use this case as evidence of his accomplishments by saying how he was the first person to force a judge to review a game before it was released or some crap.

Remember, here is Jack’s pattern:
1.Make outrageous claims
2.Repeat claims
3.Lose and/or be proven wrong
4.Claim that he lost because evil people are against him and/or claim he really won.
5. ???
6.Profit!

Even though I thought that the guys from Destructoid were kind of jerks at E3 earlier in the year, they did a bang up job covering the court case.

Ratings? What are they really good for?

Lately, there's been some commentary about whether or not the ESRB ratings system is broken. I would agree that the system is broken. However, I don't think it is beyond repair. I think that playing the games is a must. I know that some games, like RPG's can take more than 40 hours and MMORPGs can take forever, but I think that there is certainly something to be said for actually playing the game to get the character of the game. Without playing the game, without doing anything more than just watching gameplay, there is little way of telling the character of the game. You also can't tell if there is anything more to the game than what the game producers say is in the game. Call me crazy but depending on the game producers to be consistently reliable doesn't seem the wisest decision, even if there are penalties for misleading the ESRB.

On the other hand, what good are the ratings? Do they actually help things? They may help parents, but I'm not a parent. Do parents actually read the ratings?

In the article I linked to, the author, Aaron Ruby says the ratings are poorly designed with too many descriptors. Perhaps. I think that it would be silly for a parent to say, "Oh, animated blood. Well, OK then." After all, There are lots of different types of animation. If we want to use an analogy, Fritz the Cat has animated blood, but I don't think it is appropriate for children.

On the other hand, the film ratings have some truly bizarre descripters. Next time you see a movie rating, look beneath the R or PG. I mean I remember one film being rated R for "pervasive language." What is that? Call me crazy but I prefer my movies to have language that is pervasive. Perhaps they meant pervasive bad language (whatever "bad" means...).

However, as gamers, we should be used to having videogames attacked (I love it when reporters or politicians mention that videogame ratings in the USA are self-enforced and neglect to mention that so are film ratings and parental advisory stickers on music....). However, I think that we should site back and wait. The reason why is that the current trend in the film industry is to release a PG-13 film to the theaters, and an "unrated" edition on DVD. Mark my words, it is only a matter of time before some moral crusader takes note of the fact that poor little Timmy is able to buy a film with boobies in it from the store. Then the film industry will get the attention the videogame industry has been experiencing. Maybe then the news will realize who stupid this whole ratings controversy is.

Jack Thompson strikes again...

On Saturday, Jack Thompson, house husband, announced:

On Monday, September 25, Thompson will journey to another state and announce, with his co-counsel, the filing of what will likely prove to be hugely significant wrongful death action against Sony and Take-Two. The angel is in the details, as this battle in the "culture war" may indeed eclipse even what is going on in Alabama.

So today the case was officially announced and, true to his word, the "angel is in the details." The case is a wrongful death lawsuit Cody Posey and the makers of "Grand Theft Auto: Vice City."

For those who don't recall the case, Cody Posey killed his father, step-mother and step-sister when he was 14. The part where the details come in is that during a police interview Posey claimed his father forced him to have sex with his step-mother and during the trial testified that his father has emotionally and physically abused him for years.

So Thompson is involving himself in a case where he is saying that it was videogames and not years of abuse that drove Posey to kill his family. Nice one Jack. Way to pick your battles.

The article goes on to state that the lawsuit is being filed by the members of the father's family. Hunting around on the CourtTV site there is some evidence that there is a rift between the family of the Cody's father and his mother in which the father's family denies the abuse allegations and wanted Cody punished to the maximum extent of the law while the mother's family wanted a more lenient sentence. Since the court handed down a rather lenient sentence, my opinion is that Thompson has simply been caught up in a bitter battle between two groups over whether or not Cody Posey's father really was abusive. As this lawsuit is brought against both Cody Posey and the makers of GTA, there is little doubt that the mother's side of the family will strongly emphasize the abuse angle. I'm betting that Jack is getting into much more than he bargained for here.

Of course the cynical part of me predicts that when the mother's family brings up the abuse charges and makes the father out to be horrible people, Jack will turn his back on the case claiming that he didn't know about the abuse allegations thereby avoiding another loss in court...

Dave and Steve ARE online!

Back at the end of July, I berated the internets because Dave and Steve's Video Game Explosion wasn't online.

Well, I'm happy to say that I take it all back as Steve, of Dave and Steve's Video Game Explosion, has put up several episodes.

Now everything is indeed on the tubes.

Stupid Game Design Choices...

I just finished playing Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth and I've started playing F.E.A.R. In each game I've encountered some very frustrating elements.

While I enjoyed Call of Cthulhu, as more of an adventure game than a FPS, the most frustrating part is that the game designers had an irritating habit of placing save points -- and let's not forget that there are save points and not quick saves in the first place -- just before crappy cut scenes. Very very irritating to have to watch the same damn clip a dozen times in a row while trying to get past the portion of the game.

FEAR, on the other hand, was irritating before I even started playing it. Stupid copy protection meant the damn game wouldn't install in the first place. I couldn't even copy the disk to the hard drive without resulting in an error. I eventually got it copied over by booting into linux and just telling it to retry copying the files over and over. I knew I should have just downloaded the torrent. That would have been a lot easier than having to go through this.

It seems that it might occur to someone that pissing off your customers wasn't a very smart think to do...

More on porn laws

Since my last post asking about laws regarding selling pornogrpahy to minors, I've gotten a few comments I thought I would post here.
Konrad writes:

In general, the main piece of legislation re: porn is the decision in the Miller vs. California test:

http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0413_0015_ZO.html

Long story short, the main contribution here is the "Miller test," defining whether or not a given form of speech can be categorized as "obscene," and therefore not protected under the First Amendment:

"However, the Court acknowledged "the inherent dangers of undertaking to regulate any form of expression," and said that "State statutes designed to regulate obscene materials must be carefully limited." The Court, in an attempt to set such limits devised a set of three criteria which must be met in order for a work to be legitimately subject to state regulation:

* the average person, applying contemporary community standards (not national standards, as some prior tests required), must find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;
* the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions[1] specifically defined by applicable state law; and
* the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

The third condition is also known as the "SLAPS test". The work is considered obscene only if all three conditions, which together constitute the Miller test, are satisfied."
(wikipedia)

As far as kids buying Playboy (and I guess the proper legal term here is "disseminating pornography to minors," that's handled on a state-to-state basis. It's currently illegal in all 50 states, but the laws are set at the state level, so there's 50 different pieces of legislation dealing with the same thing. To the best of my knowledge, though, they are all based on the Miller test. (As a matter of fact, all the current "violence as porn" efforts in state legislatures all over the country pretty much just want to extend the scope of the Miller test onto graphic violence, thus defining it as a form of obscenity and circumventing counter-arguments based on First Amendement protections...)

Robbie writes:

There seems to be a bit of information on wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pornography#Anti-pornography_movement

It provides a summary of legal proceedings and the rationale that co-ordinated the proceedings, and links to to the cases themselves.

The basis of the first part of the section on anti-pornography laws being that pornography degrades the "grand idea" of free speech as is pertains to protecting other, more credible media institutions. The page quotes that pornography perhaps shouldn't be protected, as it is a "crass commercial exploitation of sex" - which is pretty ridiculous as an argument, since you could attack any hobby/interest magazine or TV programme with such arguments. Furthermore, it continues to suggest that pronography degrades the moral balance of society, which is perhaps the best argument against pornography, and the one that would most apply to video-game regulation - even though it is merely arguing to keep the status quo, rather than perhaps what may be a very culturally valuable medium in times to come.

grumpy_archmage writes:

Well, here in Arkansas, there is a law prohibiting the salf of "[...], pictures, clothing, or other materials which are immoral, lewd, obscene, indecent, or offensive" with contact of the Prosecuting Attorney being the action taken. (Arkansas Code 2-36-103. Sale of immoral, lewd, etc., items.)

As far as pornography, the Arkansas Law states that its a class B misdemeanor to sell porn or show porn movies to minors or to display the bottom 2/3 of a porn dvd. Oddly enough, the law does not apply if 1) the parent, legal guardian, or aunt/uncle/grandparent gives the clerk permission to sell it to the kid, 2) the said family member actually sells it to them, or 3) the said family member gives permission to show or shows themself a porn movie to the kid. Talk about a crazy law... (Arkansas Codes 5-68-501, 502, and 503 Selling or Loaning Pornography to Minors)

Jythie writes:

It usually falls under umbrella 'corruption of a minor' laws. Such laws can be used to prosecute almost anything if you can convince a judge that it is bad enough. Their application is not generally federal.

I've actually seen the same law used to take kids away from parents with unpopular religions, nudists, polly folks, kinksters, etc.

As for stores selling porn, they tend to be on thin-ice in many areas as it is, so mostly they just don't want to attract irate parrent by simply not allowing such sales. Obsentiy laws can be applied anywhere a complainer feels they can cause trouble.

Finally, jabrwock writes:

I usually go to a state's website and look up "obscenity" & "nudity" in their statutes. It usually returns the applicable laws such as definitions, fines, etc.

For an overall definition as approved by the Supreme Court, see the Miller test. It's left up to each state to determine what "sexual conduct" actually means, and what penalties to assign.

For example, in Washinton State, I went to http://www1.leg.wa.gov/legislature/, clicked on "search" and typed "obscene" & "nudity" into the search box, and asked it to search in the various sections. It returned all the different laws that apply to obscenity, covering sexual conduct, sexually explicit, etc.

School has returned and so have I

So exams are over ...for now. I have to revisit them in January, but it will be the same material, so I'm not terribly concerned.
Gaming related, watching the latest trailer for Half-Life 2 Episode 2, I was reminded of my major gripe with Episode 1. In Episode 1, there is an Antlion QUeen (according to wikipedia, it is a technically a guard, but it seems more like the queen of the hive to me). After killing it, that is it. You can't get the antlion scent and use it to turn antlions to your side. According to WIkipedia, getting the scent gland is, "an act which is said cannot be done by humans," but I'm not sure where such information came from. I don't remember that in the game. While playing Episdoe 1 I was totally looking forward to being able to use the antlions! I suppose that this is a place where that carefully crafted system where Alyx makes useful comments could have come in handy. She could have said something like, "too bad we can't get that pheremon sack, isn't it Gordan?"

It is intersting how a single line would have prevented me from being disappointed. As it is, it seems as if the possibility that the antlions can be controlled is just ignore within the game world. There were so many areas with antlions it would have been interesting to take control of them. Oh well, perhaps in Episode 2

So what would a line of dialog such as the one I proposed be considered? Is it narrative? Does it add to teh story line? Or is it something else? It seems that such a line might be similar to a situation where when telling a story someone brings up a detail, as an aside, as a way of reasuring the listener(s) that the detail hasn't been forgotten or that it may be brought up later. Do such elements have names, besides foreshadowing or asides? Do they serve the story? Do they serve to placate plisteners/players? Inquiring minds want to know! Inquiring minds like me!

First day of class fall 2006

Tomorrow is the first day of class at i.e. and my fourth year here. More importantly on a personal level, tomorrow is my oral exam. a!!!!

Writing is over. now it is time to get defensive

So after two long weeks of writing my exams, I am finished. I turned the last two in yesterday. Now all that is left is my oral defense next Monday. I've never been through a defense before, so I'm not entirely sure what to expect. I'm trying not to worry about it because that isn't going to do any good, is it? However, I think since it is called a defense I should be defensive, right? So I plan on saying lots of things like, "Well, that's a stupid question" and "what do you think it means?" With an attitude like that I can't help bud pass, right?
Invetween now and then I plan on sitting on my butt a lot and playing games. Oh, and apply to a couple conferences...

While writing my exams, I did play one game. After hearing so much about Planescape Torment, I decided to hunt down a copy and try it out. I've certainly got to respect a game so highly regarded that fans have made their own patch for it. I was a D&D nerd for a couple years back in the day (even though I could never really find anyone else who wanted to play), so I've had a fondness for the RPG genre, but last RPG I played was the cutscene-tastic Final Fantasy 7 and 8, and that prety much soured me on the genre for several years. FF7 was a novel experience for me since I'd never played any of the others, but I got half way through 8 and just got bored. The final straw was when I realized that I was really only playing in order to play the card game within the game.

The reason why I wanted to play Planescape was that it is quite often one of the games that are brought up when people talk about emotional impact in games. Indeed, the game is quite wordy. In fact fans have taken all the text from the game and made it into a book. However, I have to admit, about half way through the game I realized you could just hit enter and the numbers to go through the dialog and I just started skimming. Maybe it is because I've spent all summer reading around a book a day, but I didn't have much patience for the dialog.

Don't get me wrong, I like the game and I fully admit that the story was intersting. However, it was just a little much for me.

However, I still wonder, was it the story that was interesting for me or was it the motication for the tasks I had to perform? I know that once a character died before I had gotten around to completing two small missions involving a secret that character had I was irritated that I couldn't complete those missions. I didn't care that the character had died. Similarly, in the dialog trees that were mainly concerned with relationship stuff I would just pick the answers that I thought would give me the best result, not out of some sense of obligation or emotional attachment to the characters.

I often wonder what people mean when they say that games have a good story. I've got a paper about the fact that Half-Life had a rather simple plot, but it was well told. Years ago in an interview where I was asking a person what they liked about certain games and the person said that Unreal Tournament had a good story. I wish I would have asked him what he meant by that because certainly Unreal Tournament doesn't have much of a story at all. I think for me the appeal of Planescape ended up being that mission screen and that there were always more things to do and not the story or the emotional impact. I don't doubt for a minute that some people found the story of Plaenscape to be the most interesting thing about the game and found the missions to be simply getting in the way. I wonder, however, are there other people who say they liked the story but might be referring to the missions? Or if there can really be a distinction between the story and the mssions at all? For several years I've been thinking about the importance of the initial premice and the importance of the narrative itself. I suppose I will be thinking about it for several more years untill I get somewhere where I can make some sense of it.

Testing....

I start taking my phd exams tomorrow. So don't count on any updates for a couple weeks. Right now I'm enjoying my last day of freedom by doing nothing productive. woot!

I thought everything was on the internets???

The tubes, the tubes, won't someone think of the tubes?
Back in 2001-2002 TBS used to show a latenight block of programming from the Burly Bear network that was apparently shown on college campuses. On that late night block there was a lot of crap, but there was also one of the best videogame-related shows I've seen: Dave and Steve's Video Game Explosion.

Well, Burly Bear died (apparently it got acquired by National Lampoon) and Dave and Steve was lost to the sands of time.

I can't believe that in this era of youtube and google video that I can't find any episodes of this show online somewhere. All I can find is archive.org's cache of the tbs page and two lonely images:

How am I supposed to satisy my lame urge to college every videogame related program I can find, if I can't find it?

Realistically, however, it does illistrate the difficulties of being interested in studying this kind of ephemera. If you don't record it and keep a copy of it when you see it, it might be gone. Recently, I was able to contact MSNBC and get a copy of the episode of when Henry Jenkins was on Donahue's MSNBC show but in a case like Burly Bear where it has gone out of business, how likely is it that National Lampoon will even know what I'm talking about, let alone be willing to help me?

The moral of the story is, RECORD EVERYTHING!!!!

Duke Nukem to Use PhysX card?

Here's my first ever bit of rumor mongering!
It has previously been reported that Duke Nukem Forever is going to use the Meqon physics engine. Well, last year, Meqon was purchased by AGEIA. Now AGEIA is the maker of the PhysX physics accelerator card. So putting 2 and 2 together seems to me to lead to the conclusion that Duke Nukem Forever will use the PhysX card.
Of course that all depends on whether or not Duke Nukem ever comes out and if AGEIA is still around when Duke Nukem Forever finally comes out...

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!

How not to teach gaming in the classroom

When talking about gaming, it is generally better to actually let people play the game themselves. Everyone repeat after me: "Watching is not the same as playing."

If I ever get to teach my class on videogames, you can bet that the only time in class spent watching someone play a game will be if we are talking about ethnographic observation techniques.

I am going to have to start taking one for the team...

First I missed the Bloodrayne movie and now, I've missed my chance to see Stay Alive. The local theater monopoly Kerasotes has started something they call the Five Buck Club which is a deal where you get to see certain movies for the titular price of $5. Basically, it is an attempt to get people to come to movies that have been out a while and so its just a step between first run theaters and the dollar cinemas. However, it is only for films that have been out for a few weeks. Last week Stay Alive was still regualr price, and now, this week its gone! NOooooo!!!!!!!!!! I'm just going to have to start going to crapy movies on opening night if I want to make sure I see them... Can I deduct my tickets as research expenses???

Oh snap! PC Gamer just got served!

A few months ago the US version of PC Gamer magazine changed their format. Now they have seperated their previews, reviews, and columns into sections based on genre. It's interesting, but it raises questions of whether or not they might be throwing junk in just to make sure they have something to fill out that section that month. Apparently not all of the other gaming magazines are impressed with PC Gamer's new format.
In Computer Gaming World, there is a feature called "5, 10, 15" in which they have little summaries from the magazine 5, 10, and 15 years ago. In the April 2006 issue CGW writes:

1996 - We had a wacky idea to break the entire magazine into sections by game genre. It was like a collection of minimagazines, each kicked off by a columnist followed by news, previews, and reviews. It was a bold, original idea with one problem: where to put the games that defy simple categorization? You could just cram them all into one section that runs the gamut. Or trash the idea altogether... just like we did by 1998.

Tasty gaming theory readings for you

After quite a long wait my friends over at Reconstruction have posted their special issue on games entitled: The Play's the Thing: Games, Gamers and Gaming Cultures. I've not had a chance to read it yet so you will have to go check it out for yourself. It should be interesting reading.

Back from Vancouver... again...

So I got back from presenting at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in Vancouver. I had a pretty good time in Vancouver. However, the conference itself wasn't all that usefull. Suprisingly, there aren't that many people at a conference primarilly about film that are interested in videogames. Although the society changed its name a few years ago from teh Society for Cinema Studies to the current appellation, I think I heard people at teh conference say "SCS" more than "SCMS" by a factor of two to one. Sure, SCS is easier to say, but one can't help but feel marginalized when someone says something to the effect that, "We shouldn't forget television people. They get overlooked to often." If television people get overlooked at SCMS, then one can only imagine what it is like to primarilly interested in a medium other than film or television!

However, take heart, because all but one of the graduate students from IU presented papers on topics other than film. The conference is going to be in CHicago next year, so I'll probably go ahead and submit something again. If it was farther away than that, I might not bother. However, the more nonfilm or tv people go, the better. Anyone want to put together a panel for next year?

Also, I've added a couple more links to the blogroll on the main page, so be sure to take a look at them. I've got the links set for random since I don't want to be responsible for prioritizing them. However, they are all nice blogs, so check them all out.

I AM the Law!

A couple of months ago I bought a used version of the Judge Dredd: Dredd vs. Death game for the PC. I know the game didn't get very great reviews but it was dirt cheap.
So I tried to install it and no dice. The damn game just would NOT install. Put the disk in and an error comes up. You guessed it: copy protection. Way to keep your customers from playing a game they actually paid for...
I even tried things like isobuster and still couldn't get it to work. Of course I would have called tech support -- except that the only tech support phone numbers on the game were numbers in England. The site of the US publisher didn't even have the damn game listed on their website. The UK website didn't have any useful information, either.
So I turned to that last resort of the desperate man: piracy. The game is kind of old and it wasn't that popular to begin with and so I couldn't find it on any bittorrent sites. So I searched and searched and finally found it on edonkey. Three days later I finally had an ISO of the game I bought and paid for more than a month ago...
So the only way I could play a game that I legally bought was to pirate it. And they say piracy is what costs media companies sales...

Anyway, so I finally got to play the game. I thought it was a little better than the reviews led me to believe. It was nice and straightforward shooting. There's an interesting feature where you are supposed to arrest people rather than kill them that I found fun. It was a nice challenge to shoot perps enough to make them drop their weapon but not kill them. Then there were the zombies...

I love zombies. I even own the Uwe Boll masterpiece House of the Dead. So I also liked shooting zombies in Dredd vs. Death.

Sure, the game is pretty much by the numbers with the standard plot of horrible mastermind behind all the evil and the boss battles, as well as the disembodied voice that tells you where to go. However, I found it charming.

The graphics are rather dated. This isn't surprising for a game whose copyright is 2003. There is one thing that the game's maker, Rebellion should be damn proud of. Like their last big game, the original Aliens vs. Predator, this game loads nearly instantly. After playing games like Half-Life 2 which have lengthy loading times, I am amazed at how quickly Dredd vs. Death loads. If Rebellion can do it, why can't the other companies?

Since I'm tracing the genealogy of Rebellion's games, in addition to the super quick loading times, there is another trait that is carried over from AvP: the saving. When Aliens vs. Predator first came out for the PC (Rebellion had actually released an Alien vs. Predator game for the Atari Jaguar back in the day) there were no in-level saves or quick saves. If you died, you had to start the level all over again. Like AvP, Dredd vs. Death has not quicksave. AvP had in-level saves and quick saves added in a patch and for the gold version, so I was surprised that Dredd vs. Death didn't. At least it has checkpoints and you can escape out of the game and save it, so it isn't that bad. However, it is interesting to see the traits common to the two games from the same developer.

Overall, I'd give it seven thumbs up. If you can find it for 5 dollars, and your system doesn't have a problem with crappy copy protection, or you don't have any problem with pirating it, I would say it was worth it.

Videogame clothing

Now, I'm not one to wear an Atari shirt or something, but i just saw a really cool article of clothing. I don't usually watch Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (Is Extremem Makeover: Body Mutilation Edition even on any more???), but I flipped it on to see the end. Ty Pennington not only actually had a shirt on, but also had a jacket on. The cool part of the jacket was that it was a black raincoat-style material but it had outlines of while circles on it. Then they showed a close-up of Ty. It wasn't a white circle pattern -- it was an Asteroids pattern!!!

I totally want one!!!! I haven't been able to find one online, so if anyone sees one you have to leave a message!

Kicking it Old School

I got a bit of cash for Christmas, so I hit up ebay for some retro gaming. I am not much of a console gamer and so although I've had a Pong machine, an Atari 2600, 7800, NES, PlayStation and XBox, I've never had a portable system so I got myself a gameboy advance sp and a few games. While I was at it, I went ahead and got an N64. Goldeneye was such a talked about game, and I hadn't ever played it, so I've wanted to get it for a long time. Well, now I've finally got it -- just when I've got grading to do!!!! Noooooo!!!!!

Jack Thompson: lawyer and man of compassion

Game Politics has a story of a gamer who committed suicide. Apparently, Jack Thompson, anti-videogame lawyer and compassionate man apparently posted a message so horrible that the comment was deleted and Game Politics has decided to no longer allow anonymous comments. MetalGearSolid.org got a copy of it before it was deleted and posted Jack Thompson's response to the suicide. Here is the message that is attributed to Thompson:

Your "gamer friend" will find peace through the Lord, Jesus Christ, but sadly it's too late for that.

There is a void in every heart. You can fill it up with the things of God, or the things not of God. This unfortunate soul chose to fill it up with combat games. The playing of these video games is masturbatory activity, meaning senseless self-stimulation. If you gamers could use a dictionary you would know that that term is not necessarily a sexual one.

The real tragedy here extends beyond the life and death of this one fellow. There are literally millions of young people and young adults whose despair is deepend by turning to the things of this world and then finding them meaningless.

All of you gamers need to put down the controllers and get a life. The utter inanity of the vast majority of postings here shows how vapid "gaming" really is.

You are one of the cheerleaders for this wasting of time and the wasting of lives. Do you feel any remorse for having contributed to this "culture of death?" Of course not. Hey, let's all play MORE games, and ignore all the really productive things to do with our lives.

Let's pretend to be shocked that a gamer might descend into deeper depression, as his gamer "buds," knowing he was killing himself, couldn't figure out how to call 911 themselves for him. That would have involved leaving their computers I guess.

Sad. Sad for all of you."

One can only hope that this is not really Thompson and that it is just some tasteless joke by a troll. Whomever posted it must have a taste for irony. Suggesting that gamers don't know the definition of a word when the person who posted this obviously doesn't know the definition of what it means to be a good Christian or what it means to be compassionate strikes me as quite ironic.

When it comes to Uwe Boll, you snooze, you loose...

Bloodrayne the movie opened last weekend. I didn't get around to seeing it, but after hearing about the horrible reviews, I was looking forward to seeing the trainwreck this weekend. But I guess I wasn't fast enough. The movie stinks so bad that the theaters in town aren't showing it any more! Bastards!

I could go see Grandma's Boy, but I've already seen it. I wouldn't go see it again. If you haven't seen it yet, it might be worth a matine, but I certainly wouldn't bother paying full price for it.

Busy Busy Busy

Can't blog now... Too busy playing Bio Menace...

I should be writing a paper, not blogging!

So I should totally be writing a paper right now, but I'm taking the night off. I have to write about 20 pages, do some heavy revision on one paper, and probably interview someone for that paper before Monday. So of course, I'm taking the night off. I'm ever so tired!

Writing a paper about legal systems that influence gaming on campus. Hope is that it will be a dissertation chapter.

Also writing a paper about videogame commercials. Back in the Atari games they used to have tons of people in the commercials playing the games. Now, if they are featuring the latest FPS or whatever, they rarely have the players. In the Atari days they didn't show the games very much. Now, the game itself is nearly all they show. Watching some old commercials I notice that in some they even show people actually plugging the console in so that people would know that it took electricity.

Regarding Roger Ebert, it is nice to see that Mia Consalvo has my back. It's glad to know that I'm not the only one who isn't interested in videogames as art! In all these conversations people mention Myst as an art game. Are there really that many hardcore gamers that would rather play Myst again than Doom? Don't get me wrong, I like Myst a lot back in the day. I bought Riven as soon as it came out. However, since they came out, I haven't had the urge to play them again. Not even once!

Last night IU had a preview of Grandma's Boy. It is a film about a 36 year old videogame tester who gets evicted and has to move in with his grandmother and her friends. It's produced by Adam Sandler's production company and so, even though he doesn't appear in it, it could easily be one of his early films. As I said in an email to one of my friends, it was the best movie about a videogame tester I've ever seen. It is also, coincidentally, the only film about a videogame tester I've seen. If it wasn't about videogames, I wouldn't have bothered seeing it. Basically, there's some There's Something About Mary-style humor about bodily fluids, some pot jokes, some intergenerational partying, a couple predictable hook-ups, a bad guy who tries to do something bad to the hero, and a grandma who saves the day. I wrote a haiku about it:

Office Space was good
I also liked Golden Girls
This is both of them.

There are some good jokes. There is also some objectification of women which I found oddly out of place. I give it only 4 thumbs up. (Remember I gave Doom 7 thumbs up. And of course my bastardization of what is surely a registered trademark of a certain movie critic adds to my delight!)

Finally, it looks like I'm going to be heading off to Vancouver again next year. This time for the SCMS conference in early March. I'm convinced that the only reason I got in is that I'm giving a paper with a sexy title of, "Post-Colonialism in Civilization". Then in April it looks like I'm going to the CSA in Washington D.C. I'm convinced that I only got into that one because of the stellar efforts of the other people on the panel we put together. But I'll be talking about professional wrestling, and not videogames, so I won't be talking about that paper here. But you will respect the verbal artistry of professional wrestling or I'll kick your ass! (Which just so happens to be the title of the paper I'll be presenting at the CSA!)

Now it is time for sleep.

I've broken the comments!

I noticed no one had commented for a long time and I found out why. For some reason they are all waiting to be moderated. So, of course, I had over a thousand comments backed up, mostly spam... I plan on upgrading to the latest version of movabletype over the semester break next month, so hopefully that will fix it. Untill then, I'll just have to check once a week or so and delte all the spam by hand. At least the spam isn't appearing on teh site, so I guess that's something to be thankful for! I appologize to those who let a comment and it didn't appear before now!

I'm a Corporate Whore...

So if you look down there on the left on the main page, you should see a link to where you can buy good old Jack Thompon's book from Amazon. So click on it and buy from Amazon so I can get rich off of the affilitate fees!
Actually, I just think it is really funny to have an ad for his book on a gaming site.
Oh, and if I click on my own links then I get the affiliate fee for and basically it is like taking 5% off of whatever ad I put there...
...but it is mostly just for irony... ...mostly...

Bill Gates Doom video found!

Ever since I read Masters of Doom, I've longed to see the video of BIll Gates inside of Doom, dressed in a black trenchcoat and holding a shotgun. The video was made for a special Microsoft event where they were hyping Windows95 games and was yanked by Microsoft as soon as they saw it. Apparently , they hadn't seen it and were so shocked by the video they never let it see the light of day again. ...untill now!

Slashdot has a story, "Bill Gates' Doom Video From 1995," that links to Reel Splatter who has the infamous Bill Gates Doom Video! After all this time, it is kind of tame, but it is still awesome to finally see this.

Fun and games with ads?

After talking about the biased coverage of the Strickland vs. Sony case, and Jack Thompson's role in it, I noticed the ads that Google had put at the top of that post. Oddly enough, they were about class action law suits, and Vioxx lawsuits. This caused me to begin thinking of the ways you could play around with the content of a post to see what type of ads would appear on the page. Would that be a game? Or would it be play?

I know that there are lots of spam blogs out there that are just about getting Google rank and linking to other spam blogs. I also know that there are allegedly some people out there that have started blogs about asbestos and mesothelioma just because the payoff on ads relating to asbestos and mesothelioma are supposed to be incredibly high. So just by mentioning asbestos or mentioning mesothelioma am I trying to force the ads to display things related to that? Is it cheating to just talk about mesothelioma or asbestos just so those terms show up? I know Google probably has some filters to make sure that people don't just "game" the system so that they get ads that pay the best, so is that Google playing the game as well?

What about asking my readers to click on the ads? I've heard of people making lots of money off the ads, but I've had those ads up there for a year and have only made a little over $35. Of course you only get paid when you earn over a hundred dollars. Of course if people were to start clicking on the ads more frequently, if because I were to make a pointless post about asbestos and mesothelioma, would that be cheating?

Of course, it could also be that I'm playing more than one game at a time. One with Google, and one with my readers? They could play their own game back, I suppose...

Very Interesting Jack Thompson Video...

I went to yahoo's video search and did a search for "Jack Thomson" and came across a video of good old Jack talking about Janet Reno. The page with embedded video (which starts as soon as you go there) is called, "Jack Thompson Exposes Reno at [IBT] Indianapolis Baptist Temple." There is another page that just has the links to the videos. It is over an hour long, and I only watched part four, but it is quite and insight into how Jack Thompson thinks. In just that part he calls Janet Reno, Hillary Clinton and Eleanor Roosevelt lesbians, Says that the Clinton administration was a bunch of witches and that if Janet Reno isn't the antichrist, she is close to it. Now, I'm no expert on Janet Reno, and I didn't vote for Clinton (I didn't vote for Bush either, but I did vote!), but those are some extraordinary claims.

The videos are hosted on the American Patriot Friends Network website and while there's no evidence that Thompson endorses or ever had anything to do with that site, it is a very interesting site. If you look around, you can find out the "truth" about the World Trade Center and 9/11, AIDS is a manufactured virus, and that the United States is secretly still a British colony...

Again, I have no evidence that Jack Thompson has anything to do with this website. However, it is interesting to know that Jack's talk about Janet Reno was given at the Indianapolis Baptist Temple. I'd never heard of the place, so I did a search for Indianapolis Baptist Temple and it seems like the temple has a pretty colorful history of its own.

So I wasn't far off on my guess of what Jack Thompson would say to the Florida Bar Association...

Yesterday, I posted that lots of people from Penny Arcade have been complaining to the Florida Bar about Jack Thompson and I jokingly predicted that he would respond to them in the same way he responds to gamers who contact him: with threats. I never imagined that he really would do such a thing. Well, guess what? He did!
In a message posted on gamespot, Jack Thompson addresses the Florida Bar. The message ends:

Now, let me be clear. Any Bar complaint coming from these morons arising out of the above incident is baseless and itself constitutes a violation of a specific federal civil rights statute.
If The Bar proceeds with any of these, it does so at its own peril. The Bar paid me once. I am certainly willing for it to pay me again, along with others.
Regards, Jack Thompson

Now, I'm not a lawyer, but I can only assume that attempting to intimidate the Bar Association can't be a good career move.
The Advanced Media Network has some slightly different quotes, one of which states,

If America's law enforcement officials allow pimple-faced geeks who use death threats to drive people of faith and with values from the public square, this country will not long endure.

I'm not sure why the two sites have slightly different letters from Thompson, unless he sent out two versions. However, it is interesting that he implies that not only are the people who oppose him "pimple-faced geeks" (but if they are pimple-faced, then aren't they teens and therefore not to blame for their actions because of playing so many murder simulators??), but he also implies that they are people without faith or values. Now it goes without saying that Jack Thompson thinks people who play videogames are without values, but now they are without faith? Too bad there isn't some sort of Christian Game Developers Conference, or that Christians can't use Halo to witness to gamers...

It is also worth noting that Jack has updated his website, StopKill.com with lots more of his propaganda. I recommend reading it to see where this guy is coming from and the numerous inaccurate statements he makes.

I can't open my browser without hitting a Jack Thompson story

Man, everyone has jumped on the Jack Thompson bandwagon, haven't they? I wonder if this is the new All Your Base? Of course there's the whole deal with Penny Arcade. While I like Penny Arcade a lot, I read it every day -- yes I know that they only update 3 days a week, but that's how much I like it! ,, however, you don't mess with Penny Arcade! Hell, I've probably just unleashed a hoard of rabid fanboys by just linking to them!

So now, it seems that the people on the Penny Arcade forum have pestered the Florida State Bar Association and now poor old Jack is under investigation...

If he gets a letter of reprimand, his response will be something like this: "dear idiot: you initially contacted me. stop, or else. got it?

Jack Thompson, author

Jack Thompson, noted videogame hating, pithy email writing attorney has a book coming out. The title of the book is Out of Harm's Way. The first chapter is available as a pdf and it seems to be an autobiography. Most of the first chapter is devoted to his conversion to Christianity. The odd part, however, is the the first before you get to that, Thompson has written a page and a half about Howard Stern, once saying that, "His new name should be Coward Stern." Then we get three pages about an early encounter he had with Janet Reno (who Thompson once claimed was a closeted lesbian and would be unfit to be elected because someone might try to blackmail her about her sexuality... Except the fact that we know about this alleged incident seems to imply that it would be hard to blackmail her because Thompson already "outed" her...).

All in all name calling and offering a very unflattering portrayal of someone don't seem very Christian to me...

Regardless, it once again raises an interesting dilemma. I really really want to read this book, but I also really really don't want to give Thompson any of my money. Which will win out, my morbid curiousity or my morality? I guess time will tell once it comes out at the end of the year.

I get sent stuff for free!

Well, all my time spent watching Kathy Griffin beg for free stuff on her reality show is paying off. I got an email the other day from the developer of Professor Fizzwizzle and a link to download the whole game for free. If it wasn't a good game, I would just ignore it and not mention it. However, Professor Fizzwizzle is pretty darn awesome.

It is a pretty straight-forward puzzle game where you control the Prof. who has to push boxes, roll barrels, use magnets, and other devices so that he can get from one teleporter to the other. The settup is that the good Prof made some robots but accidentally turned the switch to evil, so occasionally the evil robots show up to chse around Fizzwizzle while he tries to get through the level.

The game is really well made. I'm currently obsessed with the windows version but there are also versions for mac and linux. The "story" doesn't get in the way and, like many of my favorite games, is really just a pretense for the action. The game starts off easy (incredibly so, actually!) and eventually gets pretty darn hard. However, if you get stumped, there is a neat solution feature which actually plays through the level for you but can be stopped at any time so you can take over if you figure it out once the game starts it for you.

So go buy Professor Fizzwizzle! ...and maybe that way I'll get more free stuff!!!

The Games I Play...

I've been playing Max Payne lately. THe bullet time, while interesting, is kind of pointless. I found it odd and gimmicy. However, it was fun.

Over Labor Day weekend, City of Heroes gave a free weekend of play, so I got absolutely nothing done that weekend.

I've applied to the SCMS's conference in Vancouver. I don't really want to go, but it seems like everyone in my department thinks it is hot shit, so I want to go just to show them that I'm not just sitting on my ass playing games all day! Luckilly it is at the hotel across the street from the DiGRA conference, so I know exactly where it is if I get accepted!.

The main game I'm playing is still Urban Dead. Besides the fact that it is about zombies, they are still adding features to the game, so it is intersting to see a game in progress and how the game changes as new features are added. ...and plus it is about zombies...

First day of class...

Today was the first day of class here at IU. I'm back to teaching the dreadfully dull public speaking, but only for the semester. At the end of the first day of class, I always go around and have the students say what they know more about than anyone else in this room and, of course, I always say, "I'm Bryan-Mitchell Young and I know more about videogames than anyone else in this room." I always get an interesting response, mainly in the form of people asking me what games I play. Today, however, I said that I do ethnography on videogame players and then asked if anyone knew what ethnography was and in both classes at least one person asked if it had anything to do with videogames. Damn kids. Like it's my job to teach them or something... oh, wait!

Since it was the first day of class, it was short and I found myself having more free time on my time than normal. Of course I filled it with playing Urban Dead. Or rather, I spent it checking out if my character was OK. Since you have a limited number of moves a day and build up one move every half hour, I don't want to waste them, but I want to make sure my character hasn't been attacked by any zombies. So we talk about pervasive gamines, but I wonder if this is some sort of pervasive games, but it seems like we the players have made this game pervasive. We check on the safety of our characters, how secure our safehouse it (and no I won't tell you where it is, you damn zombie sympathizer!). Someone set up a wiki where people update intelligence and strategy. We've taken to looking for the websites and messageboards of other players to see their strategy and working with other groups of human survivors.

Then I think about the gamers I wrote a paper about last year that played Counter-Strike and Starcraft. They would email each other about gaming. They would plan ahead on when they could play. Is that any less pervasive? What about the time I spent looking online for Euchre strategies? Or for a good walkthrough for Max Payne?

I understand that pervasive games are typically about fictional web sites and fictional emails, but are those types of games any less pervasive, any less than the way I am playing Urban Dead? I don't think so.

Jack, Jack, Jack....

More missives from Mr. Jack Thompson... I like how he includes the stuff about people threatening him and then proceeds to say that the guy should stop emailing him, "or else. Got it?"

lazy days of summer...

Not much going on. Doing some reading. I finished up First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. The first part is good. There is some good stuff in the ludology and narratology stuff for people that have no info on it. The second half, however, how you say... sucks... Note to authors: Rather than tell me how cool your art project is, why not just show me your cool art project. Talk about dancing about architecture... Don't get me wrong, the art projects all sound cool, but I didn't enjoy reading about them.

On the gaming front, I'm playing Urban Dead. Zombies and gaming? Two great tastes that taste great together!

Running into the limitations of technology...

My main computer is out of action, hopefully temporarily. Of course it was working fine and then I decided I would try to dual boot linux. So I got that done, then screwed up one config in linux and it wouldn't boot, so I eneded up trying to reininstall linux, which screwed up the grub bootloader, when ended up in me trying to reinstall windows except it keeps hanging. So no videogames for me for a while. oh well, that gives me time to catch up on my reading. .. except I can't update my endnote bib because the I've got everything backed up on a second harddrive... inside the computer that won't restart! grrrrrr.....

We Could Be Heroes...

I'm probably only the millionth person to make that pun, but oh well...

I've been playing City of Heroes lately -- I'm a level 11 technology blaster. Thankfully, it is only a 21 day trial because otherwise I would flunk out of school!

I tried Anarchy Online back when they made their basic game free, but I only lasted about an hour before I gave up. I couldn't figure out what to do or where to go -- and since they just made it free, everyone on there was just as clueless as I was! So City of Heroes is my first extended experience with a MMORPG. As a comic book geek, I couldn't resist (check out my eBay auctions! I need rent money!!!), but although I enjoy the game and like the world, there are some interesting aspects.

For those that don't know anything about it, basically, you are a superhero of your own making and you get assigned missions and defend the normal citizens. Some of the missions, most in fact, require you to team up with other heroes to successfully complete the mission. I'm sure most of the other MMORPG's do that too, but, at least in the beginning, you don't know anyone playing the game, so you have to ask strangers to team up with you. When you think of it, for computer nerds and comic book geeks, this is kind of odd. The game is basically forcing you to talk to strangers. I don't like to ask people in a store for help! It creates a very odd situation where you are forced to socialize and work together to survive, but at least in my case there is no bonding at all. I've played 3-4 hours a day for a couple weeks and still don't know anyone. So am I just anti-social, or is this a situation where we are learning to work with anyone without having any personal bonds? I won't even get into all the waiting around that goes on...

Another interesting aspect, which, again, I'm sure is common to many MMORPG's is that around every corner there are bad guys. In City of Heroes, they are mostly gangs and are usually robbing someone. However, sometimes they are just standing around, but you can attack them any way. That is kind of an odd message: "Regardless of what you happen to be doing, if you are a certain type of person, it is not only ok to attack you, but it is GOOD to do so."

Then there are also the citizens. They are totally defenseless. Without you they will be eternal victims. Sure it's a game, but it would be nice if these automatons had some sort of agency. I might be interesting if they combined City of Heroes with the Sims.

OK, well, I have over 2000 points in debt that I need to work off! Spoon!

Now that we've decided that no one knows what cinematic means...

I got a couple interesting comments on my last post about "cinematic" and I've tried read a couple things that might relate, but nothing to change my opinion that cinematic is really a vague and nearly meaningless term. I think that a lot of it has to do with perception. I often read people writing that a game is "just like being in a movie" and I really don't know what that means. I am much more likely to feel like I am actually THERE rather than in a movie. Is that a different way of experiencing the world or is that just a difference of word choice???

Moving on from that issue, I've been thinking about another term that gets thrown around. This time I've been thinking about "medium." I'm not sure that this term actually means anything. Even if it does, is it a useful term? Are videogames a medium??? My thing is that I always like to think of videogames as kinds of games. So are cards a medium? Are board games? I don't think they are. If they aren't, then why are videogames? Is this a useful distinction to make???? Any thoughts? Should we ban "medium" from our thoughts and vocabulary from our hearts and minds????

Leavin' Here!

Well, this time tomorrow I'll be on my way to Vancouver for the DiGRA conference. I'm presenting a paper Friday about our perceptions of our body as we play First-Person Shooters. Unfortunately, not only am I on one of the short paper panels, but I also ended up on a panel with 5 people instead of four. That means that I get a whole 10 minutes to talk -- and I thought cutting my paper down to 3000 words for the proceedings was tough! Oh well, still, it will be great to hobnob with other gaming people and to get to put some faces with names.

I wonder how you say "l33t" in Portuguese???

I just ran across Gamer Br, a Brazillian documentary on videogaming. I haven't had a chance to watch it, yet, but according to the site:

Gamer Br is a Brazilian documentary about the game scene around here. It gives voice to gamers, producers, lanhouse owners, journalists, psychologists, anthropologists, politicians, government representatives and game enthusiasts about questions as professional gaming, market, 'addiction', piracy, policies of incentive, censorship and the so discussed 'violence' in games.

It sounds pretty cool and is available for download either via Archive.org or from LegalTorrents.com. The only thing you have to risk is your bandwith, so you might as well download it! It is 765 MB and, according to Archive.org, "The video is mainly Portuguese-spoken, with the according subtitles in English; when the interviewee speaks English, the subtitles are in Portuguese."

Hopefully, I'll be able to watch it this weekend and give a brief blurb on it soon!

Videogame addiction watch

A couple weeks ago A&E ran an episode of Intervention that had a kid "addicted" to videogames. Now it seems that The Jane Pauley Show, is having their own episode about video game addiction this Thursday the 19th. Check out the description. I'd expect more from a fellow Hoosier!

Mad props to GamePolitics for catching this.

EA tatoos were legit, I guess

Been pretty busy lately. But now that the Spring semester is over, I should be posting more regularly. I'm sure my faithful readers, all ten of you, will be glad to hear that.

Back on the first of April, I wrote about a press release that said that EA was tattooing IU students. At the time I thought it might have been some sort of April Fool's joke since I hadn't heard anything about it. However, it seems like it really happened. Warren Christopher Freiberg wrote a column in the Indiana Daily Student that has the title, Everybody Sells Out Sometimes and he mentions that he was one of the people that got an EA tattoo. The column is about the notion of putting a corporate logo on your body, but it does verify that the tattooing did take place.

I stand corrected.

Just catching up...

It is coming down to the wee days of the semester so I'm pretty busy with coursees and teaching. In fact right now I'm taking a break from grading before I go to a group meeting! On the bright side, I am sitting outside working on my laptop and using the university's wifi, proving that Indiana University is, indeed, the most unwired college campus.

On the gaming studies front, I got my paper, "Gaming Mind, Gaming Body: Mind/Body Split for a New Millenium" into the Digra conference a record day early. Then I noticed that I had somehow been removed from the schedual, so I had a mini-panic attack and emailed people and got put back on. Of course, now I seem to be on a panel with game design people, which is odd, but at least I am on the schedual. Now let's just see if I manage to get into the proceedings book rather than just on the DVD with the rest of the riff-raff!
On a related front, I've been told that my long in press essay in the Doom: First-Person Reader book from the Ludologica series is still in the works. Maybe some day I will get to read my own work in print. Except the book is in Italian... and I don't know Italian... Of course that means that I can still put it on my vita with some confidence that an US jobs I apply for won't be able to see how bad it is!!!

I did manage to find time to finish FarCry. As friends who have played it assured me, it did get better. It is interesting how a game grows on you. There's a paper topic right there! Also it is interesting how a certian small feature can make or break the game. For me, the binoculars that would locate the enemy on the radar and the sniper rifle were essential to my enjoyment of the game. Before I had those, I hated the game. Once I got them, the game became much more fun.

OK, 9 more papers to grade and an hour and a half before my meeting. Think I can get them done before the meeting? Me neither. But I'm giving a test tomorrow, so I should be able to finish it during that.

EA Tattoos IU???

I'm not sure if this is legit or an April Fool's joke since I didn't hear anything about it happening, but Gamespot has an article that claims, "EA tattoos Hoosiers with passion for games." It would be odd if it did turn out to be fake that they picked IU out of a hat. On the other hand it might be more odd if it were true.

Thanks to Konrad Budziszewski for the heads up!

There and back again...

So I made it back from the Popular Culture Association in sunny San Diego. There were 6 videogame panels in two days and although I missed a couple, the 4 I caught were great. If you're looking for a nice conference to go to you could do worse than the PCA.
The flight back was a nightmare, however. I had a flight from San Diego that left at 10pm pacific time back to Indianapolis.. ...via Newark! I had a 3 hour layover in Newark and didn't get back to Indy until 11:30am the next day. A 6ft4 guy in the back of the plane ain't a god time.
While I was waiting in Newark I also had a unique experience. I've got friends from all over the world so I think I've gotten pretty good at understanding non-native speakers of english. The woman working at the airport stumped me though. She had a Mexican accent, which, again, I like to think I can do a pretty good job of understanding. However, on top of that, she had a New Jersey accent! That threw me for a loop.
Waiting for me when I got back home was my newest addiction: DDR! I played it at the Game On exhibit in Chicago and realized that I am horribly out of shape, so now I am on the DDR exercise routine! The fat is just melting away!

g4m3rs 4 gØd part II: l33t 4 teh lØrd

Those with a good memory may remember that back in September I saw a flyer for a Halo party put on by a religious organization. I guess these guys were ahead of the curve. Over at Water Cooler Games, I saw a link to a story about The Saga of the XBox - ''How To Witness Using Halo 2'' that talked about a couple of ministries using Halo 2 as a way of reaching people. The original article, How to Witness Using 'Halo 2' gives more details on it, as well as an interesting interpretation of the Halo story. As someone who once wrote an article comparing Doom to working in a corporation, I can appreciate interesting interpretations.

However, I wonder if they wouldn't be better off using Painkiller which is about fighting demons anyway? Still, it is an interesting phenomenon. I wonder how they feel about the laws attempting to ban the sale of games like Halo 2 to minors?

Jacko continues...

At this point I think I need to just go ahead and make a "Jack Thompson" category to file these posts under...

Joystiq has a story called, "Thompson vs. Gates, Round 1, which posts a fax that was allegedly sent to Bill Gates by Jack Thompson. In the comments are a couple more examples of his elegant writing style. Yep. I'm sure Ed Bradley is real proud of the story he did featuring Thompson.

All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy

Busy busy busy. The only thing I have time for is playing minigames lately. Lots of DopeWars, Risk and Strange Adventures in Infinite Space. There is certainly something to be said for these type of short games.

I'm slowly preparing for a couple conferences, the Popular Culture Association at the end of March and then the DiGRA Conference in Vancouver in June. West coast here I come!

Game Blogs

Just a quick FYI, Game-Blogs seems to be back up. I know there are other blog aggregators out there, but the specificity of Game-Blogs makes it a fav or mine. And of course I also like going there and seeing how many people have clicked on one of my posts over there!

Super Bowl Sunday!

While I don't really care about the Super Bowl, with the news that EA has exclusive rights to make NFL games, it will be kind of sad that the sports shows will only be able to have Madden as the computer game to predict the winner instead of running all the football games.

I'm in the midst of taking classes and don't have much time for gaming myself, but am managing to find some time to play Dope Wars and was thinking about the differences between these little "time waster" games and the longer games that can take days to play. I don't think that there has been much investigation between the different geneologies and purposes that they games have. Why don't you go work on that and get back to me, ok?

The end of IU's EA University???

With EA buying out everything, I was interested to see some local news about EA. I've previously discussed EA's viral marketing and attempt to turn my school into EA University, well it seems that this is in danger of coming to an end! According to the Indiana Daily Student, the guy who puts up all those stickers (and there are new ones up, but my camera is in the shop so I can't take pictures of them) is going "to leave void in campus program."

While there is no doubt the guy does a great job and deserves every penny he gets paid, it seems odd that the article doesn't seem to question the mixing of academics and consumerism. You would at least think it would mention all the damn stickers!

Whoever fills the "void" on campus, it will be very interesting to follow the how gaming companies continue to spend money on advertising on college campuses.

Last Post of the Year!!!

Winding down from the end of the semester rush, and getting reaquainted with my tv and computer.

Not specifically related to videogames, I found a few new tools invaluable for modern researchers.

The first, and everyone is talking about it, is Google Scholar. Sure, there are limitations to it, as some have noted, but when you are doing research on a topic like videogames but don't care about violence, google's quality sure cuts down the amount of time it takes to find stuff. And that, for me, is what I've been waiting for, is better quality in academic search, not quantity. Ebsco and jstor are cool and all, but sometimes they can be impossible to use effectively. Best of all, there is a search plugin for Firefox that lets you search just google scholar rather than have to go to the url to search it. I've found several articles that were in the traditional academic databases but didn't turn up untill I used google scholar.

Another great tool for academic life is Abbyy's PDF Transformer, which as one might imaging, turns PDF's into text. There's nothing that frustrates me more about writing papers than having to retype block quotes. With this, you just convert it to a .rtf file and cut and paste quotes to your heart's content. Most classes use e-reserves now, which are just articles scanned into pdf files, and the converter makes it a lot easier. (most OCR software will do this as well, but the PDF Transformer is cheaper).

Amazon.com's Look Inside the Book and Search Inside the Book feature which is great if you can't remember where inside a book a certain quote was. If you are looking for a good quote, or a source for it, A9 is pretty good because is uses google's database and also lets you use the "search inside the book" feature at the same time. There is also a Firefox search plugin for A9 too.

This next is kind of a dark tip, but related to PDF Transformer, at least in the way in which I use it is, because if you work at it a little, you can get access to page Amazon shows you (that file is on your computer somewhere if you look for it!) and using pdf transformer turn it into text. You can also look at more than just the 3 pages in a row that Amazon lets you by just "searching inside the book" for the page number. There is a limit to the total number of pages Amazon will let you see per day, however, as I found out when I tried to get a whole article from a book that way once...

LIke I said, none of those have much to do with videogames, but they certainly made my life easier and saved me a few trips to the library when I was writing about videogames

books? they still make those?

I was flipping through my copy of Electronic Gaming Monthly and saw an ad for something I don't remember ever seeing an ad for in a gaming magazine before: a book! Of course it was for a novelization of Splinter Cell, but still, it was interesting to see in a gaming mag. Also of note was although it uses the logo for Splinter Cell, it doesn't have a picture from the game on it, but rather a fairly generic picture.

On another note entirely, count me as a big supporter of Valve's Steam. I've never had any problems with it that I know many have had, but the number one reason I am for it, is no more damn cd checks. Having built a new system and only gotten around to putting one cd drive in it, I have to say that cd switching sucks ass. The issue of switching cds was so irritating that I attempted to delve into the world of no-cd hacks, to no success.

One thing that I was originally in favor of regarding Steam was that on the older games like Counter-Strike in its various versions, Source and Condition Zero, didn't have one of those stupid splash screens that tells you who made the game. So imagine my anger when HL2 had their stupid Valve screen. We know who made the game! Why do you need to remind us every single time we start the games? At least there is only one, I'm playing Deus Ex 2 and it has at least 3. Note to game developers: stop pissing off your customers! Seriously, does that stupid splash screen really help? Does anyone really think of Neversoft when they think of Tony Hawk???

gaming gaming gaming

I just submitted my final grades to the university, so my semester is officially over! Of course to celebrate, I have been playing lots of games. I still haven't noticed any real trash talking on Counter-Strike:Source, so maybe trashtalkers really ARE 13 year old kids? It will be itneresting to see if lots of kids get Halk-Life 2 for Christmas and the ammount of crap in CS:S goes up noticably.
I've been trying to get into Deus Ex 2, but I just can't seem to do it. Too much takling and the gun feels too wimpy. Continuing my long running hatred of the Unreal engine, Deus Ex 2 has already crashed once on me and this new computer never crashed on Doom 3 or Half-Life 2,,,
I've also been playing a lot of Civ3. It was all research, I swear! I got an A on the paper, so I guess I might try to publish it at some point. Below is a portion of the first page. Anyone interestested in the rest can drop me an email.

The Civilization games have been lauded as "The Best Game of All Time" by Computer Gaming World magazine and the "Greatest Computer Strategy Game of All-Time" by Time magazine, won countless other awards and is responsible for a slew of both spin-offs as well as knock-offs (Friedman, Civ3.com). It has even been the subject of numerous studies into the educational potential of videogames having been declared by one scholar as, "a particularly intriguing tool for studying world history in that it allows students to examine relationships among geography, politics, economics, and history over thousands of years and from multiple perspectives" (Squire 9). Despite these accolades, the Civ games have not gone uncritiqued by scholars who have noted some of the Imperialist choices that have influenced the game designs.
While many traditional forms of explicit colonialism have fallen to the wayside, and historians have reexamined the way in which histories of colonization is presented, to a large extent, historically-inspired popular entertainments have failed to rethink the history which they purport to present. In wargaming and in historical simulations, issues are presented in a simplistic good vs. bad format which almost always either depicts the European as good while those whose lands were colonized as bad or they are depicted in such a manner that all civilizations have the same goals and structure. In this paper the ways in which Sid Meier's Civilization videogames present a highly simplistic notion of colonization, imperialism and empire will be discovered. Also explored will be the ways in which the game reinforces traditional notions of good civilizations vs. bad (or barbaric) civilizations, what it means to be civilized, as well as the ways in which the game makes other civilizations appear either completely western or so inscrutably Other that the only way to deal with them is through eradication. The purpose of this is not to condemn the Civilization series, its creator, or players as "bad" but, rather, to demonstrate the ways in which the legacies of colonialism and classical liberalism continue to play themselves out in places as seemingly benign as our entertainments and how our current culture remains a Civilization of Colonialism.

Too Busy to Play Games????

Apparently not, even though I've got 3 papers due in two weeks and 20+ papers to grade by tomorrow (what do my students think? It's my job to teach them or something? Kids these days!) I've managed to finish Half-Life 2 in less than a week and put in some record length sessions with Civilization 3.
At least the last one is for a paper. I writing about depictions of Imerialism and colonialism in videogames for a class on Empire and colonialism. Funny how you can shove videogames into any class.
My post about videogame girls continues to get comments. It is interesting to see the reaction to it. I got over 1000 hits one day with people reading it. I also got linked to by some porn blog, which caused some interesting reactions from people who came here from that site I would guess.
OK, time to grade. Weeee!!! A grad student's work is never done...

Playing to wait and Waiting to play

In anticipation of the release of the big games, Halo 2 and Half-Life 2, I'm going away from the FPS games. I'm preparing to write a paper about depictions of colonialism and empire in gaming and so I am starting to head towards wargaming for the first time. On the way there, I found a cheap copy of Civ3 and I've became 100% addicted to it in just the same way I was addicted to Civ2. Not really related to colonialism, but it will do until the "H" games come out.

Of course, if anyone knows of any games that deal with colonialism (apart from the Civ spinoff Colonization, that is), drop off a comment. There is always a lot of talk about "Why can't games be about broader topics" and yet here we have some games that are about something as complex as colonialism and yet tends to treat the topic in rather black and white terms (with all the racial coding implicit in that statement).

But the Digra proposal deadline is just a couple weeks ago, so I need to get that taken care of first!

so much to do and so little time...

As we get to the middle of the school semester, the stresses of life as a graduate student are piling up. Students are giving me assignments, like it's my JOB to teach them or something! And I have my own assignments due. I'm only writing one paper about videogames this semester, but that doesn't mean that I'm not submitting to conferences. The PCA deadline is November 1st and the DiGRA is soon after, so if you want to submit to either, you better get a move on. Oh, and write me a proposal too while you are at it!

Since I do have my new computer, I am making time to continue to play videogames. Painkiller is taking up most of my time, but I'm also still getting killed by people online in CounterStrike. It is interesting how I manage to make time to play games, but not going to the recycling center... I guess I have my priorities in order! The big news is of course the new GTA game coming out soon. Just wait until our good friend Jack Thompson rears up his head to condemn it. I know he is busy suing people in England, but I'm sure he'll find time to talk to some lazy journalist who doesn't know anything about his credibility (or lack thereof in my eyes...)

Oh well, time to go grade some more student papers...

online gaming without nubes? Is it possible???

I broke down and did the old Steam pre-order of Half-Life 2. I know I'm such a sucker.
So even though I'm hip deep in Painkiller (I hate that swamp monster so much!!!) I couldn't resist trying out the Source Engine version of Counter-Strike.

Guess what? I've put in 2-3 hours and haven't seen any trash talking or people just acting like asses yet. Wow! Now I'm sure they are out there, but it is certainly refreshing to be alb e to play CS without jerks.

That most jerks don't seem to be on the new version yet is an interesting phenomenon. Basically, the group of people playing CS:S right now are the hardest of the hard core and who have the money to spend to buy the pre-order. Which raises the question of who lamers really are. Are they really 13 year olds? Are they people who don't have the computer to run the new version? Are they casual gamers? It will be interesting to see how the new CS community develops and what will happen when Half-Life 2 finally hits the shelves.

On a related note, CS:Condition Zero came with the Steam package I bought and while I was waiting for the Source version to download, I started playing it. It is fun to play with the bots, but boring as heck when you die. What I found interesting though was the fact that CS has one version of the maps, CS:CZ has another version and CS:S has a third. So we have a constant process of remaking the same maps (not to mention the older versions of some maps that have evolved through the betas of CS). It is an interesting process which has some similarities to Lucas' constant tweaking of Star Wars. What is interesting, however, is that I haven't found anyone lamenting about how the old versions of the maps are better, unlike the constant lamenting of the original versions of Star Wars.

Whether this is, again, a case of only the hardest of the hardcore playing the game at the moment, with criticisms yet to come, or somehow revisions of levels seem to function in a different way for players than revisions of films do for watchers is yet to be seen.

Despite the fact that CS:CZ comes with "Deleted Scenes" I wonder if some day there will be a "Special Edition" of Counter-Strike that features tons of various versions of the Dust and Office. If they reinstate the jailbreak and VIP modes and include Jeepathon2k you can count me in!

g4m3rs 4 gØd???

I was going to go teach Monday and I saw something interesting on a bulletin board. There was a flyer for a Halo tournament. That is far from unusual, but was unusual was that it was hosted by the campus Christian Student Fellowship house. I guess they are trying to use videogames to convert people?

Of course to show how much gaming is naturalized in my mind, the fact that Halo was chosen by a group of Christians was probably not accidental did not even occur to me until a friend pointed it out to me!

Digra call for papers out

As the title says, the DiGRA 2005 Call For Papers is out. Deadline is in November. June can't come soon enough!

I guess this means I need to finally finish up this damn incomplete so I can try to present it at the conference!

Something I saw somewhere else...

Well, I'm trying to ease off of the instant buyer's remorse of buying a new computer. I just put my orders in for the parts and although my current desktop is old (Athlon 1900+) the thought of spending the money shocks me. Oh well, I ordered some l33t components. Athlon 3500+ (with the fancy new socket) Radeon x800, gig of ram. Watch out all you lamers, i'm coming after you!

But I was surfing around over at water cooler games and saw the link to the interesting Gamespot article, Redefining Games: How Academia is Reshaping Games of the Future, which is the longest article I can remember ever seeing on Gamespot. Despite not having a printer friendly link that I can see, author Lauren Gonzalez does a good job of covering the bases. It links to several game blogs, but of course not mine! (But then again there are tons of gaming blogs that don't link to me even though they link to any other fly by night blogs... but I'm not bitter or anything...;-)

The article ends on the interesting note of asking people what person unrelated to the field of games--famous or not, dead or alive--they would chose to be a game developer. The answers are pretty interesting and revealing of a persons theoretical standing. Of course, that begs the question of who I would choose. Honestly, I don't have a solid answer to such a question because I spend so little time theorizing games (and most of my time theorizing players and the appeals of playing, which is of course related, but as my high school principal once said, "It's the same, but different."). Musically, I think I might pick Led Zeppelin from the height of their careers, or the Flaming Lips. I think it might be interesting to have the guy who makes up the New York Times Crossword puzzle make a game. If I were cruel, I would suggest that it would be great if the makers of Final Fantasy made a game, but I'm not cruel enough to say that... ;) From art, I would second Salvador Dali or Escher. But it would also be a very tranquil experience to have Bob Ross rise from the grave and design a game. From the realm of literature? I seem to be drawing a blank on that one... Man, I am just grumpy today.

On that note, I will wrap this up. In the past couple days I've ran into a couple of people that say they read my blog. I just want to give a shout out to my peeps. Thanks for reading!

Crystal Waters can relate

No posting latly since my lease on my old apartment ran out last Friday and my new apartment isn't available untill noon this Friday. So I'm homeless, I'm homeless.

However, just a quick tip. I don't know if I'm just dence, or what, but I've been going to Shacknews pretty frequently for a while now. However, it is only recently that I've started taking notice of their "Latest Interesting Comments" feature at teh top of the main page. It turns out that is where the REAL late breaking news often occurs. People will find out about it, post a message and often it will be news that won't show up untill the next day, or it will be a link to some interesting pic or freeware.

While not entirely game related, it is a good way to keep track of the pulse of the gaming world. Also a study of it would be facinating in that it would show the spread of news and information that the internet allows.

Followup on German sources

A little while back I asked for some German-language references for a paper I have to write for my German class. Thanks to some helpfull posters as well as the kind people on the DIGRA mainling list, combined with my own research skills, I was able to find some articles that seem fairly interesting. I thought I would share them if any readers of German are curious:

Bruns, Karin. “Game Over? Narration und Spannung im Computerspiel.” Kulturrevolution. 45-46 (2003): 85-89.

Fritz, Juergen. “Action, Lebenswelten und Transfer.” medien+erziehung (merz), 47:1 (2003): 7-21.

Fritz, Jürgen and Wolfgang Fehr. “Identität durch Spiel: Computerspiele als Lernanreize für die Persönlichkeitsentwicklung.” Medien Praktisch. 4 (1999):30-32.

Gunzenhäuser, Randi. “Darf ich mitspielen? Literaturwissenschaften und Computerspiele.” September 22, 2003. July 20, 2004 .

-- “Raum, Zeit und Körper in Actionspielen Max Payne.” dichtung-digital. March 31, 2002. July 20, 2004 .

Mathez, Judith. “Von Mensch zu Mensch. Ein Essay über virtuelle Körper realer Personen im Netz.” dichtung-digital. November 7, 2002. July 20 2004 < http://www.dichtung-digital.org/2002/11/10-Mathez/index.htm>.

Müller, Jörg. “Virtuelle Körper. Aspekte sozialer Körperlichkeit im Cyberspace.” 1996. July 20, 2004 .

Schindler, Friedemann. “Von Super Mario und Super Marion.” January 29, 1999. July 20, 2004 .

Suter, Beat. “Computerspiel und Narration.” netzliteratur.net. April, 10 2003. July 20, 2004 .

Wenz, Karin. “Computerspiele: Hybride Formen zwischen Spiel und Erzählung.” netzliteratur.net. March 5, 2003. July 20, 2004 < www.netzliteratur.net/wenz/wenz_computerspiele.htm>.

-- “Computerspiele und Kulturwissenschaften.” netzliteratur.net. April 3, 2003. July 20, 2004 < http://www.netzliteratur.net/wenz/comp_kult.htm>.

I guess this means I have to work on translating them now...!

Long time no see

It has been a bit longer between updates than typical, but I've been busy. TV won't watch itself!

And there is some interesting stuff on TV occasionally. On the otherwise dreadful G4TechTV one generally great and always interesting show is Icons, which features short half hour documentaries about videogame related topics. Friday they had a pretty good show on about DooM. Like all things on cable it will be on again soon. Bluesnews posted links to various videos of the episode.

One thing that I gathered from the episode was that Steven Kent, author of The Ultimate History of Video Games, among other things, is writing The Making of Doom III, which should be an interesting companion to David Kushner's Masters of Doom.

OK, time to watch some more TV. I think this might be the one where Gilligan messes up their chance to get off the island!

Am I supposed to call it 3.0?

Here it is! I hope everyone likes it. Below is lots of non-game related web design lamenting, so if you aren't into that, the game content will return in the next post (unless I've broken things so much I have to apologize!)

Well, after a month or so trying to figure out CSS, I think I got enough of it under control so that I have something I am happy with. I hope everyone enjoys the new site. For those LONG time readers, you may remember that when I first started a blog, it was a 3 column layout, and now it is again. The more things change the more they stay the same.
The layout started out as a template I got from Firdamatic but it was fixed width and I wanted a liquid layout. That broken layout can be seen here. I eventually found A List Apart which had a great article about "Creating Liquid Layouts with Negative Margins." Now I have to admit, I still don't entirely understand why the margin has to be negative, but it works. Of course it didn't work right away, because these things never does. I had to just basically cut and paste the article's CSS the results of which can be seen here. I discovered an invaluable took for people messing around with web design, editcss, an extension for Firefox which places an item in the right click context menu that pops up the css of any site and allows you to edit it on the fly. With the help of that I was able to get things looking the way I wanted them. But of course, that was only when I was looking at it in Firefox and Mozilla. The calendar was all screwed up in IE and Opera. Now not being a web design wizard, I did what anyone would do, I turned to Google. Eventually I found someone that had encountered the same problem and was able to fix it. So with the help of editcss, I was able to figure out what Palestars did to fix it. Finally came the little fiddling with the borders and the colors. The banner picture is a picture I took here on IU's campus. I originally was going to have more pictures of places in town where I have seen videogame related things in public, but decided it would be too busy. I made the title with the font silkscreen which I first ran into on the web comic Diesel Sweeties and I tried to keep the actual title fairly small so that it shows up in a wide variety of screen resolutions.

So that is it. I haven't changed the archive templates (and I should mention that I figured out how to display category archives from Learning Movable Type) and I'm not sure if I will. I've tried out the site on Mozilla, Firefox, Opera, IE6 on Windows and Safari, Mozilla, and IE on the mac (it looks a little odd on IE for the mac, but I have no idea how to fix it and according to the server logs it doesn't look like very many people are using it) but if someone finds something looking weird, let me know. I probably won't know how to fix it, but I've gotten really good at cut and paste!

change is in the air..

Four short posts about change:

So, not to like get anyone's hopes up, but I think I'm just about done messing about with the css for the new layout. Look for a new improved design early next week!

On game related news, it seems that Doom 3 is going to come out fairly soon. I guess that is even more motivation to buy a new computer.
However, I have to say that if it is like the preview that they showed at E3 a couple years ago that had the constant mini-cutscenes, I will be very dissapointed. All I ask is no cutscenes! Don't show me doing something, let me do it!

Speaking of E3, from the debut of the PSP and the Nintendo DS at the last E3, it looks like the landscape of gaming could be changing with the good old gameboy having some serious competition. I've never been much of a mobile gamer, I've never owned a gameboy -- although I did have a handheld Space Invaders game back in the day. I turned over the score counter on it. See mom and dad, I wasn't wasting my time, I was doing research for my future career! You got to have that cultural capital man!

But nexy year's E3 seems to be the one where everyone will be showing off their new consoles. I don't know. I feel like it is time to replace the PS2. Some may disagree, but I think it's limitations are holding back some cross platform games. But I don't really feel like my x-box has reached the end of its life yet. I think it has a couple more years left in it. And of course with Microsoft radically changing the architecture of the NeXtbox (whatever it ends up being called) there won't be any backwards compatability. However, I think the idea of modding one of the current boxes and archiving a bunch of games on it does look compelling.

Well, wasn't that just disjointed and rambling?

Lazy days of summer...

It is indeed the lazy days of summer. I just want to lay in bed all day. But my adoring crowd of fives of fives of dedicated readers insist that I update my blog. Oh the responsibility of blogging!

Random game related things:

I'm playing through Half-Life again. I know that it has been talked about to death by many people, including myself, but it still has something going for it. Lots of people mention the great story, but even having played through the game more than once, I really don't see where this plot is. Sure, there is a storyline, but I don't really care about it at all. What makes it so interesting for me is just that it is put together oh well. Never are there places where you have to really guess what you are supposed to do which makes playing it such an intuitive experiences.

However, it is not all wine and roses. For a games that is this old, and is still being patched from time to time, I'm surprised that it has as many bugs as it does. Every time I ride an elevator, I have to jump at the end of the ride or else I get stuck and can't move. It is incredibly irritating and serves to remind me of how fragile the reality of a game is.

On another topic, I don't think I ever mentioned it but Dungeons and Dreamers is a facinating read. It is strongest when it concentrates on Richard Garriot of Ultima fame and somewhat weaker when it strays to other subjects such as the id people (which is probably weakened all the more by coming out after Masters of Doom). *Irony Alert* I think that by focusing so much on people, however, the book actually missed out on addressing a much more interesting phenomenon. I know, I know, I'm the guy who is always saying, "Videogames are about people!" and"Ethnography is da bomb!" but while the story of how Richard Garriot amassed a fortune, and helped to create an industry and then got forced out from the company he founded in his parent's house is facinating, I think that it really serves as an illustration of a larger phenomenon of the corporatization of the gaming industry. Garriot's story nicely illustrates how the computer software industry moved from something that people literally did in their garages, bedrooms and attics by themselves and hiring friends and family and marketing games themselves to a multibillion dollar industry which is driven by profit rather than artistic vision and now takes years and large groups of people to complete. It also signals the death of the autuer, which is in and of itself an interesting phenomenon in that to the vast majority of people who buy games they are an authorless medium. Had Dungeons and Dreams explored this aspect with a little more detail, it would have made for an incredibly facinating analysis. Oh well, I guess that's my job!

Cheap Bastard

I'm a cheap bastard. I hardly ever buy games full price. Well, I went to the evil that is Wal-Mart today and wow, they have lots of good games for $9.98! I finally picked up Max Payne (as well as Red Faction 2). Which points out the fact that, you know, I bought Red Faction 2, which is something I probably wouldn't have done if they were full price. So of course, I just can't wait untill ESPN NFL 2K5 comes out!
But anyway, to give you folks a heads up, there are some good deals lurking at you local Wal-Mart if you go past the boxes and look at the games in jewel cases.

EDIT: I'm refering to PC games. I don't see consol games drop much below 19.95.

Lesen Sie Deutschen?

In order to get my language requirement out of the way for my phd I'm taking German this summer. The second summer session just started Friday (the day after the first session ended!) and we have to write a paper (in English!) using sources written in German. So what are some good internet available videogame essays written in German? I've run across a couple, but can always use some more.

See, I'm not the only one that thinks Geertz rocks!

I was doing a search for a Goffman reference that Geertz uses in Deep Play and I found a pretty cool posting called "Closely Reading DAoC" that makes some interesting insights into how Geertz is applicable to MMORPG's. Go check it out.

Accuracy in reporting???

As most readers know they caught the people who stole the Half-Life 2 source code. However, in doing my usual Google news search for videogame, I ran across an interesting article about the source code theft. According to the Modesto Bee, " Arrests were made in the theft of video game blueprints. From the article:

SEATTLE (AP) - Authorities have arrested suspects in a case involving the theft of software blueprints for the hotly awaited action computer game "Half-Life 2," the FBI said Friday.

Who knew that software had blueprints? At least that explains why Half-Life 2 has been delayed for going on a year now. I'm no game designer, but I think you actually have to type all the code into the computer rather than write on that blue paper with white pencils.

I like to shoot people!

I was out playing Counter-Strike with some guys in the computer lab earlier, and while I know I am certainly not the first to say so, videogame scholars really need to read Clifford Geertz's Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight. (Note that this is an condensed version. Go find The Interpretation of Cultures or another book it appears in for the full version). Not only is Geertz an entertaining writer (something that is all too often lacking in academia, but he makes some interesting observations on what makes play and games exciting and involving.

E3 still offers intersting observations...

Robin Hunicke has some really great commentary on E3 over at her blog. Even though I've never been to E3, her thoughts pretty well match my own observations of it, especially in light of Tore Vesterby's blog post that mentions that :

Gamespy is offering an official DVD of E³ coverage. I guess the booth babes are as important - if not more important - than the games when looking at their pre-order site and their promo text:

You'll get 4 DVDs packed with over 200 game
previews, press conference coverage, looks behind-the-scenes, editor
cameos, even a booth babe featurette -- over 11 hours of video, total!

Here's my note to the industry: Yes, heterosexual men find women attractive. However, there are lots of other people in the world besides heterosexual men. Sure sex sells, but I tell you what, even I, as one of those who is in the target demographic, am getting tired of T&A. If we want T&A there are other places to get that. I get a dozen emails a day telling me where I can get that in fact. Everything has its place, and there is room for a lot more variety than the industry is giving us.

A little something I rescued from the recycle bin...

I"m editing an article for publication and as always happens in situations like that there are always little bits that have to be cut out. Cutting the out is always painfull and so rather than just deleting the paragraph I thought I would post it here. So here is something for people to mull over:

In the often cited "Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema," Laura Mulvey writes that one of the pleasures of film is scopophilic, or based on looking (324). "[The] brilliance of the shifting patterns of light and shade on the screen helps to promote the illusion of voyeuristic separation" (Mulvey 324). However, in a FPS, the player is voyeristically looking at the main character because the player is the main character which means there can be no voyeuristic pleasure in playing a FPS because there is no one to watch. Indeed, even if one were to attempt to stop playing the game in order to look at one of the other characters and subject the character to a objectifying male gaze, the character would in all likelyhood shoot the player in a direct rejection of the voyeristic gaze. Additionally, what occurs while playing a Shooter is not a separation, but an immersion in that by using the first-person perspective, the player is encouraged to forget that they are playing a character and to feel as if they themselves are in the game. The pleasure in playing a First-Person Shooter is not in looking but in doing.

links...

So I finally got around to adding some links to other game blogs. If there are any that I missed, leave a comment.

They know I know!

I was just looking at my web site visitor log and look who's been visiting:
Referrer URLs
www.worldwide.ea.com/industry/view.aspx
www.eac.ea.com/QA/news.asp
knowledge.ea.com/industry/view.aspx
passport.worldwide.ea.com/
www.worldwide.ea.com/
www.worldwide.ea.com/industry/

Hmmmm... It looks like someone at EA has found my blog. I tried some of the links, but I couldn't get any of them to work. I'm assuming that perhaps they are some sort of internal company links or something. I wonder in what context my site is being linked to. It seems that nothing escapes their attention for long.

I, for one, welcome our new EA overlords...

Seriously, I have nothing against EA, I'm just interested in what is going on here. So, hello EA! Leave a comment or two!

What I'm up to

The PCA was a good time. I felt that all the videogame panels were top notch. I suggest heading over to the PCA web site and doing ctrl+f search for game and see the titles of some of the papers that were presented.
In my mind there is still a need for more videogame only conferences, but that is just me.

Currently, I'm writing a paper about masculinity, whiteness, and nationhood in vidoegames. Of course with a topic like that, it is enormous. I am going to have to cut something out.

There is still a big hole in videogame studies where race fits in, so I if anyone knows of anything dealing with the race of videogames and specifically videogame players, drop me a line in the comments.

Not sure if this counts as a game or not...

Recently, a friend directed me to subservientchicken.com. It is a guy in a chicken suit standing in front of a web cam. You type a command into a text box and the guy does what you type. Apparently, it is some sort of weird viral marketing for Burger King.
It is pretty entertaining. It appears to be several pre-recorded segments, but it is interesting to see how many differnt clips they had to film.
Mmmmm chickennnnnnn....

It may not be the GDC, but...

I hop on a plane Tuesday to head down to San Antonio for the Popular Culture Association national conference. The PCA is not the most prestigious conference, but it is turning out to have quite a few videogame panels. When I went to the PCA two years ago in Toronto, I was on the only videogame panel, now there are five. So while none of the big names will be there (besides myself of course!) hopefully it will turn out to be a good time.
So look forward to some pictures from the PCA!

America's Army

If you are some sort of pack rat like me and have an unbearable compulsion to save anything videogame related, or if you are just interested in America's Army, then you might want to check out the pdf about it. I haven't read it yet, and honestly, I haven't spent as much time with America's Army as I should, but it looks interesting. And, again, I have a compulsion to download anything I see that might possibly potentially be useful in research at some undefined point at the future. Luckily, bits and bytes don't take up much space...
I found it via a comment left over at Grand Text Auto.

Just a reminder...

I haven't seen this or anything, but as a reminder, GSN, the channel formerly known as the Game Show Network, is going to be showing a documentary Sunday night. It will probably be horrible and nothing that anyone didn't already know, but in my mind, even horrible things about videogames are interesting, simply because they are on the air and are being seen by lots of people who probably spend less time thinking about videogames than us academic folks and as such even horrible representations of videogames are for many the only representations that they may see.

So be sure to tune in tomorrow night! Its got Tony Hawk! It must be kewl!

Research

Anyone out there doing some research on videogame players as a sub-culture? Using a little Dick Hebdige or Sarah Thornton? I'm getting set to do some work on that and it would be nice to see what someone else has done on it.

I'm too busy doing original research to play some silly game!

It looks like for the foreseeable future my Friday nights will be spent playing Counter-Strike. All in all, there are worse things I could be doing. I like CS a lot. What I'm going is some ethnography on a group of guys (and they are guys) who play CS in a lab on campus on a regular basis.

Of course, I'm not just playing, but observing, and interviewing people. That is where it gets interesting. I've turned my hobby into a job. I know that I'm not the first to observe this, but interesting things happen when you turn your hobby into a job. As I said, I like Counter-Strike. And it is fun to play with other people face to face. I'm new to this university, so it is nice to meet some folks outside my department as well. However, because I'm studying these people (and myself just as much) it isn't just fun and games, but it is work. Playing Counter-Strike on Friday nights is a job.

Certainly, I haven't got a lot to complain about. As a graduate student, I am getting paid to play videogames and hang out with people. However, the dynamic is different now that this is for an external purpose -- that is my dissertation and the ethnography class I am currently taking. A group of my friends were getting together to play some cards that same night and I couldn't because I had to go observe people. So of course when I did stop by the card game around midnight (I know, I left the gaming early!) the first thing I told them was that I would have been there earlier, but I was out doing original research and I didn't have time to sit around all night and play silly games.

Well, I thought it was funny. But it points out that taking on this project means that I have to make some (however small) sacrifices.

My point in this is not to complain. I know I'm pretty lucky. It is as a warning. Think about it before you turn your hobby into a job because when you do, it changes things. in four years (hopefully!) when I finish this dissertation, I certainly hope that I won't be burned out on playing videogames. Of course if I am, that will just be another chapter for the dissertation, "How Studying Videogame Players Made Me Burn Out and Never Want to Play another Videogame Ever Again."

90% of everything

I've had some free moments in the past couple days so i've started reading some videogame studies articles I've been meaning to get around to. Some of them are pretty good. But lots of them are not. To be nice. I know it isn't a new observation, but 90% of everything is crap. Now that videogame studies seems to be the hip new thing (I was here first posers! ;-) ) there is more and more to read and more and more of it seems less than earth shattering. Of course many may say that of my work, but I'm not naming any names here so be kind! It is kind of sad though to see the field filling with mediocrity.
Of course I was pleasently surprized when the Popular Culture Association program was put online. There are several videogame panels. Quite a big difference from two years ago in Toronto when there were three of us videogame people on one panel. Of course, there is that 90% of everything is crap and the PCA has certainly adhered to that rule the two times I've gone in the past. Oh well, I can be that ass in the audience who askes rude obnoxious questions.

work is so hard!

I've started doing my ethnographic work here. I spent the evening playing Counter-Strike with a handful of gamers. It was interesting to get to play against experienced players again (I was the worst one there) as well as to put on my ethnographer hat and study them. My little research subjects.
I spent three hours playing. So what was the first thing I did when I got home? Started playing Grand Theft Auto. Maybe there is something to this videogame addiction thing.

insert witty comment here

I read Sarah Thornton's Club Cultures again the other day. I read it first three years ago before I decided to turn my interest in videogames into my vocation. It and Dick Hebdidge's Subculture make interesting reading. While reading them I couldn't help but think about videogame players. Are videogame players a subculture? WHat consists of subcultural capital for a gamer?

I think that obviously he who has the best computer has a certain amount of capital. Also, there is a certain amount of bragging rights to being able to say that you played Counter-Strike earlier than the other guys (beta 3 baby!). But is that enough to make a subculture? I don't know. I am not sure what calling gamers a subculture gets me and my research. If gamers are a subculture, then so what? Is this a question worth pursuing? Is a label meaningful? Is it useful? I'm not sure. Something to think about.

wonky is a word. really

The site seems to be acting wonky. It works if you go to popularculturegaming.com but not www.popularculturegaming.com. That worked up untill the other day. I didn't mess with anything. I'm not sure if dot.tk is screwed up or my host is screwed up or if I broke something. But I didn't touch it, I swear!

A Request

What would be really nice would be a web site that reviews videogames and tells me which platform is the best for a specific game. I've got a PC and I've got an X-Box. So when a game is available for both of them it often becomes difficult to decide which to buy. Sure a game like Tony Hawk will almost certainly be better on X-Box because of the controller. However, what about a game like Deus Ex 2 or Prince of Persia? or Knights of the Old Republic? Someone make up my mind for me!!!

American Mcgee's Cut Scene

I started playing today. Them kids sure love cut scenes don't they? Well, I hate them. I would like to be able to play more than two minutes at a time without watching some stupid movie. I know, I know, I sound like a broken record. I just can't get over how frustrating I find them.

The game thus far is rather unremarkable. I am not real confortable at how the game has sexualized a little girl. Alice is all gothy and has this seductive voice. ...and she's what? 12? Nice.