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