Tag: video games

The hypocrisy of anti-video gaming laws

Arnold Schwarznegger signed a law banning selling violent video games to minors or face a $1,000 fine.

Funny how this man, who made his millions from extremely violent movies affording him his successful bid for Governor of California, is now the champion of anti-media-violence.

The Wired article sums up the hypocrisy pretty well with their last sentence: “Consider that your final irony: Politicians work hard to ban virtual torture — while working just as hard to allow it in real life.”

-TPP – Save the Children!

Hot Coffee here, Hot Coffee everywhere

The controversy over animated, literally, sex scenes found in the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas reached the US Capitol earlier this week. Bunch of politicians figured a game that features prostitution, graphic violence, car jackings and other violent crime can’t have sexually suggestive contents in it, even if hidden from the retail version and only to be uncovered by modding the game with 3rd party software.

Hillary Clinton opened her presidential campaign with a media blitz suggesting this game alone is cause for all harm ever done to the youth of America. It turns out she was hoodwinkled into doing this by ambulance chaser extraordinaire, Mr. Jack “Thumper” Thompson. Mr. Thompson has made a career of exploiting high profile incidents like the Columbine shootings to extort money from innocent 3rd parties, like the video gaming industry.

Turns out Thumper is not the only lawyer trying to profit from this.

An 85-year-old grandma, Florence Cohen, is suing Rockstar Games, the maker of GTA: San Andreas, and their parent company Take-Two Interactive, because these awful companies put PORN in the game she bought for her grandson.

There’s just one big issue with this lawsuit. Her throroughly traumatized grandson is 14. At the time she bought this nice game for her nice grandson GTA: San Andreas was an M-rated game, which means it’s not suitable for people under 17. She bought it regardless. She is now claiming she was somehow deceived. If I was the lawyer for Rockstar Games, I’d offer to settle for $1.

The sanest opinion regarding all the media generated controversy on the issue was written by Steven Johnson, author of a book “Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter”. He’s mockingly encouraging Hillary Clinton to devote her energy on a much more popular game that “instills aggressive thoughts in the minds of its players, some of whom have gone on to commit real-world acts of violence and sexual assault after playing.”. That game is, of course, high school football.

-TPP

What’s a “mature” video gamer to do among the adolescent jerks?

If you’re a video gaming addict over the mental age of 21 and you play a lot of multiplayer online games, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that the online gaming services are full of griefers, assholes, racist homophobes and other misfits. It seems that the anonymous nature of pretty much all such services encourages antisocial behavior.

It makes the online gaming experience pretty miserable for the rest of us. The gaming companies are doing what they can to mitigate the problem, but they really can’t control behavior especially when the services are being used by millions of people every day.

Fortunately there are solutions, and they’re all community based.

Instead of going and playing against the general masses, playing with and against other mature gamers works wonderfully well. There are several online communities for more mature gamers, one of which is Seasoned Gamers. I joined October 2004 and the change in the online gaming experience since then has been like day and night.

The group is made of over 500 people between the ages of 17 and 72 mainly from the United States, but there are a few Europeans and a strong Canadian representation in the group as well. The people are XBox owners and mainly play multiplayer online games on XBox Live.

There’s really nothing else common with any of us, except that we like to play video games, online. In fact, in every other aspect we’re probably an extremely diverse group of people. Do not attempt to discuss politics or religion in the group, you’ll get an earful from someone on the opposite side of the opinion spectrum.

As a somewhat of a online community geek, it’s interesting and fascinating to me how this particular community and communities like it have all successfully worked around an otherwise “unsolvable” problem. It truly demonstrates the power of a user driven community building. The online communities Microsoft has tried to build around XBox and XBox Live! are perfect examples of what’s wrong with online communities formed from the top down. They are cesspools of antisocial behavior, overt marketing by the community “owner” and generally tend to be useless. Yet the user driven communities thrive.

-TPP

I knew there was a reason why I hated Electronic Arts

I have a love/hate relationship with Electronic Arts (EA).

I’m an avid gamer. Have been so since my teenage years, over 20 years ago. I especially enjoy sports games.

I used to own a Sega Genesis – or Sega Megadrive as it was called in Europe – when it was the height of video gaming universe. It’s around that time when EA started their long running sports game franchises based on the professional sports in the United States. Their hockey games on the Sega Genesis were especially good. I bought almost every version they published, and they published one every year. Allowance money was gone very quickly on those games.

Fast forward to XBox and XBox Live! times. Well, EA decided not to grace us mere mortals with games that would play on XBox Live! That didn’t sit too well with most of us, and by this time Sega’s ESPN sport franchise games had caught up or in some cases surpassed the quality of the EA games. I was happy to flip the finger at EA, and put my money on Sega’s games. This decision was made even easier when Sega decided to drop the price on all of their 2K5 games to $19.99, online play and all.

Now someone married to an EA employee posted a long article about the despicable working conditions EA is forcing on their employees. Read the story, it’s quite amazing, although familiar to most of us who at some point have worked for a publicly traded mega corp, how EA, which is by far the most successful and profitable game publisher out there, can treat their employees so badly.

You would think EA could afford to spend some of the roughly $1.85B they make in gross profit for the benefit of their hard working employees.

-TPP