Defence Gaming

There's been a fascinating proliferation of publications covering gaming. For people interested in issues of politics in games, and the slippery slope between fighting simulation and military training, the new Defence Gaming, "a new initiative from Swedish Defence Materiel Administration (FMV), The Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) and The Swedish National Defence College (FHS) to study, research and explore the conjunction of computer and video games and the military." Judging by some of the smiling faces in the staff section, maybe this was a project undertaken by gamers to make their cumpulsory military service fun? Either way, looks like Defence Gaming will be spending money and energy to track fascinating, if occasionally frightening, issues.
(first seen on Ludology)

Video Games to Get Grammys, not Oscars

Perhaps in an effort to bring gaming to the forefront and increase exposure to the public, The New TNN is going to host a first ever televised video game awards ceremony which is being dubbed "The Oscars of Gaming." Maybe they should have found an Executive Producer other than the President of Nickelodean, because it sounds more to me like it's the Grammys of Gaming.

Categories will include: Hottest Hero and Heroine, Most Addictive, Coolest Villain, Best All-Around Badass, Most Difficult to Master, Best Free For All Carnage, Best Soundtrack, Hottest Graphics, Best Kick Ass Weapon, Best Game based on a Movie and Best Celebrity Actor and Actress in a Game, Best Pro-Sports Game. In addition, games will be competing for the Hall of Fame Award and Game of the Year.

Hottest Hero and Heroine?! Best Celbrity Actor and Actress in a Game?! Best Kick Ass Weapon?!

What kind of categories are these, anyway? Sure, there's about three or four that fit the bill (Best Soundtrack, Hottest Graphics, Game of the Year), but it sounds a lot like someone who has never played games in their life came up with them. Without categories such as Best RPG, Best MMORPG, Best FPS, Best Action Title, Best Driving Game, Best Flight Simulator, or Best Gameplay, it seems that this ceremony is seriously missing the point.

Star-crossed Romance

A while ago I found a treasure trove of newsgroups run by young women and teenagers who wrote romantic/erotic fan fiction about boy bands starring themselves and their friends. It was fun to watch the fiction flex to include newcomers and their requests ("Oh, I want to be Ashley's best friend! And I have red hair, and green eyes, and my favorite color is blue. Can you write me in?") This was, I thought, a different kind of MUD, and almost 100% female in population.

I started searching for similar phenomena and can across this delightful fan fic starring Lance Bass of *NSync and the notorious Eminem. The set up is delicious, and there are extremely amusing touches which lend an air of playfulness to the story. I love that whenever Eminem gets pissed off he runs himself a bubble bath, or that Chris and Joey are portrayed as the only non-gay members of *NSync (well, duh).

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Video Game Censorship: Coming to a Country Near You

Think that the gaming ban in Honduras won't happen in your country? As it turns out, there's more than one way to get violent games out of the hands of consumers, and a way to make sure it happens in every country.

According to a recent GameSpot article, which is based on an ESPN.com article, the NFL is taking a closer look at their licensed video games (specifically NFL Blitz, although allegedly that game is not their sole target) due to an editorial by Sports Illustrated writer Rick Reilly which attempts to make a moral statement on the violence in NFL Blitz and its relation to the actual NFL games.

As it turns out, there's an excellent chance that the makers of NFL Blitz will have to scale back some of the classic violent play that made Blitz the game it is, in order to maintain the NFL license. In what could be a precedent making decision, a game already in production and one that has already published this known "violent" gameplay (which is rated E, for everyone) for four years is going to probably be asked to pull content which gamers fully expect to be in the next version in order to appease the NFL.

The only question which remains to be answered is whether or not real football players will stop making late hits and illegal chop blocks due to this video game censorship.

Pretty In Pink

I don’t know why, but this winter, I am positively addicted to the color pink.

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Game Studies 02 02

The folks at Game Studies have posted their third issue, further developing academic discourse on games:

• Jonathan Dovey: Guest Editorial.
  
• Helen W. Kennedy: Lara Croft - Feminist Icon or Cyberbimbo? On the Limits of Textual Analysis.
  
• Jairo Lugo, Tony Sampsom and Merlyn Lossada: Latin America's New Cultural Industries still Play Old Games - From the Banana Republic to Donkey Kong.
  
• Celia Pearce: The Player with Many Faces - A Conversation with Louis Castle.
  
• Greg M. Smith: Computer Games Have Words, Too- Dialogue Conventions in Final Fantasy.
  
• Talmadge Wright, Eric Boria and Paul Breidenbach: Creative Player Actions in FPS Online Video Games - Playing Counter-Strike.

I rapped on them a bit in a review for HyperText Kitchen; I thought they were reading too much and not playing enough games. But their pieces over time have evinced more grounding in actual gameplay, with increased examples and citations from within games, and relatively fewer citations from texts on narratology. Either way, I'm glad to see they are actively publishing, thought I do wish they saw fit to include email addresses or web page links for their authors.

Video Games Tech used as Research Tool

The NYTimes reports that psychology researchers studying "hidden bias" found that subjects were much more likely to "shoot" African-American figures than Caucasian figures in a test situation facilitated by a video-game-like interface. Do you have hidden bias? You can try a test yourself.

Indie Game Interviews: Sean
An interview with independent game developer Sean Barrett.

A veteran of PC game-maker Looking Glass Technologies and their titles Thief, Terra Nova, and System Shock. Sean here muses on his past work with graphics and his interest in "interpersonal physics" - how games might better simulate engaging player-to-non-player-character relationships.

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Exploring Game Addiction

What could turn a non-gamer into a gaming addict? This is the question Jewels set out to explore. Surrounded by a number of gamers, but not such a gamer herself, she opted to give games a try. After meeting the MMORPG Anarchy Online, she found something in a game world online worth living for. And she found real life didn't provide quite the same sorts of respect: "But in the end, they're still nothing more than video games" - includes some good interviews with fellow players, and good links to other pieces about gaming and gaming addiction. (From Slashdot)

Russian Roulette

FatBabies correspondent FatCosmonaut went searching for pirate versions of various popular games in the software stands of the former Soviet Union. He found hundreds of thousands of copies of Warcraft III, and two copies of Marrowind. He sees piracy as a result of stupid business decisions:

Our industry is extremely international these days and we should begin to understand that it is in all of our best interests to understand how Intellectual Property law works in these foreign lands so that we can best manage our properties and rights within them.

Presumedly all these games should have been popular and pirated, but some had made the right kind of deal to protect their interests. So he's written up all you need to know to prevent piracy of your games in Russia.

Halo: Original Game, or Sequel?

A year ago, when Halo debuted, I was playing some multiplayer Halo at a friend's house and recalled just how strikingly similar Halo was to Marathon: Bungie's previous installment of First Person Shooters. I remember being overwhelmed with a deja vu-esque sense that I was in fact playing a Rose that was going by another name, and made a mental note to eventually look into the matter.

So I did some research, and came up with some fairly strong evidence to prove that it seems to be a very well done transfer of the Marathon legacy to the 3D gaming world. Why bother? Well, because as a fan of Marathon, I saw what an incredibly tight game Bungie had on their hands, and lamented the fact that nobody ever wanted to play a one of those "Mac games." By the responses I got, it seemed like I was asking them to do something immoral. To this day, many die-hard PC-only fanboys still scoff at the idea of Marathon. Can you blame Bungie for creating a sequel but changing the name in the interest of selling more titles?

There were rumors of Marathon "easter eggs" throughout Halo, and I think there's something more to the following similarities than "easter eggs." Games like Duke Nukem which had homages to nearly every FPS that came before it (Doom, Dark Forces, etc) had easter eggs. Halo has what I would call an identity crisis.

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