As shameless as this may be, I’d like to pimp my political weblog for you folks. A project for NYU’s Journalism department, my little slice of blog looks at the use of videogames and flash-cartoons in the presidential election. I’m rather moderate, and an idiot, so please feel free to comment and criticize and disagree anyway you feel is appropriate or humorous.

While the last election extensively used the internet, such things as little flash cartoons about the various candidates’ policies or games based on Kerry’s Vietnam experience are rather new to the current campaign. This really brings up the harsh reality that the electronic landscape is now important enough to become a heated battlefield for the politicians. I think it's worth taking a small look at.

Hell, maybe my writings might even give some insight into this baby kissing of the 21st century.

Alright. Shameless plug over.

A fellow named Jim Davies has a small online gallery of paintings he has done based on Pac-Man. I particularly enjoyed "Demonizing Pac-Man" and some of the other anti-Pac-Man propaganda.

I can't believe I'm making this writeup. Not because it's about sex, but because I'm going to lay bare before you the dark depths of my own gaming geekdom. You've been warned.

This seemed fitting with the recent rumblings of a Playboy featuring renders of "naked" female game characters (one could argue that game characters are almost always naked, since we don't bother to model the skin under their clothes, and underneath this skin, they're as hollow as a chocolate easter bunny). Those efficient Germans beat the US to the punch on the games/girlie mag cross-over front. Witness Spielboy! My mind is still reeling from the pun. Not only does this webzine exist, they are actually on their fifth issue.

Okay, so it's not a direct match to what Playboy is doing. Spielboy is really more about a playful combination of eroticism and boardgaming. It reminds me of Dan the Automator's Music to Make Love to Your Old Lady By in that it's so playful that I have a hard time telling whether it's satire or straight-faced sex-positivism. Sections like the version of Am I Hot or Not using images from board and card games suggest satire, while the (tame) Pictoral points toward a more serious outlook.

This is the part where I reveal just how deep my gaming geekdom goes. What really interests me about this site is not the sex, but the sheer unadulterated love for non-electronic gaming and everything associated with it. There's a quiz page where you can try to match up 20 game designers with their previous occupations.

Take a minute to comprehend what that means.

While Germany is certainly famous for their love of family games, this sort of gaming wonkery just totally blows my gourd. Spielboy is unique in that it is not a goofy sexual niche site, no, it presents gaming qua lifestyle so completely that it demands human sexuality also be viewed through that lens.

PBS, that's the United States' public television network for the rest of you, has produced a two hour documentary on the video game industry. The Video Game Revolution has interviews with a great many industry names, including Ralph Baer, Shigeru Miyamoto, Jason Rubin, Will Wright, Chris Taylor and Peter Molyneux. The official site for the program provides details on local air times.

Not having seen the program myself, I can only speculate as to what sort of image it paints of the industry. Still, there's something kind of magical about videogames being so entrenched in American society that PBS will go and make a documentary about them. If any of you get a chance to see this, be sure to post your responses!

Lauren Gonzalez over at Gamespot has put together a lengthy feature on the history of the relationship between gaming and academia. If you've only recently discovered GGA, you might find the article useful as a condensed version of the sorts of things we seem to talk about often here.

Many of the big names of game academia pop up in the feature. Janet Murray, Michael Mateas, and Gonzalo Frasca each get significant coverage, and Gamespot provides a good selection of quality links to gaming-theory-related websites (including us). Among the more unusual sources Gamespot talks to is Paul Miller (DJ Spooky - That Subliminal Kid), due to his recently published book Rhythm Science, who claims that modern youth culture is based around the idea of "replication," although exactly what that means, Gamespot never reveals.

The main shortcoming of the article is that when it discusses the relationship between game academics and game developers, it only gets the opinions of academics. Perhaps this is warranted by the academics, who readily admit that few decision makers in development pay them much serious attention, but as somebody with a foot in each world, I'd really like to see somebody delve into the nature of this relationship a bit more studiously.