I knew it! SCEE announced that it's working on a videogame based on the Fox series 24. Since the series already plays like a game, it shouldn't be that hard to adapt.

Playing as super tough agent Jack Bauer might be fun. Would you still have to rescue that pesky daughter though?

On IndTV. It's in the fourth panel on the top row.

Thanks to Souris for the link.

Also, Souris has a post about I am 8 Bit, 80's inspired videogame art showing in Los Angeles, April 19-May 20. It's right around E3, so you should all drop by.

Shocking! Double-Fine, developers of Psychonauts, have not one, not two, but three (!!!) webcomics hosted on their corporate site.

Double-Fine Action Comics is a collection of good-but-not-great web comics that will probably be funny to gamers. My ability to enjoy these comics will probably increase if Psychonauts lives up to the amount of time it spent in development.

The China Daily reports that a 41-year-old man stabbed an acquaintance who stole and sold his Dragon Sabre in the MMORPG Legend of Mir III.

The interesting thing is, the accused, Qiu, tried to contain his frustration and do the right thing. He went to report the crime to the police, but they told him that virtual property doesn't count. So Qiu got upset and attacked Zhu in his home.

But if virtual property isn't "real", how could the unfortunate Zhu have sold it for $871?

Qiu gave himself up to police and on the advice of his lawyer, has pleaded guilty to intentional injury, claiming he never meant to kill Zhu.

However, the court's prosecutor told the court: "As cyberweapon is not under the protection of any law in our country, Zhu was faultless in this case."

This case dramatizes one of the reasons Larry Lessug taught the class Law in Virtual Worlds. It seems obvious that a digital era requires new thinking about digital products and their worth. What's odd about the language of the lawyer representing the game company is his terming game assets "just data"; what is a computer program but just data? And don't we recognize that some software company owns that? Surely even in China, for all its supposed leniency in piracy issues, recognizes this. The real issue that's being overlooked in the discourse is whether players can claim any rights to these digital assets. But those issues will be forced on the Chinese court soon:

Now more and more gamers are seeking justice through the courts over stolen weapons and credits.

"The armours and swords in games should be deemed as private property as players have to spend money and time for them," said Wang Zongyu, an associate professor at the law school of Beijing's Renmin University of China.

"These virtual objects are often tradable among players," he added.

But other experts are calling for caution.

"The `assets' of one player could mean nothing to others as they are by nature just data created by game providers," said a lawyer for a Shanghai-based Internet game company.

Online game companies in Shanghai -- the city with the most players -- are planning to set up a dispute system where aggrieved players can find recourse.

Shang Jiangang, a lawyer with the newly established Shanghai Online Game Association, said: "The association has drafted some measures to facilitate the settlement of disputes over virtual assets."

He added: "Once any cyberweapon stealing occurs, players can report to the operator, which will then sort it out according to the circumstances."

The Australian has an article covering some recent statements by Hillary Clinton on the subject of videogame violence.

"Children are playing a game that encourages them to have sex with prostitutes and then murder them," she said, me-tooing the chorus of morally posturing politicians over the past year or so.

Of course, this is almost certainly just posturing for an '08 presidential run. As a Democrat, Hillary needs to cover her "morality" bases, and she's been quick to show Jesusland that she can represent them too.

But come on...

From my co-worker and fellow indie rocker comes this delightful link: the hottest portable of all. Thanks, Justin!

Now that I am one of the working classes again, I value being able to waste an entire weekend to playing and replaying a favorite game. (Carth, did you miss me?) The downside is, Monday hurts, what with my gaming hangover.

Upside is, my co-workers understand. I walked in from the kitchen to overhear one of my colleagues raving about System Shock II, which he had played all weekend. The International News Editor, who sits right next to me, is a WoW addict. He's only four levels away from reaching the cap. There are games around me all the time. We talk about games constantly. What we like, what we hate, and why. I've got three monitors in my cube and they are lit up all the time. I feel like my brain is going to explode from all the stimulation. But of course I think it's great.

I could do - and have done - a lot of different jobs. But this is the first time that a straight office job meshed so well with my leisure pursuits: not only the gaming thing, but the writing thing, which has been my "thing" since the time I was in second grade and composed an epic poem about dolphins. Writing has been my constant companion in times dark and bright. Getting to - having to - do this day in, day out, is challenging, but exhilerating.

I worry sometimes about burnout. When your money-source is also your pleasure-source, you find yourself doing the same thing all the time. I wondered about this in regard to my music-making, also: if suddenly my passion became my job, would I take less pleasure in it? There's something to be said for having the kind of job you enjoy, but which you can leave at the office. Is it suffocating to want to take that work everywhere with you and have it infuse your life? Is that healthy?

But back to the job. There are offices, and then there are offices. I think in general offices with toys are better than ones without.

Pointless? Cheap? Oh yes. Kotaku furthers the discussion.

(Insert article about what this says about PSP/women/gaming/sex/society.)

Oh, that pesky vibrating controller. Still causing trouble after all this time. Today a U.S. court ordered Sony to stop selling its Playstation console and pat $90 million dollars in damages to Immersion, a company that develops haptic technologies. Immersion has brought a suit against Sony claiming patent violation.

Read the Reuters news feed.

Read the Japan Times article.

This refers not just to the trance vibrator, but to the dual-shock technology used in both PSOne and PS2 controllers. Sony is appealing the ruling.

Great article on Gamasutra about the prospects of unionizing game developers. Very interesting.

Awesome public health advertisement uses the video game metaphor to encourage the use of contraceptives in young women and girls.

Thanks to Nicole from Quebec to pointing me to this!

My boyfriend is not a gamer. I mean, he did unlock all of Moby's gear in three days of playing SSX Tricky. But he's not a gamer. He's not "hardcore". Well, he did play FIFA Street for five consecutive hours. It's a game his friend Tom bought, even though he doesn't even have a PS2. Tom just brought it over to our house and we've been playing it here. Tom's not a gamer, either...but he is French, and he's a huge fan of le foot. The fact that you can play FIFA Street in locations like Marseille with his favorite (and least favorite) players was enough to make him pick it up. He'll be buying a PS2 for the first time, too.

Tom and Jesse aren't gamers. A lot of gamers (my office buddies, for example) think FIFA Street is, well, garbage - to put it more delicately than they did. But gamers aren't whom EA is courting with games like FIFA Street; they're wooing Tom and Jesse.

I've been considering this at least warm topic, the new games journalism, for the past week, going through the archives both tangible and in my head. I've come to a conclusion about why it's so hard to pin down the genre: It doesn't exist. Or if it did exist, it actually was the advent of reviews, previews and the like (screenshots!), the same material someone has mistakenly labeled "old games journalism". What we are calling the new games journalism is actually the old, original form of the art.

I'm trying to be an adult about this and buy my PSP Value Pack with my tax refund. But they've made it so that in the gaming world -- not strictly limited to the gaming world, either -- you have to buy anything you might actually want to buy weeks or months in advance of its release. I can today, at least for the next couple hours, pay fifty dollars to "pre-order" something I will not get until Thursday no matter what. My tax check has yet to make an appearance and I've promised myself, PSPs being the sorts of things tax checks are for, that I won't buy it until my refund arrives. But Sony wants my money now.

Someone needs a hug.

I have a few thoughts about this. First, I don't think I'm quite clear on what "New Game Journalism" really is, although one of my articles has been included in the Guardian round-up. When I joked about this on IM with Julian Dibbell, whose article "A Rape in Cyberspace" is also included, we decided that we weren't sure when our writing became labelled as NGJ. I admit that when I started GGA I was tired of reviews and previews, and I knew I wanted to write about so much more than that. But at the same time I still read reviews and previews, and I still read industry news, too.

Writing experientially to me has always been a part of journalism - we have called it "gonzo" journalism in the past, but look back at 19th century American journalists - like Mark Twain - and you'll see that it's always been a facet of writing for the public. Such writing is not now intended to replace traditional, or "standard" journalism (calling it "old", as UK Resistance does, I think dates it too much). If a reporter were to turn in a piece on Baghdad, for example, we news consumers would be served well by hearing the traditional journalistic take on events, but there is also something extremely valuable about hearing the reporter's personal experiences: what was it like to try to get this piece together? What does it feel like to live in Baghdad, to dodge car bombs every day, to see your colleagues die off one by one? Writing about that adds immesurably to our understanding of the situation.

Same goes for music. Tell me, in one piece, what an album and artist are like, where they come from, what the influences are; but excite and inspire me by describing what it feels to be in the audience at an incredible rock show, to be on tour with them.

Awesome music video imagines an arcade game based on freestylin. If this were a real game, it'd be really hard. Although after having watched Missy Elliot's Road to Stardom I'd begun to feel like, yeah, I could do that!

I love how candy comes out of the machine as a bonus. This is courtesy of ClockWorkGrue - who's probably too busy working on The Godfather game to post. That's okay. Thanks, Ben!

By the way, speaking of music and videogames, I forgot to mention that Freezepop played a post-GDC party at Lulu's house last Saturday. As some of you may know, the band contributed a track to the crazy racing/beat-matching game Amplitude, sequel to Frequency. Read an interesting music review/dialogue about that game here.

It's only Thursday, feels like Friday. Sigh.

Excerpt from a Gamespot interview with Sheri Graner Ray:

SGR: Men play female characters. I don't have the exact numbers, but a huge percentage of males play female characters. The number of females playing male characters is so small as to be not worth counting. And they'll tell you, "I don't play a male character because it's not comfortable."

GS: And yet if you're in a stand-alone game, you often don't have a choice--often you are a male character.

SGR: Right. Or you don't play. On my women's mailing list, you'll find them all the time that say, "I didn't play Fable because there wasn't a female character to play." So it's one of those barriers. It's one of those doors that stops them from ever playing the game.

Now, if I get the chance, I ALWAYS play female, and usually one that looks like me (given the option): petite, dark-haired, light on the muscle. In D&D, I try to play a version of myself as much as possible... which usually ends up being a Bard/Rogue type character with a high Persuade but negligible combat skills.

But I also played Fable, and loved it - and had three wives in three cities, including the dark Lady Grey. I played Prince of Persia and loved it. I suppose you could say, perhaps, that there is a difference between the action/adventure and the rpg. The rpg really asks you to put yourself in the character's shoes. But then, Final Fantasy 7 and 8 have a large female cult following. I don't think it's a problem to experience a story from someone else's point of view.

I read books with male narrators and male protagonists. I watch movies with male heroes, told from a male point of view. The important things are character, story, and emotional depth, and those can belong to anyone, any sex or any color.

I think the problem is just that there isn't enough diversity. What if all books we had on shelves were written by John Updike or Phillip Roth? I love their writing, but I'd be bored out of my mind sifting through so many pages of self-reflective upper-middle class male-ness. It's good to have a Richard Wright in there, a Virginia Woolf, a Zora Neale Hurston. I'd like that for videogames, too, obviously.

But what Graner Ray says is interesting. Is it really true that women vastly prefer to play women, while men are more fluid in their gender-identity? I've wanted to conduct a study on this for years, but I lack the social science research skills. Maybe someone out there wants to help out.

A little while ago G4 came into the office to interview all the editors about their top ten lists - best FPS, best art direction, you know. I mentioned the art direction on Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and said, "besides the beauty of the surroundings, the prince is hot!"

They were like, "But what about his hair? Say something about his hair!"

Huh?

Later as we were wrapping up they passed by the life-size mock-up of Prince of Persia that stands guard right outside my cube. "You think he's hot? He just looks gay to me," muttered one of the camera crew.

I'm not sure if I believe this eBay listing for a "haunted" NES system, but I really do like the idea. Then again, this guy has a 100% score of nearly 200 eBay members, so I doubt he's some fly-by-night joker.

According to the story of the auction, the system belonged to a kid who passed away. His father eventually donated the NES to thrift store, which sold it to this guy. When the owner plays the games, he hears voices speaking through the television, voices which suddenly stop whenever he tries to get too close to the screen to hear better. Spooky indeed.

There's only one day left to bid, and at the time of this posting, the auction is at nearly $200. But if you need a little extra supernatural with your gaming, go for it.

Damn, I'm really unhappy I missed this talk. (I was interviewing Peter Molyneux at the time, however, which I guess is a pretty good excuse.)

Going Techno

This year at GDC, the theme was "future vision", but the underlying subtext was the meaning of user-created and user-owned content. Microsoft's keynote was characteristicly slick and PRed: "Customization!" crowed J Allen. But "customization", for Microsoft, means skins and the ability to find your friends online - great features, but shallow ones. The stress was on technology - according to Allard, we're in the "HD era". And that means Hi-Def content and Hi-Def services. Several game developers in the audience blanched at this, as it also means even bigger budgets and bigger teams. Is that really what drives great games?

I [heart] Nintendo

Nintendo took a different tack: capture the "heart of a gamer", and you will have brand loyalty. But more than that, Iwata spoke about fun. Fun is not dependent on technology. The console should exist to entertain, to provide the most fun as it possibly can. And the new games Nintendo unveiled for both DS and Gamecube look to be packed full of fun. I can't wait for Animal Crossing DS.

That's my preliminary GDC report. What about you?

I learn this morning via Joystiq that Blizzard has graduated to the virtual afterlife a largish chunk of World of Warcraft players who've been farming gold in the game world and selling it out here in wetworld for the coin of the realm(s). Thus inflames the million-voice choir with the seed of a debate over whether or not Blizzard should be allowed to do this. Nonsense. Of course they should be allowed to do it. Blizzard has the absolute right to do what they wish with their game world. This includes canceling player accounts for in-game conduct that they do not like. This includes canceling the whole game if they so desire. I thought we had worked out all this philosophical intrigue with Sony's EverQuest. For the avid WoWer, it should by now be quite clear: You play at the pleasure of Blizzard; learn to live with it.

That's not to say this is necessarily a wise business move. Indeed the parental urge of the game's developers to curtail creative and perhaps unforeseen uses of their world may prohibit them from making considered decisions. Any game has the potential to go stale, and I would argue that it's just a matter of time before all games go stale. People doing weird things in World of Warcraft of course may cause some trouble, but they are also working for Blizzard, not for free, but actually paying Blizzard to work. Innovative use of the game world keeps things fresh. Even if it's annoying. Not all of it will benefit the game world, of course, but if it keeps you coming back out of delight or sheer frustration, it enhances the marketability of the game. And this ultimately benefits Blizzard.

If you did a little gold farming on the side and today discovered you no longer exist in Azeroth, go buy yourself a fresh copy of WoW, load up on some more game hours, and get back to it. This time, try not to get caught.

Sorry I haven't been able to post this week - the Game Developer's Conference has taken up a lot of my time. Today is the last day, and then I'm off to wrap-up parties and then a quick jaunt to SXSW Interactive for a talk on Monday morning. If you're in Austin around then, come and say hello.

Maybe my favorite part of any gaming conference is seeing friends - or in some cases, meeting friends for the first time. Babsi, whose survey I put up a little while ago, was there, as was Carol Chung wearing her NES controller necklace. Hot! Galen, who was a TA with Henry Lowood at Stanford now works there full time. Harvey Smith's at Midway. Warren Spector has his own studio in the works. Katherine Isbister, who wrote the excellent article about artist Becky Schaefer, I'll meet tomorrow for a cup of tea.

AND I got to play with Nintendo toys. They have some great stuff coming out for DS which I'll talk about next week.

But now, it's off to interview Molyneux! More later.

xoxo

-jane

I'm watching Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. There's an episode on about a man who kills a hooker using a car and stomping method taken from a game called "Intensity," an obvious fictionalization of "Grand Theft Auto." Naturally, everyone's shocked and horrified that a video game features such violence. And who makes the revelation to the police that the hooker's death was a video game mimic? Of course, a little boy who thinks that the game is "cool."

Check it.

Includes one of GGA's own articles. Can you guess which one?

Hey, just blame video-games! As it turns out, a couple of lawmakers in Seattle would like to force makers of video-games to be liable whenever some idiot kid loses their mind and goes on a shooting spree.

Since there's no point in even going over how rediculous this sounds (and how this is the wrong state to try and get that legislation passed; hello, Microsoft?), let's extrapolate what else could happen if this law were to be, uh, legalized, due to precedent.

Gun manufacturers would be liable every time someone is killed using a firearm. While this sounds good, it would allow families of criminals to sue the companies that made the cop's gun.

Knife manufacturers would be liable every time someone used a knife in a slaying.

Parents would be liable, as they made the kid (Grandparents could also be found liable, as they made the kids that made the kid).

Movies and TV Shows are reduced to lumps of people sitting around breathing, after being sued by everyone and their Moms due to sex and violence issues. Eventually, even breathing is found to be offensive and sexually suggestive.

Pipe-wrench, lamp, and candlestick manufacturers everywhere are sued due to "unsafe" equipment that allowed spouses in a fit of rage to hit their significant others.

Playboy is sued in record numbers for teen pregnancies.

Mtv goes bankrupt (besides the morally part) after parents everywhere sue for their kids getting bad grades.

VH1 is sued for causing short attention spans with their new "Worst Week Ever" series.

Anyone got any others?

Hello my smart readers, I'm interviewing Peter Molyneux next week. What are some of the things you'd want to know? It's always tough to think of questions he hasn't already been asked a thousand times, like "where did you get the idea for x game"; so if you have some interesting questions you've been mulling over, let me know!

Girls in Games is a nonprofit organization started by discussions on the IGDA Women-in-Development List, staffed by volunteer teachers and mentors. Their aim is to provide real experience in game development to young women or women from other fields to help them find jobs in the industry - a sort of a experience incubatorm if you will. Sande Chen and Michelle Sorger, affiliated with Girls in Games, will be speaking at GDC this year. I'll be interviewing them next week, so stay tuned for more details.

In the meantime, if you want to check them out or volunteer some services, visit the website!

First, I would like to say hello, and introduce myself as a new contributor to GGA. Now onto the good stuff...
I love it when game publishers are able to "think outside of the ball" and introduce entertaining viral marketing ploys to all the ADD kids surfing the internet. My new favorite is from Sega. Monkey Ball freaks around the world, check out "The True Adventures of Chad, The Guy Who Was So Into Super Monkey Ball Deluxe He Decided To Live In A Ball".

... there's a petition out and about to put videogame characters on it. I guess Walk of Game wasn't enough for Mario.

The Start Gallery in SOMA will open a show featuring art inspired by videogames. There's an event hosted by the club Polo's Blue Cube on March 10 - during GDC - with music until 2 am and some classic playable games as well as pieces from the art show. Should be pretty fun.

Walk of Game is a, you guessed it, hall of fame for games. God damn, what is it about videogames that compells everyone to pun so much?!? I mean if I never have to see another article titled "Game Over" or "One Up" or some other cutesy take on "gamer lingo" I will die happy. IN any case, the first-ever induction ceremony will take place March 8th at the Metreon. That's during the GDC, so you can come by after the sessions. I'll be there with a shiny press pass, cheering on Link and Mario. Oh, and Sonic, too, I'd never forget you!

The Kaiser Family Foundation will release a report on young people and new media use on March 9 in Washington D.C. Senator Hilary Rodham Cliinton will give the keynote address. This is a really important event, as it is a national study and you can see from the line-up of panelists that they tried to get a cross-section of participants. I do think they should have included at least one young media-saturated person, however.

A little while ago ClockworkGrue posited a question about the possibility of "Peacecraft", a game in which you'd try to stop war rather than make it. A new fantasy role-playing game that blends live-action elements does just that: you play to deconstruct nuclear weapons using a pack a cards. The game is being developed by Terence Ross, who also has a long article about conceptualizing nuclear weapons up on his site. I don't think the game is finished yet, but when it is, it looks like it will be available as a free download.

Hm! Maybe Pakistan and India and China and North Korea just need to get together and play a game of cards.

NC Soft and Cryptic Studios have joined forces with Top Cow Productions to put out a comic book based loosely on the City of Heores game.

Top Cow editor-in-chief said in a press release, "There is a legion of fans out there who love comic books as an idea and as a genre, but may have forgotten that they love comic books in and of themselves." Can someone explain to me what this means? Is he talking about gamers who love comic books as an idea? A lot of them, I think, actually buy comic books too. Is he talking about fans of the Hellboy and Constantine films who never read the comics but love the stories that come out of them?

Aw! So cute! This brings up a very interesting question - what kinds of videogames would a cat want to play? Something with Hamutaro, perhaps?

(Thanks, Souris and Robin!)