USC and EA are partnering to offer female students a scholarship to attend the Interactive Entertainment Summer Camp during the USC's Summer Seminars program.
From the press release:

The USC Interactive Entertainment Summer Camp is a 4-week program designed to help students pursue their dream of working in the video game industry. The single scholarship in the 2005 summer seasons will represent the first female registered student in the program, as the 2004 inaugural year featured an exclusively male student body. The scholarship includes free admission to the camp, room and board at USC, and three college credits for successfully completing the program.

The USC Interactive Entertainment Summer Camp runs from July 3rd to July 30th. Deadline to apply for the scholarship is May 15th. It is open to any female high school junior or senior with a GPA of at least 3.5 and who submit both a written recommendation from a teacher and a 250-word essay on why they are passionate about video games. Applications should be sent to: ea-usc-scholarship@ea.com.

"We hope this scholarship not only provides an exciting opportunity for an inspired girl, but sends a broader message. EA wants to encourage girls to aspire for a career building games...and we hope the best and brightest continue their studies and find a future home in the industry," said Steve Seabolt, Vice President at EA.

Representing 39% of the gaming population, according to the Entertainment Software Association, women players are a growing force within the gaming community. EA is responding to this demand by encouraging and empowering young women to take the industry seriously and consider it for a future career. This scholarship is the first step in a larger program designed to encourage women to pursue their passion for gaming and enter the industry as professionals.

EA and USC have been working together in a number of different ways to ensure students are ready to enter the games industry with the knowledge and power to make a difference. "EA continues to support our engineering program at USC," said Dr. Anthony Borquez, Director of the Information Technology Program, which offers numerous courses on gaming. "Not only does EA provide us with game resources and guest speakers for our classes, but we also staff animators and engineers from EALA who teach classes in my program."

Applicants must have a cumulative B average, submit a letter of recommendation from a high school teacher and submit a 250 word essay "Why I want to grow up and make games." More information about the USC interactive entertainment summer camp program and EA scholarship can be found at: http://www.usc.edu/dept/admissions/programs/summer/seminars.shtml.

For the little girl who idolizes the murderous, deadly assassin! Get your very own.

Catwoman and Wonder Woman also available...

By 1-Up.

Hahahahaha.

Oh wait, are you serious?

Maybe you could have had an actual girlfriend help you out with your list, Shivam. I mean seriously. Centipede? Ms. Pac-Man? Bejeweled, for Chrissake? You're really reaching there, buddy.

Posted by Robin.

In other news, how excited are we? We Love Katamari.

We really do. And here's more proof: Katamari Doh-macy and Katamari da Vinci.

According to Steven "Emergence" Johnson in the New York Times, television makes you smarter. Why? Because it's getting more and more like videogames in the following ways.

Cognitive Multitasking
"But another kind of televised intelligence is on the rise. Think of the cognitive benefits conventionally ascribed to reading: attention, patience, retention, the parsing of narrative threads. Over the last half-century, programming on TV has increased the demands it places on precisely these mental faculties. This growing complexity involves three primary elements: multiple threading, flashing arrows and social networks."

Learn by Doing
"Many reality shows borrow a subtler device from gaming culture as well: the rules aren't fully established at the outset. You learn as you play."

Emergent Television
"Reality programming borrowed another key ingredient from games: the intellectual labor of probing the system's rules for weak spots and opportunities. As each show discloses its conventions, and each participant reveals his or her personality traits and background, the intrigue in watching comes from figuring out how the participants should best navigate the environment that has been created for them. The pleasure in these shows comes not from watching other people being humiliated on national television; it comes from depositing other people in a complex, high-pressure environment where no established strategies exist and watching them find their bearings."

"Interactive" Television
"You have to focus to follow the plot, and in focusing you're exercising the parts of your brain that map social networks, that fill in missing information, that connect multiple narrative threads."

The New Criteria for Smart Culture
"In pointing out some of the ways that popular culture has improved our minds, I am not arguing that parents should stop paying attention to the way their children amuse themselves. What I am arguing for is a change in the criteria we use to determine what really is cognitive junk food and what is genuinely nourishing. Instead of a show's violent or tawdry content, instead of wardrobe malfunctions or the F-word, the true test should be whether a given show engages or sedates the mind. Is it a single thread strung together with predictable punch lines every 30 seconds? Or does it map a complex social network? Is your on-screen character running around shooting everything in sight, or is she trying to solve problems and manage resources? If your kids want to watch reality TV, encourage them to watch ''Survivor'' over ''Fear Factor.'' If they want to watch a mystery show, encourage ''24'' over ''Law and Order.'' If they want to play a violent game, encourage Grand Theft Auto over Quake. Indeed, it might be just as helpful to have a rating system that used mental labor and not obscenity and violence as its classification scheme for the world of mass culture."

Unfortunately I can't provide a direct link, but The Bees' "Chicken Payback" video directed by Thomas Hilland (and hosted on his site) predates the DJ Format video directed by Keith Schofield we linked to earlier, and works on a similar theme.

Worth the 3 minutes it takes to watch it.

Calling all New York peeps!! Nintendo of America is opening its first-ever retail store in Rockefeller Plaza, NYC. Blow-out block party celebrates the launch May 14th. They'll stock exclusive Nintendo merchandise (pink DS???) and have a DS sampling station. Also, "the store has been designed to create an interactive experience for all visitors including a multi-player gaming wall and a surround sound gaming lounge where consumers will play dozens of edgy Nintendo games."

(Hmm, don't know what they mean exactly by "edgy" but okay.)

I often feel like moving to New York...today the temptation just got raised up a notch.

Reuters, AP -- Riding what can only be described as a licensing title wave, EA is set to announce that it has brokered an exclusive licensing agreement with God, The Almighty.

In an unofficial statement, Larry Probst said, "Well, we really feel it was a good deal for us. I mean, we have a quite a few titles that feature God in them, such as Populus, Black and White, and even The Sims, just to name a few. We felt that it was in our best interests to get the exclusive on Him before anyone else had the chance to snap Him up."

The contract is speculated to hold God to an exclusive five year deal with EA, including using His likeness on box art, marketing, and especially His Voice of God for trailers and previews to the song of twenty five billion a year for five years. "Everyone knows we have more money than God," Probst proclaimed, "we just figured we should leverage that and grab God while we still could."

"Well, I thought it was a great deal at the time, I mean, five years is only a blink of an eye for me, but I have to admit that I had my doubts at first," God said in an interview. "I'm looking at it from the perspective that at least this way I can make sure everyone at EA gets Sunday off."

It is speculated that God might even be used to offset the "quality of life" issues EA is experiencing. "We're hoping that God can just snap his fingers and have the game created for us in an instant. We can have our designers pitch the idea to him, and presto, instant game. It's going to save us a lot of man-hours and labor costs. Come to think of it, our overhead will pretty much be zero for the next five years," Larry explained.

Theory even has it that in a bold legal positioning move, EA plans to sue for copyright infringement on behalf of all games, everywhere after this deal goes through. "Let's face it," Probst said, "God made everything. Free will debates aside, He made it. You can think you had the idea first, but it was really Him, through you. Call it Divine Inspiration or whatever you like, but it's His, and now, by contract, EA's." What this means for the rest of the industry, and gamers in general, remains to be seen.

Developer IFD resorts to calling the Feds on a piracy charge against Take Two. Maliciousness or miscommunication?

GamesIndustry story.

They should have done this years ago. Just an aside - I'm absurdly pleased to see a female player featured as the default gamer in the silly cartoon art illustrated the bad old way and the good new way.

Interesting speculation at Terra Nova: "I get an uneasy feeling when actual conflict spills over into games of conflict. But I’m not sure why. Maybe it -would- be a good idea if opposing sides took up virtual arms – anything is better than stones and bombs. For example, one might argue that the current India vs Pakistan test series is a cathartic political statement, the leaders of both nations being present seems to suggest that that game does have political significance. Or am I just trivializing matters now? After all, war’s not a game now is it?"

This brings briefly to mind Kuma/War, which lets players experience levels baed on real U.S. missions in Iraq, ot its Arab-world counterpart, UnderAsh.

Virtual cultural colonization?

Simply fantastic flash video that manages to be at once a critique of the PSP, an elegy for consoles and games past, and a paean to one of the greatest RPGs ever. It's funny, but also extremely moving. At least, to me.

(To see thoe whole piece, click on New Game.)

[From Grand Text Auto]

Don't worry. We've got your cereals and yogurts right here. Dannon's line "Frusion" is a fruity yogurt drink aimed at... us, I guess. There are so many brands normally associated with the fuddy-duddy or the middle-aged dieters that are seeking to woo young hot markets. And videogamers seem to be, for some reason, a very attractive segment.

Is this because gamers are now suddenly cool, suddenly trend-leaders? Somehow I find that a bit off. What feels more right to me is to say that young people have an idea of the cool videogamer that seems to align with trend-spotters' ideas, too.

The DS was made to change the way that games are played.

If the PSP changes anything about the way games are played, it's that now when you play, you might actually look hot.

Sony marketing's ability to present the PSP as a "lifestyle accessory" rather than a gaming system has really impressed me. Witness Korean website PSPStyle. This is a series of 3 model galleries on the themes of 3 classic fairytales, The Little Mermaid, Snow White, and Cinderella. Throw in some glamour, add a PSP, and there you go.

And that's what's so odd, really. I mean, yes the PSP is a sleek little device. It fits into the style of the photographs, but, I mean, they're so posed and awkward. It's like they decided to do Gothic Lolita night on The Price is Right. It's not really sexy or mysterious, it's just silly.

When it comes down to it, the best glamour shot of a PSP wasn't even made by Sony marketing. It was made by some girl. I linked to the original picture from Kotaku a few days ago. Much to my surprise, the girl writes for gaming blog-thing RedAssedBaboon under the name of Hatsumi. She has in fact written about "the picture," finally proving that ours isn't the only website where women will fondle gaming hardware and then reflect on it.

One the one hand, I think it's really awesome that our gaming devices can look like something you'd want to be seen using. I remember when critics praised the Gameboy Advance SP because it was so small that respectible people could carry it discreetly. Why shouldn't the world learn to see people who play games as playful, sexy creatures? On the other hand, there's the flag waving nerdcore gamer in me who wants a handheld to be awkward and gangly because it means that when I do see one it's like a little sign saying "I am of your people."

This is, of course, ridiculous. Random guy on the street with a GBA SP is no more likely to be anything like me than random guy on the street with a PSP. It's great that gaming can be trendy, and that the 300 pound guy on the train the other day and Paris Hilton are both PSP owners. Maybe now there'll be some demand for game-related clothing that breaks the basement-casual standard? After all, if there's one thing we gamers know how to do, it's play (and pwn) well with others, and the pool of "others" just got a whole lot bigger. Right now, gamers are coming out of the basement, into the lime-light, and you know what they look like? They look like me. They look like you. They look like Hatsumi. But they're all here because they love games. No doubt we'll get to have arguments over who was a gamer "before it was cool," but if it means that we can argue over a friendly wi-fi deathmatch, then I'm looking forward to such inanities.

Koei has the right idea.

I love that it has compartments for your games - and your lipstick! Go here and click on "sa.ku.ra".

(Thanks, Jarik!)

Especially acapella chorus geeks. They are the worst.

I mean, I am a geek, in my own way, and most of my friends are too, but there's something so... aggressively geekly, so gleefully, in-your-face geeky about chorus geeks. And I say this having done both theatre and chorus in high school and some in college. But in the geek hierarchy, there are good geeks and bad geeks. Yes, BAD GEEKS. And I'm sorry to those who are fan of this "style" of "music", but cutesy-pootsey oh-so-clever acappella singing is VERY, VERY, BAD GEEKERY.

Ryan points me to an excellent interview on Ain't it Cool News with David Jaffe, director of the game everyone's talking about, God of War:

"I am a massive movie fan. I’m totally inspired by movies. Hell, I’m more of a movie fan than a game fan. To hear another movie fan say that the game is great and that it works... I’ll tell you what. This is intentionally supposed to feel more like a movie. We did not want to make a game that was a hardcore game for gamers only. We wanted to make a game that was narrative, that was story-driven. We did things with hidden checkpoints so that if you died, you don’t have to replay very much. It’s really meant to be accessible..."

We’ve done a lot of commentary on the game in various magazines. Legal doesn’t like it when I say, “Here are specific things which were influential,” for some reason. I guess we’re supposed to create in a vacuum and never have any influences of any kind. You can just play through GOD OF WAR and be like, “Oh, there’s RAIDERS, there’s Harryhausen, there’s Marvel Comics.” And then hopefully, beyond that, people will still think that GOD OF WAR has its own identity. It’s clearly born of a love of those sorts of pop culture entertainments.

Blogs, in case you didn't know, are the new corporate buzzword. So everyone at my workplace has a blog. Never mind that I already have two - I've started a third one for my work that I'm calling "diaries", as it reflects a more personal approach to gaming in work and life. So, there it is - GameGirlDiaries.

All the other editors have blogs too, as well as some of the online guys. You can see their stuff all together at Blog Faction.

There is a piece in last Sunday's New York Times about the New Games Journalism. (Free registration required.) Go read it; although it's brief, regurgitates all the old saws of the NGJ, and says odd things about how Americans rarely write NGJ, it is after all in the Sunday Times.

via Kotaku

*If the Times equals legitimacy, then what does the Post equal?

via Sarahlah at Athena's Legacy, who refers Kotaku, who is refering PSM...

Lara Croft is finally starting to look less like a 90's comic book leading lady and more like that totally hot girl I see while running on the beach. Maestro, I say, right on.