Gaming News and Views 8-11-06
There's just too much interesting stuff going on in the gaming world! Enjoy!

Illinois Has To Cough Up A Half Million To Pay For Its Illegal Anti-Game Law
So Illinois passes a patently unconstitutional law. The ESA rigorously defends it. The federal judge throws the law out, ruling, "If controlling access to allegedly 'dangerous' speech is important in promoting the positive psychological development of children, in our society that role is properly accorded to parents and families, not the State."

And now the state of Illinois has to pay the ESA's legal expenses as well as its own. This is an incredible waste of taxpayer money, and shows great irresponsibility on the part of lawmakers, who knew dang well that similar laws have been struck down as unconstitutional elsewhere.

Get more juicy tidbits at GamePolitics.com and VideoGameVoters.com

The Omega Syndrome Updated With Easier-To-Use Interface
Okay, a bit closer to home... The Omega Syndrome has been updated (again). All versions get an improved interface, with skill commands available right from the main screen this time (yes, yours truly got stuck for five minutes trying to figure out how to repair an elevator with the old version, so I'm interested in trying out this new change). Also, with the full version, more comic-book pages have been added to improve the storytelling. Enjoy!

You can read more about the interface change here, and you can download the update from The Omega Syndrome's page at Rampant Games. I do not know if you will have to re-install the add ons for the full version after this, however. I'm going to be offline tonight, so I may not be able to test it out until Sunday or so. If you try it out before then, please note what it takes in the comment section.

A Spirited Defense of Story In Games
I don't know if anyone else follows the endless rounds of the storytelling vs. gameplay debates that go around, especially in the academic circles. I praise the debators for doing this (and I'm blown away that videogames are a subject of academic study and debate). It's one of those chicken-and-the-egg type arguments that will NEVER be conclusively resolved, but I think that (up to a point) we learn a lot from the discussion.

Psychochild, a game development and MMORPG development veteran, has an excellent article offering his moderate opinion, and links to more interesting articles on the subject.

E3, Not Love, Is A Battlefield
Raph Koster has an excellent article entitled "E3, Retail, Dinosaurs, and Mammals," and suggests that the downsizing of E3 is a defensive measure on the part of major publishers that may backfire as they practice an older model of PR / Media Relations that may no longer succees in today's information-rich world. I thought it spoke nicely to some of the same issues I brought up in yesterday's article, and shows the continuation of the same mentality I discussed a year ago.

20 Minutes of Videogames Makes You Violent?
Thanks to Amber Night (and WomenGamer.com) for this juicy tidbit: 20 Minutes of Videogames Desensitizes You To Violence.

My contention is that 20 minutes of any sort of highly active or strenuous activity would produce the exact same effect. Like Tennis! Yeah, sure.... the score of zero is called "Love" in Tennis. So what's the winning score? It must be HATE AND WAR! Hah! I've broken the code. Why did violent games have a higher effect than the non-violent ones? Duh... the violent games deliberately invoke player's fight-or-flight instincts!

Seriously, I'd like to see someone test that out, but I'm not qualified. Not that this would stop me from making outrageous claims just like these researchers. Apparently mainstream media will buy just about anything that sounds sensational that Joe Public can't tell is an obvious line of Bull Hockey. Oh, well.

Truth In Videogames Ratings? Yeah, Right!
Gamasutra has published ESA President Doug Lowenstein's response to the Truth In Videogame Ratings Act, co-sponsored by one of my very own congressman from here in the State of Utah, Jim Matheson. The response is a good one - it basically sheds some light of The Real World upon an act certainly sounds well-intentioned, but in practice is incredibly unreasonable.

Games aren't movies or books, folks. They aren't static experiences that can be exhaustively evaluated. I put well over 100 hours into playing Oblivion, yet I doubt I saw even half of the content in the game. I spent too much of my time hopping through meadows picking flowers.

If I was hired by the ESA at great expense to evaluate Oblivion prior to its release, I still couldn't tell you from first-hand experience that the game allows you to murder innocents with little or no repurcussion. I couldn't tell you if there was a hack you could make to the code that would allow you to make some female characters topless. As far as I know, there could be some remote dungeon somewhere in the game called the Marquis de Sade's Pleasure Palace!

So how would my evaluation be any better (aside from being far more expensive, to the game industry AND the taxpayers for GAO supervision) than what we've already got?

It's just one more horribly ill-conceived bill that our politicians are wasting time and taxpayer dollars creating, defending, and ultimately losing.
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 9:35 AM (Permalink)