The release of Madden NFL 11 this summer will mark the beginning of a new shift in policy for publisher Electronic Arts—they will sell all the in-game advertisements themselves.

Previously the company had relied on third-party in-game ad specialists, such as Massive Inc. and IGA Worldwide reports MediaWeek. EA’s Senior Vice President of Global Media Sales Elizabeth Harz said the move would allow EA to offer more elaborate,” integrated packages to advertisers.”

Educators in the United Arab Emirates are attempting to push fledgling game developers towards making more socially conscious games and now one school will be able to create such applications using one of the most powerful game engines available.

The Khaleej Times reports that American University in Dubai has inked a deal with Crytek in order to use the developer’s CryEnginge as a basis for developing Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC “edutainment” titles. UAE teachers are trying to get students away from creating violent action games in order to “create content that imparts values, culture and critical thinking skills to digital natives.”

Dr  Basel Dayyani, Associate Professor of IT at the American University in Dubai on the movement:

A British ex-pat currently living in Dubai has penned an article that examines what it’s like to be a gamer in the United Arab Emirates.

Josh Brindley wrote the two-part piece for GamesLatest and began by outlining some generalities, such as how Dubai gamers seem to prefer single-player gaming over multiplayer, though the writer points out that this may be more of a factor of Xbox Live not being officially supported yet in the UAE. Sony’s PlayStation network, however, has been supported in the country since the PS3’s introduction.

UAE gamers also seem to prefer the PS3 over the Xbox 360 and sports games over shooters.

Brindley also details how easy it is to acquire banned games in the UAE:

Despite being officially banned, many games can be acquired over the counter fairly easily in the gray market because the gamers demand for it is high, and everybody’s willing to pay to play.

Many expats who’ve just moved into the country don’t know about the grey market games, so they aren’t be able to buy them.

He sums up:

Most of the differences are because gaming isn’t quite as popular as in the UK, but the market is growing rapidly so it won’t be long before most of the differences are resolved. If the UAE adopted some of the methods of distribution the UK uses, then I think the gaming market would grow faster.

Microsoft has updated its Xbox Live Code of Conduct with terminology that now allows gamers to include their sexual orientation in their Gamertag.

Gamers are now free to label themselves as Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Transgender or Straight, in a move GayGamer called “fantastic.”

In a letter announcing the change, Microsoft’s Mark Whitten wrote:

Under our previous policy, some of these expressions of self-identification were not allowed in Gamertags or profiles to prevent the use of these terms as insults or slurs. However we have since heard feedback from our customers that while the spirit of this approach was genuine, it inadvertently excluded a part of our Xbox LIVE community. This update also comes hand-in-hand with increased stringency and enforcement to prevent the misuse of these terms.

More from GayGamer on the change:

This is something we have been fighting for here on GayGamer for a long time and it's gives us a wonderful feeling to finally see it come to fruition.

Congratulations to Microsoft and Xbox Live for stepping up to the plate and listening to the concerns of an important and oft overlooked section of the gaming community. Bravo!

Thanks Andrew!

Earlier this week we detailed a review paper penned by Dr. Linda Papadopoulos, which explored the Sexualization of Young People.

Who better to further explore the topic than a female gamer that revels in violent games? Julie from our sister site GameCulture offers her take on the subject here, go check it out.

Here's a little taste:

A lot of the findings in the report deal specifically with younger people and teenagers. I'm not a parent so I can't comment on what I would or wouldn't do in that situation. And perhaps I've become desensitized to the level of violence depicted in video games. In fact I enjoy games with alot of action, guns, and yes, even violence. Is it wrong that I find games with guns enjoyable to play? I like shooting at other players and killing them but I'm not about to go and grab a gun and shoot someone.

The earthquake that rocked Chile last weekend killed hundreds and affected the lives of thousands more. Zam has a story on how the survival of a game-related accessory contributed a little hope to one of the quake’s survivors.

A 33-year old woman gamer named Karen, who lives in Santiago, was playing Guitar Hero: Metallica with friends when the quake hit. Many of her possessions were strewn about and destroyed as a result of the 8.8 magnitude earthquake, but the survival of one specific object, a World of Warcraft Blood of the Horde stein, gave her a reason to believe that the rest of her family in Chile had survived the quake intact.

She wrote an email to the Taverncraft, the stein’s maker just days after the disaster, writing:

All i wanna say that you made a good product and little stein give me hope, and have family in Concepcion and the other region that are the most affected for the earthquake and when I see the stein without a scratch for me was like ... yeah maybe my family made it too... that day I couldn't sleep... and only yesterday i have news all my family from the south are alive :)

Karen also told Zam that she and her friends have continued to play games as a way to get through the aftermath of the earthquake.

The talking head from the Council on Children and the Media, who claimed in an Australian TV report that videogames are to violence like cigarettes are to lung cancer, is just a sock puppet of South Australian Attorney General Michael Atkinson.

Dr. Wayne Warburton made the claim in a piece that aired on Australia’s Ten network earlier this week. News.com reports that the Council on Children and Media, also known as Young Media Australia, has received tens of thousands of dollars in funding from Atkinson.

A spokesperson for Atkinson verified the link, which sees the group receive a grant annually in order to fund its Know Before You Go project, which is designed to provide information to parents on what films are suitable for children.

While Atkinson’s office would not reveal the amount of money that changed hands, a Labor MP talking in parliament in 2006 put the figure at $33,000.

Council on Children and the Media CEO Barbara Biggins said that Atkinson has no influence on the group’s view on videogames, “It's the only project that's funded by him and it's been funded for years now. And I think good on him for helping parents to understand the classification system better. That doesn't mean that we owe him anything in terms of what we do with campaigns.”

Update: Wow, Jack Thompson actually made a great point in relation to this story. In between urging me to pay attention and calling Hal Halpin my puppet master, JT notes that Dr. Craig Anderson made a similar reference to cancer in a 2003 paper on violent games:

Myth 9. The effects of violent video games are trivially small.

Facts: Meta-analyses reveal that violent video game effect sizes are larger than the effect of second hand tobacco smoke on lung cancer, the effect of lead exposure to I.Q. scores in children, and calcium intake on bone mass. Furthermore, the fact that so many youths are exposed to such high levels of video game violence further increases the societal costs of this risk factor (Rosenthal, 1986).

Update 2: Texas A&M Texas A&M International University researcher, and nemesis of Dr. Anderson, Christopher Ferguson also wrote in to point us towards a research paper of his (PDF) that goes to great lengths to debunk Anderson’s claims which JT referenced above.


Thanks to everyone who sent this story in!

A review penned by Dr. Linda Papadopoulos into the Sexualization of Young People, which was alluded to last week on GP, has been released and videogames play a prominent role in it.

The review (PDF) was done at the request of the UK’s Home Office and is part of a government strategy to address violence against females. In a foreword, Papadopoulos writes that the document is “not an opinion piece,” but one constructed from “empirical data from peer reviewed journals.”

In her Executive Summary, the doctor notes that “games are becoming increasingly graphic and realistic,” and that children are “more and more likely to play games without adult supervision.” She also adds that a link between violent content and aggression has been cited in “several studies,” and that it is “widely accepted that exposure to content that children are either emotionally or cognitively not mature enough for can have a negative impact.”

Under section five of the report, entitled Sexualized Content and the Mainstreaming of Pornography, Papadopoulos notes that “High street stores sell video games where the player can beat up prostitutes with bats and steal from them in order to facilitate game progression,” leading to the following “clear” message to girls that this type of media portrays, as interpreted by the doctor, “... young girls should do whatever it takes to be desired. For boys the message is just as clear: be hyper-masculine and relate to girls as objects.”

A few other videogame references from the review:

Violence against women is often trivialised. For example, in the game Rape-Lay…

Many popular video games effectively reward children for engaging in violent, illegal activity, albeit virtually…

Nevertheless, it is imperative that we acknowledge the very real possibility that, say, pornography that shows girls talking with relish about pre-teen sexual exploits, or highly realistic video games where players take on the role of stalker and rapist might start to blur the boundaries between what is acceptable and what is not. [Ed. does that sound like empirical data?]

Among her sweeping recommendations, Papadopoulos recommends that game consoles be shipped with parental controls pre-activated and that:

Games consoles are sold with a separate ‘unlocking’ code, which purchasers can choose to input if they wish to use or allow access of the console to adult and online content.

GP: Papadopoulos' bio notes that she has made appearances on the TV series Big Brother, which as our resident curmudgeon DarkSaber was quick to point out, is not known for serving up content that is exactly empowering for any form of life, including females. There is no mention of (nor blame placed on) Big Brother in her report. Indeed, videogames are more of a focus of her review than television.

An online game launching tomorrow will attempt to spur players into making headway against some of the world’s biggest problems.

CNN details the game, entitled Evoke, which is billed as an entry in the “alternate reality” genre. Developed by the World Bank Institute and designed by Jane McGonigal, the game will last ten weeks. Over the course of that time period, participants will be presented with new challenges and will attempt to make headway against the challenges in real-life. For example, if a current challenge involves famine, players might try “to provide meals for someone in their neighborhood.” Once they have documented their real-world actions, via a blog post, photo or video, they will receive credit for finishing the mission and can receive additional awards and rewards from fellow players.

Upon the game’s completion on May 12, players who complete all 10 challenges will be named a “Certified World Bank Institute Social Innovator – Class of 2010.” The best players can also receive travel scholarships and “online mentorships with experienced social innovators and business leaders from around the world.”

While anyone in the world can play Urgent Evoke, the game is designed for people in Africa, a place, which it’s noted, has less Internet access than anywhere else in the world. To that end, the game has been designed to work seamlessly on cell phones as well. So far 3,500 people have signed up to play the game, 400 of them from Africa.

CNN also has a short video up in which McGonigal gives an overview of Evoke.

A story on GameSpot features the opinions of Electronic Arts and Aliens vs. Predator developer Rebellion as related to the R18+ videogame rating discussion ongoing in Australia.

The Aliens vs. Predator game was originally Refused Classification by The Classification Board before successfully winning an appeal and an MA15+ rating. Rebellion producer Paul Mackman spoke to GameSpot about Rebellion’s position that it would not modify the game to appease censors:

This was important to us and something Sega agreed with, and I think they handled the appeal process very well. It reached a successful result and you guys get to play the game and that's the important thing. The politics aside, [it’s] really not for me to comment on.

Mackman indicated that keeping the game true to the film source was Rebellion’s top priority, “…it's fair to say these are fiendish monsters from outer space and they do commit violent acts. Those are all represented in the films, so I don't think we would be true to the licence if we didn't portray that.”

Electronic Arts, who most recently clashed with the rating board over Left 4 Dead 2, provided a statement on their backing of an R18+ rating category:

Government policies that refuse to rate mature content effectively censor the content that adult players want to play. This shows a poor understanding of exactly who plays interactive games in Australia. The spectrum of gamers is as wide as the viewership of television, movies, theatre, and the readers of books.

A government policy that keeps our games out of stores and forces developers to rewrite code is censorship. Age rating systems are designed to help people make appropriate content choices for the right age groups.

In a related article, GameSpot notes that both the Australian Sex Party and the Pirate Party Australia have thrown their weight behind the introduction of an R18+ videogame rating category, while more traditional parties, such as the Greens and The Federal Coalition, have adopted a wait and see attitude.

Greens Senator Scott Ludlam did offer his take on South Australian Attorney general Michael Atkinson however:

I think the position he took to block the rest of the country from moving forward was really unhelpful, and I don’t think he necessarily provided the arguments to back up the position he took.

Thanks Ryan!

Not long after the ESRB retracted their online ratings summary of PSP game Dead or Alive: Paradise, the "creepy" and "voyeuristic" game is in the spotlight once again, with director Yoshinori Ueda claiming the game is not "soft-core porn".

In an interview with Eurogamer, Ueda fired back at critics claiming the game is sexist, saying "We're certainly not trying to degrade women. They have beautiful bodies. We're trying to show off the beauty of their bodies but we're not trying to be degrading about it - we're trying to show that they are beautiful characters."

Ueda counters accusations that DoA:P's excessive mammaries have nothing to do with game play by asserting that DoA:P isn't really a game anyway, at least not in "the traditional sense".  "What we offer is a selection of things to play and activities to have fun with. The players have the freedom to play Paradise however they want," Ueda said. "For us, the goal was really to offer a little bit of paradise to the users, and we hope that people playing the game will be able to come away with the feeling that they've visited paradise."

GP: So it is a game, it's not a game, it's about the characters, it's about whatever the players want... Ueda's point unfortunately gets lost amidst the contradictions. It's a bit disingenuous to suggest that his game actually attempts to honor women, while dismissing that some may feel degraded. And while various branches of modern feminism offer competing arguments about whether women should or shouldn't to take pride in having an attractive body, the characters Ueda features in DoA:P aren't real -- they're not human.  Of course, this isn't a new issue, as the Dead or Alive series has been controversial for the sexualization of its characters since Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball. But does anyone else see something inherently chauvinistic about having a male director assert that all he wants to do is show off women's beautiful bodies for other people's pleasure?


Dan Rosenthal is a legal analyst for the games industry.

The Emergent Media Center of Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont is working on a unique game to educate boys on the effects of violence against women.

What makes the in-development game different is that it involves soccer, which should make the game more palatable to youngsters. As users play a soccer match, the on-field action will be broken up with narrative sections which pose social decisions, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education.

A team of 50 students is working on the game, which was funded by a grant from the United Nations Population Fund. Aimed at boys between the ages of 9 and 13 years of age, the game is scheduled for an online release in March.

Ann DeMarle, Director of the Emergent Media Center, hopes that the game will have international appeal. She commented on why the game targets boys, saying “We need education of women, and we need to help victims, but at the same time, you can only go so far if you can't change the culture of the men.”

As part of a campaign designed to boost recruitment, the French Army introduced a new campaign that uses the slogan “Devenez vous-même” or “Be Yourself,” and directs interested parties to visit the website DevenezVousMeme.com.

The French Army ad appears to have caught the eye of Electronic Arts, as an article on LusoGamer (translated) points out that an ad for Battlefield: Bad Company 2 appears to have somewhat appropriated the French Army slogan. The similarities were not very difficult to notice as the giant ads appeared right next to each other (picture) in a French subway station. EA’s ad directed users towards the (inactive) website DevenezPlusQueVous-meme.com, which translates to “Be More Than Yourself.”

Army General Philippe Pontiès didn’t find much humor in the matter, telling French website Ecrans (translated) that:

We are clearly in a situation of abuse of slogan. So far, our campaign is working very well, we have very good returns.

The General also noted that the army has been advertising in videogames, with good results, and, ironically enough, has advertised in select EA game, such as NHL 10, NBA Live 10 and Need For Speed Pro Street. The General made it clear that the Army advertises only in racing or sports games, never army or military-themed games.

The ad appropriation issue has apparently been resolved through dialog between the Army’s agency and Electronic Arts.


Thanks Emanuel!

The Quantic Dream-developed PlayStation 3 title Heavy Rain, which releases stateside today, will not see the light of day in the United Arab Emirates.

The Khaleej Times reports that the UAE’s National Media Council, in what sounds like a late reaction, stopped the release of the game. The paper speculated that a scene from the game in which a character is forced to perform a topless dance at gunpoint was most likely among the reasons for the game’s ban.

A Sony PR rep confirmed the game’s ban, noting that Heavy Rain “has been conceived from the earliest stages as a genuinely adult experience. This means that it deals with strong content including blood and nudity, but treats this content in amature and sensitive manner.”

Problem solving UAE residents that wish to play the game will probably not have too hard of a time finding the title according to one gamer, who said, “There’s a flourishing gray market out there and the title will be available there, if it already isn’t.”


Thanks Andrew and Gellymatos!

A UK psychologist has blamed videogames, among other media, for the sexualization of young girls.

Dr. Linda Papadopoulos (pictured), a clinical psychologist at London Metropolitan University, who has also appeared on TV shows such as Big Brother and the Celebrity Fit Club, called out games that contain high sexual content as “hypersexualising girls, telling them that their desirability relies on being desired.”

In a story in the London Evening Standard she specifically called out the browser-based game Miss Bimbo as an offender. The game entices girls to “Become the hottest, coolest most intelligent and talented bimbo the world has ever known!”

Papadopoulos’ comments were taken from an upcoming government inquiry into the subject, which will be published shortly. In her report, Papadopoulosis is expected to call for a labeling system to be slapped on airbrushed images used in media and an age limit for the some of the more racy men's magazines.

|Via MCVUK|

The founder of the website Hot Blooded Gaming has authored an extraordinarily introspective—and sometimes painful—piece on how videogames have always been there for him, through just about every tough moment he’s experienced in his life.

Calling games his “guardian angel,” author Kreyg details his love affair with games, which kicked off when he was only four years old and his family acquired a “broken” NES. By the time he began attending school, Keryg was not popular because he "was the fat kid,” but even then, videogames were there for him:

Video games helped make not having friends at the young age more bearable. It was how I got to have fun as a kid. While people were at birthday parties I wasn’t invited to, I was playing games that would have made a nice gift. Their loss, right?

Kreyg did eventually make some friends in high school; friends who shared a common love of games:

While the majority of the school was out partying and running from real cops, we were trying to not get busted in GTA and lose our turn to play. Ironic how we were playing GTA and staying out of trouble while some of our fellow classmates were the ones out getting in real trouble. As high school progressed, our weekend video game meet-ups were something we looked forward to.

Kreyg offers up many more tales (definitely read his full account here) before offering:

Throughout my life, I’ve been put in many tough situations. Through them all I’ve had one thing constantly there – video games. Video games made the bad times good, and the good times even better. Without video games, I feel many parts of my life, especially my childhood would have been a lot harder for me to get through.

 

Whether it be by coincidence or design, for the last 20 years of my life, video games have been my guardian angel.

Joe Stack, the man who crashed a plane into an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) building in Austin, Texas last week, has certainly made an impact on society as well, with many debating his manifesto in the wake of the incident

Whether you see Stack’s final message as the ramblings of a madman, or as the ramblings of a madman tinged with perhaps a vein of lucidity, Newgrounds has a very short and simple 8-bit styled game up on its site that will allow you to walk—and fly—a few feet in Stack’s shoes.

Entitled Tax Time!, the game begins with users burning their house down before jumping in a plane to their final destination. Along the way, news items converge and users can crash their plane into a car to earn an “Auto Recall” medal. Upon reaching their final destination, the game displays the message “Justice is Served” and awards the player another medal for “Sticking it to the Man.”
 
The title was created by Newgrounds member Falcon who says that he enjoys “making stupid games in 24 hours or less.” The game was submitted on February 18th, the same day Stack flew his plane into the building.


|Via PrisonPlanet|

The Singapore-MIT Game Lab has planned a benefit for Haiti earthquake victims that involves epic lengths of game play.

The Complete Game Completion Marathon 2010 will see a group of teams attempt to complete a wide variety of games. The event takes place this weekend, February 26-28 in the Gambit Game Lab on the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts and will be broadcast live on Ustream.

Donations are being accepted via the Complete Game Completion Marathon 2010 website and will benefit Partners in Health, a group that brings modern medical care to poor communities and which has been active in Haiti for over 20 years.

A full list of teams, with the games they will play and the estimated time of completion, follows:

• The Stickhandlers—NHL 10 full season—25 hours
• Fire Hose for Haiti—Final Fantasy, Mega Man 9 and Mario Kart—35 hours
• Being Bad for Good—Mass Effect 1 and 2—25 hours
• A Song for the World—Hatsune Miku: Project Diva—30 hours
• The Panzerfaustian Bargain—Left 4 Dead—8 hours
• Team Funwolf—Shadow of the Colossus—8 hours
• Team Funwolf: Lonewolf—The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time—15 hours
• Clara Fernandez Vara—The Curse of Monkey Island—15 hours
• Team Medkit—Doom 1 and 2—15 hours
• Team Friendless—Phantom Hourglass—18 hours
• Consoles Are So Last Millennium—every game on Marleigh Norton’s iPhone—13.5 hours

The Singapore-MIT Game Lab is a partnership between MIT and the government of Singapore designed to explore new directions in the development of videogames.

Jason/Jace Hall has had a long and varied career centered in interactive entertainment, but he’s found yet another new career to try out—recording star.

Hall is putting out an EP entitled Video Games Aren’t Bad For Ya, which as you might imagine, will attempt to put games in a positive light. The EP’s first single is called I Play W.O.W., an unapologetic ode to playing the massively multiplayer online game.

Hall's take on game critics:

When you are told that you are being lazy, or wasting your time, or being anti social – when in fact you have just spent 22 hours working VERY hard with a GROUP of people accomplishing extremely difficult tasks – you want to tell the uninformed person accosting you to F** OFF!

While the song has a certain Weird Al quality to it, it’s all in fun, and Hall is a giant of a man, so we’ll reserve any further judgment. Just go listen to/download a clean version of the song here. Clean and explicit versions are available on iTunes for 99 cents each.

Hall was a co-founder and CEO of Monolith Productions before moving on to become Senior Vice President of Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment. Now he is an Executive Producer of the ABC television show V: The Series and star of the Jace Hall Show.

The topic of violent and adult-rated games has once again bubbled up in Switzerland.

MCVUK and TechEye both report on a resolution that passed unanimously in the Commission for Legal Affairs and would make it illegal to sell games rated PEGI 16 or 18 to under-age minors. Swiss parliament will now have a chance to vote on the measure, which was originally introduced by Christian Democratic Party member and National Councillor Norbert Hochreutener in 2007.

TechEye writes that Hochreutener believes the law is needed to “enforce ratings and make sure kids cannot play what are called 'killer games' in the German-speaking part of Europe.”

A second, and more troubling motion, would call for a complete ban of violent and adult-themed videogames within the country. This motion passed too, though with a closer vote of nine to three, and will also head off to parliament for vote. One of the backers of this proposal is Social Democrat Evi Allemann (pictured).

Allemann’s website offers some of her thoughts (translated) on the banning of such “killer” games:

Such games do not make each one a killer, but they increase the willingness of those who are already vulnerable. A blanket ban on such games therefore seems appropriate and proportionate, especially since they do not have any worth protecting cultural and social content and there are thousands of other exciting games that work without such extreme violence.

One way to implement the motion lies in the operationalization of Article 135 of the Criminal Code. This prohibits the display, manufacture, importation, storage, promotion, etc. of sound and visual recordings of cruel violence.

Another country to keep an eye on in the future.

Edit: Fixed the link for the translated section of Alleman's website.

The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) kicks off tomorrow in Washington D.C. and organizers of the event are turning to videogames and hip-hop in an attempt to ramp up the event’s attraction to a younger audience.

Fox News reports that videogames will be featured in a room called the XPAC Lounge, or as one event organizer termed it, the “hub of fun.” The lounge was the brain-child of radio host Kevin McCullough and actor Stephen Baldwin.

Ten videogame stations will be featured in all, offering attendees the chance to play games such as Guitar Hero, Dance Dance Revolution and Call of Duty.

The XPAC Lounge will also be home to a late night “rap/jam” session on Thursday night. The article questions the viability of such a function in light of Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele’s (pictured) failed past attempts at interjecting hip-hop culture into conservative principals. Steele previously published a blog entitled “What Up?” that he eventually killed in reaction to ridicule of the name and he also reportedly once described a GOP public relations initiative as “off the hook.”

CPAC Director Lisa De Pasquale seemed to think that “the energy” is flowing more towards conservative candidates right now, adding, “To be a rebel on campus, you have to be a conservative."

5,000 people are pre-registered for the conference, 61.0 percent of whom are students.

The Homeland Guantanamos website offers an embedded Flash game designed to highlight the plight of immigrant detainees in U.S. custody.

Users will take on the role of a journalist posing undercover as an Immigrant Detention Center Guard in order to solve the death of 52-year old Guinea immigrant Boubacar Bah. A friendly detainee inside will aid the investigation as you tour the facility in search of clues.

The game is based on true events—Bah was a real detainee at the Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey (which the game models the detainee center after) and died in custody on May 30, 2007.

A video report from the New York Times on Bah’s death claims that following a fall, believed to have taken place in a bathroom, he was found unconscious. Bah later briefly regained consciousness and was taken to a medical center, where he became agitated. He was shackled and put in solitary confinement, where he again became unresponsive. 15 hours after his fall, Bah was rushed into emergency brain surgery. His family was not notified until five days after the fall. Bah was in a coma for four months before eventually dying.

The website estimates that 300,000 legal and illegal immigrants are currently in custody in the U.S. and that 87 immigrants have died in custody since 2003.

The game was developed by Free Range Studios for the human rights organization Breakthrough.

The New York Times video was just one-part of a series of reports on in-custody deaths of immigrants in the U.S.


Via ArtThreat.net

Xbox Live chatter between a Canadian and a Texan turned serious when the latter gamer disclosed plans to shoot up his high school.

The Texas gamer began by detailing his troubles in school to a Port Alberni, British Columbia Xbox Live opponent, which was normal enough, but eventually the Texas gamer spilled details on plans for attacking his school, including rattling off the names of fellow students he was going to target.

The talk alarmed the B.C. gamer enough that he contacted local Royal Canadian Mounted Police personnel, who started a cyber investigation. The RCMP contacted Microsoft and were eventually directed to a teenage suspect in San Antonio, Texas, who was arrested and is facing untold charges.
 
Port Alberni RCMP Staff Sgt. Lee Omilusik commented on the case:

This incident demonstrates the power of the electronic world and how different enforcement agencies can quickly work together to protect the citizens they serve, regardless of obstacles such as international barriers

The arrested boy was 16-years old and a student at John Marshall High School. The school issued a short message (PDF) to parents indicating that the boy would be removed from school “indefinitely.”

Local ABC station KSAT indicated that the gamers were playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

Thanks Andrew and whoever posted about it in the Shoutbox!

Following a prolonged battle and a series of false-starts, China’s General Administration of Press and Publication (GAPP) has finally given the official go-ahead for NetEase to operate the world of Warcraft expansion The Burning Crusade.

In granting the license needed to operate the game, GAPP said that NetEase had “taken necessary corrective measures." The decision came down on Friday wrote Digital East Asia. GAPP had previously suspended NetEase’s permit over what it termed “gross violations” of regulations.

In related news, China Tech News offers word of a new Chinese initiative spearheaded by game operators that will educate parents on how to best oversee their children’s online game activities.  Game operators Wanmei.com, Tencent, Shanda, Netease, Changyou and Giant Interactive are particpiants in the program, which will provide a variety of support materials for parents and also provide the means for parents to suspend or cancel their children’s accounts.

Digital East Asia also shed light on a series of YouTube videos (pictured) that lampoon the World of Warcraft Chinese debacle and use the situation to provide commentary on the rigid state of Chinese censors. The Wall Street Journal said about the video, “…its subtext is a broad, biting allegory of the fight against government Internet controls, peppered with allusions to a list of real-world conflicts in China over the past year.”

Part 1, with English subtitles, can be found here.

The Middlesex-London Health Unit of London, Ontario has launched an online game designed to educate teens and young adults on the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).

Adventures in Sex City will have players assume the role of one of four characters—Captain Condom, Power Pap, Willy the Kid or Wonder Vag—as they take on penis-armed (literally) villain the Sperminator, who is hell-bent on spreading his brand of STD-infected love to everyone in town.

Players will be asked a series of STD and sex-related questions. Right answers result in the Sperminator’s seed being repelled back at him, while a wrong answer can lead to your avatar being infected.

Shaya Dhinsa, Manager of Sexual Health at the Middlesex-London Health Unit, on the game:

Reaching teens and youth is a huge challenge for us, that’s why we worked directly with them to develop a resource that would catch their attention while providing important information in a fun way.

The game was developed in conjunction with Mind Your Mind, a London-based, nonprofit organization, with support from the Perth District Health Unit.

The Church of England has issued a call for tighter regulation of videogames.

The Church, which perhaps still has a bad taste in its mouth from the use of Manchester Cathedral in Resistance: Fall of Man, addressed the issue of violent games in a meeting of its general synod on Thursday night.

Following an introduction, in which speakers were cautioned not to mention the names of specific games because “there is a risk of legal proceedings,” Tom Benyon (pictured), a former MP, took the microphone.

Benyon labeled the Byron Report “good in parts,” but said that it “did not go far enough.” He proceeded to read a poem by Oliver Wendell Holmes which he felt “encapsulates the essence of what we are about today in the matter of violent and sexual DVDs.”

God's plan made a hopeful beginning. But man spoiled his chances by sinning. We trust that the story will end in God's glory. But, at present, the other side's winning.

He continued:

A bubbling sewer of gratuitously violent and sexual pornography in DVD games are washing all around us. Byron relied on the proposition that parents have a liability or are interested in controlling what their children do. We think, sadly, that that is optimistic and a prize hope.

Benyon went on to recount the story of a “family member” who “saw one so-called game some years ago and had nightmares. He was a teenager. He was an innocent and he was profoundly shocked. The damage that he suffered was substantial. The images remained with him for months.”

Benyon also had a compilation of violent games on CD that he was going to show, but he decided not to ruin the “evenings or supper” of attendees by showing it.

He added, “I know that the Devil is said to have all the best tunes. Without any question of doubt he has the monopoly of violent and pornographic videogames.”

The Archbishop of York offered analogies to Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, selecting a quote from the latter, that “law cannot legislate for morals, but it can actually regulate it.” He added, “On this great day of celebrating 20 years since Mandela came out of prison, can we help our young people to come out of the prison of these awful, awful videogames.”

Full audio of the hour-long meeting can be listened to here.


Via The Guardian

It’s the game that has enraged populaces around the world and now Italy has apparently noticed that Rapelay can indeed be found on the Internet.

Italian newspaper Il Corriere (translation here) has a story up which features an assemblage of important types screaming about the game being just a series of tubes away from common citizens.

Giorgia Meloni, Minister of Youth, said that he would speak to Postal and Communications Police to get the game removed from the Net, while the Mayor of Rome himself, Gianni Alemanno, called for the game to be banned.

Gabriella Moscatelli, President of Telefono Rosa, a group that fights violence against women, also came out against the availability of Rapelay, saying that it was an “incitement to commit a crime.”

Also joining in the condemnation of Rapelay were Barbara Saltamartini from the People of Freedom (PDL) party and Dorina Bianchi of the Union of Christian and Centre Democrats (UDC), who said something along the lines of “while spending commitment and energy to propose and promote policies to support women, we discover that the creators of a video game put the same amount of commitment to train a generation of rapists. I drop my arms.

GP: Just to clarify, the premise for the game is sick, there’s no doubt about that. The furor that continually crops over it each time a country “discovers” it however is bizarre, as are the subsequent attempts to scrub it from the Internet. Rapelay is definitely a uniter, in that it has virtually zero backers (other than Penn Jillette perhaps), making it the ultimate safe target for attack."


Thanks to reader ItaliAnon for the link and translation assistance!

Perhaps inspired by the likes of Ubisoft’s Jade Raymond (pictured), the Guildhall at SMU has reported that 20.0 percent of its January 2010 incoming class is female.

Compared to the percentage of women who currently work in game development, which the Guildhall puts at between 4.0 and 6.0 percent, this statistical anomaly has the school very excited, as Founder and Executive Director Peter Raad noted, “There has been a disparity between the number of men versus women in the video game industry far too long and we believe this increase represents a growing trend of more women seeking a career in game development.”

The Guildhall also shared that among the new students (cohort 14 is how the school refers to this latest class) are a pair of twin sisters studying software programming, a veteran of the Iraq War, a former NASA intern and students from Malaysia and Israel.

Raad believes that such diversity could lead, eventually, to better games being developed, “To create games that are compelling and games that appeal to an ever-expanding market of gamers, diversity must be cultivated within the development community, as well as within the individual teams that develop a single game.”

A new project co-founded by a Carnegie Mellon University graduate student is creating educational games for extremely affordable computers that are gaining popularity in developing nations.

PlayPower grew from an idea Derek Lomas had while attending a conference in India, where he noticed that families were snatching up $12 computer systems right and left. The 8-bit computers are not very powerful, but the processor that powers the PC (the MOS 6502, which powered the Apple II and Nintendo NES) is in the public domain, meaning that development is relatively easy and inexpensive.

Lomas told the Post Gazette, “It doesn't require a $50 million development budget to make a great game.”

The PlayPower team is currently at work on three games, two of which feature the Hindu deity Hanuman. One Hanuman-starring title will teach users how to type, with the hopes that such a skill could translate into better job opportunities, while the second is a multiple-choice quiz-type game. The third title in development will try to raise awareness of malaria.

Lomas added, “I think that many of the more powerful educational effects of the system can be in the way it changes a kid's interest and ambitions.”

Lomas anticipates that all three games can be finished this year. He also hopes to build a relationship with those selling the computers so that PlayPower’s software can be bundled in.

Over 1,000 volunteers from around the world are already on-board to assist in game development. PlayPower also hopes to harness the growing 8-bit retro community for assistance in future releases.

Jo Frost, best known stateside as the principal in the show Supernanny, has a new show airing in the UK and in its debut episode she attempted to tackle the issue of violent videogames.

The Guardian has a run down of the program (Jo Frost: Extreme Parental Guidance), in which Frost, with the assistance of Iowa State University’s Dr. Douglas Gentile, conducted an experiment on 40 boys.

In one experiment, the boys were split in half, with 20 playing a football game for 20 minutes while the other 20 played a first-person shooter for the same amount of time. Following their game play session, all 40 boys watched violent news footage and had their heart rate monitored. Boys who played the FPS were found to have slower heart rates while watching the violent on-screen reports versus those who played the sports game, leading to a voice over that declared, “Shockingly, just twenty minutes of violent gameplay was enough to densensitise the boys.”

Author Keith Stuart took the methodology to task, writing, “I'm no neuroscientist, but with the biological stress response recently engaged, surely it's no surprise that in the few minutes after violent gameplay, test subjects react differently to violent stimuli?”

Stuart continued:

So really, what does this all say about the long-term effects of exposure to violent videogames? I would suggest very, very little.

An additional experiment, in which Gentile knocked over a can of pencils in front of each boy individually, was supposed to measure empathy. Reportedly only 40.0 percent of the boys who played the FPS helped to pick up the pencils, versus 80.0 percent of those who played the football game.

The combination of the two tests, and the resulting conclusions, were a bit too much for Stuart to take:

Cognitive neuroscience is a complex field - it is perhaps not something to be prodded and poked at during a piece of realty TV voyeurism masquerading as documentary material.

He added:

…if just 20 minutes of exposure is enough to turn normal boys into desensitized monsters, our streets should be filled with violence. They're not.