I'm Taking a Break

I've been busy enough that I'm taking about a week or two off from the blog. In the meantime, check this study out.

Guess the Game (Character) 2!

Here's another of my little brother's drawings, like the Resident Evil one he made before, and you're to guess which game (in this case a game character) he's symbolizing. No one guessed it last time, more likely due to lack of traffic rather than difficulty, but this one should be a bit easier. Let's try:

Northern Illinois Shooting Blamed on Games As Well

Yet another college shooting, and yet another bit of violence blamed on a "violent culture" of video games happened last week. After the shooting, Jack Thompson immediately sprang up in a FOX News interview, in which he obviously blamed the shooting on "the Counter-Strike Half-Life" game, which apparently the shooter had played along with most people in the world. Makes me wonder why I haven't killed anyone yet. It must happen at some point, I just wish I'd get it over with now. Anyway, then a New York Post article mentioned Counter-Strike, and an Illinois legislator blamed our violent culture rather than gun control issues. The guy came off medication, so I'm not sure why a history of playing Counter-Strike would be more responsible than that. Also, any proposed gaming legislation wouldn't even affect his playing Counter-Strike, because he's 27 years old. I hope that we're not going to suggest 30 year-olds can't play violent games either. Especially if they can have whatever guns they want.

All Together Now: 2/10/08 - 2/15/08

Sail the ship. Chop the tree. Skip the rope. Look at me! All together now...

2/10/08- I made a quick recap on several things at once, like a Pokemon hold-up, and the British crackdown on video games.

2/11/08- I fell for the reigning rumor that Wal-Mart was about to cover up M-rated games. Yeah, I'm pretty ashamed, because I realized it must have been a joke at the time, but couldn't find anyone laughing.

2/12/08- I talked about Hush, the quick downloadable Rwandan genocide game.

2/14/08- I quickly linked to Bruce on Games' editorial on the British gaming crackdown, and gave you all a chance to guess what game my brother was thinking of when he drew a little picture of raccoons with umbrellas in front of an evil house.

Holiday Laziness: Guess the Game!

I don't feel like writing a huge essay or anything for Valentine's Day, so instead I'll show you one of my little brother's drawings and you have to guess in the comments which game he's drawing it about. This may be tough, because it's not literally like the game, but think about what all the things in the picture are, and I'll devote a hall of fame on all future Guess the Game posts to whoever is first to guess it. Click on the picture for a much closer look.

Shameless Link: The British Government is Stupid

Really, just read this story for all you need to know. The British government is forcing every video game to go through BBFC classification, as I've said before, and this post from Bruce on Games tells you everything that's wrong with it.

Hush: Rwandan Genocide Is a Rythm Game (Actually Very Tasteful)

In Ian Bogost's new column at Gamasutra, he talks about a new-ish game (describing it as a video game vignette) about the Rwandan genocide of 1994. Hush comes from USC, (where you got the funky flOw) and it's basically a five minute long "rhythm" game. Letters appear on the screen that you are to press on the keyboard when the letters reach their brightest. This represents you, a mother, singing to your baby to soothe him, while Hutu soldiers are committing a massacre around you. You constantly hear sounds of the massacre, knowing that allowing your baby to get too riled up will expose your location, killing you. It's not exactly Rock Band, no... Even the gameplay isn't, due to the patience necessary in waiting for the letters to actually get bright enough. Well, it's recommendable, and provides a short but intense emotional experience for those willing to be given a short but intense emotional experience from a game about singing to a baby. So any Call of Duty freaks can probably just move along.

The Craziest Thing I've Ever Heard: Wal-Mart Covering Game Covers

Wal-Mart is placing a porno-style three quarters black sleeve over M-rated game covers. This has to be a joke. And T-rated games may get half sleeves. That makes even less sense. I'm really afraid I'm being had here, this really sounds like a joke. There's not much more info here, but apparently this is true. What could possibly be "damaging" on a game cover? They're not "interactive", which is the buzz word for most who blame violence on video games. A quick look through the video rental store will show you that approximately one fourth of movies' covers involve you looking at the main characters of the movie through a girl's legs. You may laugh, but it's true.

And, of course, it wasn't true. Sigh.

Stuff I Done Heard on Them There Internets

Some people say you shouldn't even blog on weekends, because no one will read it. If that's the reason, then I shouldn't blog at all, but let's move on. I failed to post yesterday due to my recent purchase of Devil May Cry 4 and recent rediscovery of Civilization IV (two games so different that they don't use the same numeral system, but I'm playing them both). Video games get so much crap thrown at them every day that I'm already way behind. Just a quick scan of recent GamePolitics posts shows a local TV news story claiming games normalize killing, a kid stealing Pokemon cards from another kid at (Airsoft) gun point, and this whole British gaming crackdown business. The last item is what I suppose I'll talk about here, the other stories work just fine as headlines.

Gordon Brown, the somewhat new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom after Tony Blair stepped down, is apparently getting ready to implement British Board of Film Classification ratings for all video games, or at least a lot more than they're handling now. Tanya Byron, apparently a big psychologist or something across the pond, is releasing a new report on the game industry that will prompt government action. The new game ratings will actually make it illegal to sell games to those under the suggested ages. It's basically what we in the States have been trying to avoid for a long time. It creeps me out, I don't see why the pre-existing hassle of buying a game underage in stores has to now exist in law, though I'm guessing the purchaser can never be at fault with a law like this. Still, shivers down my spine.

All Together Now: 2/3/08 - 2/8/08

2/3/08- Grand Theft Auto is expected to be controversial yet again. (I'll leave some space for you to gasp in disbelief here).

2/4/08- Other countries than the United States have gaming controversies as well. Again, not a real shocker of a headline, but at least this one has some real details.

2/5/08- I began my Off-Topic Tuesdays with a new Google Map to complement the Gaming Around the World post from the fourth.

2/6/08- I examined the new study claiming that men are more likely to become addicted to video games. I had a couple of problems with it that have yet to be resolved.

2/7/08- There is too much orchestral music in big-budget games today, I've decided.

Also, I recapped the remaining presidential candidates' stances on gaming legislation to kick off "Patriatari Thursdays" on the blog. I still haven't decided whether that should be pronounced like "patriotic" or like "patria", the word for home country in several Romance languages. You decide.

Patriatari: Super Tuesday, and What it Means for Gamers

Super Tuesday in American Primaries was, well, Tuesday, and the results were pretty clear: The results were not clear (for the Democrats). McCain is almost certainly going to be the Republican nominee at this point, even though several key conservatives are expressing their dissatisfaction with America's choice. For the Democrats, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are consistently reported as ending in a tie, with roughly thirteen states going to Obama and nine to Clinton. This equals out to a tie (or perhaps more likely a Hillary advantage) due to Clinton's victories in New York and California, clearly key states. But, you likely already knew all that if you had cared in the first place.

My point here is to talk about what they have to do with the gaming world, as I originally did in my first popular-ish post at my old blog, The Wii PlayBox. The candidates list has shrunk quite a bit from them (with even Mitt Romney out of the race today) so I can get into more detail than before where more details exist. Most of the original story, (which Yahoo! stole from my earlier post and managed way more publicity even though they were really late *grumble*) came from the Common Sense Media questionnaire, asking if the candidates supported video game legislation from the federal level. Anyway, let's get started with the details:

Hillary Clinton: By a millimeter, a knife's edge, a photo finish, Hildawg is still front-runner for the Democratic nomination, and she's not exactly hip with gaming. She, along with another enemy of gaming, Lieberman, attempted to pass the Family Entertainment Protection Act in 2005 after the Hot Coffee scandal, which would have criminalized the sale of mature and above games to children under seventeen. The law was ruled unconstitutional basically because it would give the ESRB too much authority while they're still a private group, which Hildawg could theoretically still get around by abolishing them and setting up a government-run ratings system. In other words, she can and will propose video game legislation in the future, which likely still won't stand up in court. I hope.

John McCain: Not quite so clear. Like all Republicans beside "games are a cesspool of filth" Romney, McCain didn't respond to the questionnaire, so he doesn't have any specific stated stance on gaming legislation. Yahoo's post decided to try to determine his stance by the company he keeps, pointing out his friends Lieberman *ALERT ALERT* and baseball player Curt Schilling (?). I already talked about Lieberman in the Hillary post but Schilling is a bit of a stretch, in my opinion. He has supported McCain, and he owns a stake in an MMO company, apparently. I don't know that he's exactly a huge influence, but that's all we know about McCain, so that's the best we can come up with. At least he hasn't preached game legislation like Romney used to.

Barack Obama: The Wunderkind of the Democratic party (yes, I know he's 46... and not German) Obama seems sort of more hopeful on gaming than the other candidates. In his response to the questionnaire, he hinted at a possibility of legislation if the ESRB doesn't get their act together (what are they doing wrong?) but mainly just supports more studies on how games affect kids growing up. I don't know that I'd trust the studies at this point after I've looked at so many of them and how scattered their findings are, but this is better than straight-out legislation. Like on all of his stances, you can basically project whatever position you want onto him and support it with something he's said. Actually, that's true with a lot of the candidates on a lot of things, but that's for another post.

Mike Huckabee: Who knows? Really, he didn't answer the questionnaire, and he has no one with any position on video games to link to, either. He has played Guitar Hero before, but that doesn't actually mean anything. He's still a conservative, though perhaps actually less than the others on social issues, and he's likely not going to worship the ESRB. There you have it, that's all I know.

Ron Paul: Yeah right, he's not a frontrunner, I'm not going to talk about him. Oh, wait, I'm already getting hate mail from his supporters. Uh, okay, um, Ron Paul is, like, best buds with the constitution so he'll totally send gamers checks in the mail for supporting the arts. But seriously, Paul supporters, just chill out a little bit.

Off-Topic Opinion: Too Much Orchestral Game Music

Just a quick thought: I believe that too many games now have big-name orchestras playing their music. It seems like games with a large enough budget just decide "Why not?" and hire one. Don't get me wrong, several first-person shooters like Halo should just stick with the orchestras so they don't end up with Dynasty Warriors-esque lame rock. I actually think Half-Life handles their music pretty well, with none for the majority of the game with special (non-orchestral) music suddenly coming up at tense points in the game. However, Ratchet & Clank should not have orchestral music. It's soft, unobtrusive, and completely forgettable, and I don't like that. I actually liked the one-man-with-a-computer compositions featured in similar 3D platformers like Spyro the Dragon that were sort of cool and at least could be heard. I know somebody will disagree with me, so go ahead and tell me so.

Studying Studies: Gender Differences in Gamers

Originally via GamePolitics, I came upon the recent Stanford University study that said men are more likely to become addicted to video games than women. Quote from the press release:

"Allan Reiss, MD, and his colleagues have a pretty good idea why your husband or boyfriend can’t put down the Halo 3. In a first-of-its-kind imaging study, the Stanford University School of Medicine researchers have shown that the part of the brain that generates rewarding feelings is more activated in men than women during video-game play."

Format

I thought at least "the Halo 3" should amuse some of you. Anyway, twenty-two people, evenly divided in gender, were given a game to play involving balls and a line across the middle of the viewing ground (you may as well just look at it in the original Stanford link up at the top.) A constant stream of balls come towards the middle line, and the line will move left if hit by a ball and move right if the balls are far enough away from it. The participants were only told to click as many balls as they could, removing them from the screen, but everyone quickly found out that their "territory" to the left of the middle line had to be increased to "win".

Results

The results came in roughly equal for the genders in number of balls clicked, but the men came out with more territory than the women, by identifying the balls closest to the wall as needing to be clicked first. According to Alan Reiss, “The females ‘got’ the game, and they moved the wall in the direction you would expect. They appeared motivated to succeed at the game. The males were just a lot more motivated to succeed.” After looking at the visuals for brain activity from the fMRI the players were hooked to, the researchers noticed increased activity in the area of the brain representing both reward and addiction for whoever ended up with more territory, meaning, the males.

My Response

So the conclusion that made the headlines and became more general and underexplained with each repeated telling was "Men more addicted to video games". I have a couple of issues with the study, which I discussed here at VG Researcher alongside Wai Yen Tang's write-up about the study. My main issue was likely the fact that the researchers claimed this game was "a fairly representative, generic computer game." Boiling down video games into this one simplistic tech demo-level program seems unfair, though I understand it's necessary that the experiment eliminate as many variables as possible. The game, in the end, doesn't represent video games so much as goal-oriented activities due to its abstract nature. Therefore, I think that a better conclusion would likely be "men are more addicted to achieving abstract goals" instead of video games. It mostly makes me wonder if the same brain visual results would occur from, say, scoring in a sport or winning at roulette in a comparison between genders.

Another interesting point we happened upon in our discussion at VG Researcher was that games without specific goals tend to be the ones stereotypically associated with girl gamers. The Sims and the various match-three puzzle games are often associated with girl gamers, and at least The Sims doesn't have a specific goal the player must reach. The puzzle games don't especially either, with more of a vague infinite points system than levels or worlds to beat. One can never "beat" Tetris or Bejewled especially, and girls seem to have an easier time obsessing over it than Civilization IV.

The Stanford research team said they planned to do more research in the area, which is definitely what I'm looking for. It's an interesting topic, and it's not likely to lead to laws being passed against gaming, so I'm all for it. I still have some concerns about the findings that will need more study to resolve.

Off-Topic Tuesday: New Google Map

Tuesdays will, in the future, tend to be more off-topic than even this, but today I began making a Google Map for gaming controversies to complement my Gaming Around the World Monday feature. I haven't quite decided where I'll put it yet, but here it is, if everything's working correctly:



View Larger Map

The State of the Union: Gaming 'Round the World

America isn't everything, even though Super Tuesday is tomorrow, but other countries have gaming controversies as well. Some of them have it even worse off, despite the fact there's no Thompson, Clinton, Romney, or Lieberman in their country. I'll quickly summarize the state of gaming in several other countries recently.


China: As GamePolitics reported today on a very old blog post from Henry Jenkins of MIT, China doesn't care so much as the United States about violence in video games so much as "gaming addiction". The notion of gaming addiction is supposed to loosen traditional family and community bonds and decrease productivity, and Jenkins argues that it benefits China to build the concept of an addiction to gaming. This would provide justification for China's increasingly restrictive policies on the internet and video games. China has banned all sorts of things online and modified a few others: China has banned children from internet cafes, imposed time restrictions on visiting those cafes, banned certain games for showing China didn't always belong to the current regime, and forced Google to support the great firewall. As capitalist of a communist country China is, they're still really restrictive about the internet, putting them at about the worst civilized country to be in if you're a gamer.

Germany: Germany has a strange couple of rulings on games as well. First of all, they don't allow any swastikas in their games or anything that's "not art", which is way more trouble than it's worth, but not very important. In a very strange decision, Half-Life was forced to tone the entire game down by a lot, resulting in robots instead of marines, no blood, vanishing enemies, and other nonsense.

Greece: Alright, this is the worst country for a gamer in the world, assuming you're not in a third-world country. In 2002, Greece right-out outlawed gaming. Nothing from solitaire to Brain Age could be played in Greece, even by foreigners just arriving in the nation. There was obviously a tremendous outcry, and the ban was reduced to only apply to internet cafes in December 2003. That was a close one.

Finland: Another recent story from GamePolitics, the Finnish Christian Democrats are asking for an extra screening process on video games to be doubly sure they don't have any hidden bad things. The Finnish Games and Multimedia Association was quick to say that the process is really rather unnecessary and would simply hurt the industry by giving Finnish gamers a reason to buy their games from elsewhere while they face delays and possible censorship, sidestepping the extra process. I wouldn't expect this to go anywhere especially, it's just a party considering the motion, but I'm not exactly up on my Finnish politics, either.

South Korea: Take China's information, and tone it down a lot. South Korea has banned several of the usual violent video games like Grand Theft Auto and Manhunt, but also has a slight issue with games involving the two Koreas. Mercenaries, Ghost Recon, and Splinter Cell have all been banned due to either showing North and South Korea at war or destroying Korean land in the games.

Rockstar Braces for Impact Over GTA IV

Dan Houser, writer for GTA IV, stated in a Yahoo interview that he's, understandably, certain that this installment of the series will bring as much or more trouble than the last ones. He especially fears that the drunk driving and strip clubs are going to cause the most trouble, besides the whole batch of old features to the game. Houser said "I expect [controversy] because we've had so much of it in the past. I wish people would treat video games the same as other media. They seem to not want to do that for reasons that I don't understand. It's a convenient enemy for people." Grand Theft Auto really seems to me sort of mellow compared to some games out there now like Saint's Row, but GTA is cursed to receive the public outcry, as is anything put out by Rockstar until, I don't know, they release a Reading Rainbow game series.

All Together Now: 1/26/08 - 2/1/08

1/26/08 - Cooper Lawrence apologizes for her role in the FOX Mass Effect scandal.

1/27/08 - My most popular post by far, a list of the last year and a half's studies on gaming's effect on humans.

1/28/08 - Jack Thompson is revealed to think the Mass Effect scandal is silly and contrived.

1/30/08 - Grand Theft Auto is being blamed again for violence. Hardly news, is it?

1/31/08 - Cooper Lawrence sticks by the University of Maryland study she cited, which is a good idea for her because the study can't be read without paying for it.