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.