Remember that ‘infamous’ sex scene in Mass Effect? Well, Fox News, fabled U.S. news organization, reported on it. And apparently they slightly got the facts wrong.
EA is doing the sensible thing and is pointing out Fox’s reporting inaccuracies in public, and in no uncertain terms. I don’t know how effective it will be, but still, it’s a great letter.
Daniel Radosh has written an op-ed about the state of the interactive medium in the New York Times. Some choice quotes:
Games boast ever richer and more realistic graphics, but this has actually inhibited their artistic growth. The ability to convincingly render any scene or environment has seduced game designers into thinking of visual features as the essence of the gaming experience.
[…]
If games are to become more than mere entertainment, they will need to use the fundamentals of gameplay — giving players challenges to work through and choices to make — in entirely new ways. The formula followed by virtually all games is a steady progression toward victory: you accomplish tasks until you win. Halo 3, for all its flawless polish, does not aspire to anything more. It does not succeed as a work of art because it does not even try.
None of this should be news to anyone inside the industry. The real news is that there is a decent article about games as an art form in the New York Times.
(Via Grand Text Auto.)
Ziggurat Con - The World’s First War Zone Game Convention? | Gamegrene.com
A gaming convention in Iraq, how cool. Via Penny Arcade.
Best 300 parody so far.
Will Wright gets a prize from a Hollywood organization (via Gewgaw)
Cool, and as Robin mentioned, cool because Will makes very un-Hollywood-ish games (or perhaps this is why he got the award?). It also helps that some of the other Very Well Known game designers are not American, I guess…
I am, in fact, not dead. Although I do have a cold. Some random stuff to prove I am at least physically present:
(From all over the place.)
Both Game Girl Advance (or, at least, people commenting there) and Chris Crawford doubt the rather positive demographic numbers from a recent ESA press release.
Greg, of Greg.org, writes about Gus Van Sant’s new movie, Elephant, the techniques it uses, and how it, and Van Sant’s previous movie Gerry, are like video games.
Game Girl Advance linked to this blog entry about gaming in Iraq. It makes Iraq seem less foreign.
This is a site (in Russian, apparently) containing pictures of toilets in games. It’s an impressive list: however, they do not have screenshots of Albion, which featured space-age toilets in the human spaceships (designed by Thorsten Mutschall), and weird, organic communal toilet-plants in the houses of the indigenous species (designed by Erik Simon). As far as we were aware, we were the first to put toilets in role-playing games.
A questionable honor, I suppose, but still.
(From BoingBoing.)
There is this trend it seems, in MMO games, to have female characters with otherworldly attributes. Now I know the idea is to lose yourself in a wonderful game of elaborate fantasy, ancient lore, unreal landscapes and diverse species, but I ask you: Does a female Gnome really need to wear a 32 DDD cup? Yes, I’m speaking about headlights, tatas, racks, boobies, melons….breasts. I want to know why is it female characters have the ability to make enormous breasts even larger, with newer games having customizable features to do so, yet male characters don’t seem to be able to change their size…and yes I mean that size. Who’s to say, as a female in real life who plays female characters online, that I’d not like to see male characters with their attributes larger?
Read the rest of this hilarious editorial.
(From Slashdot Games.)
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