… until the game is linked to as the cause of a recent schoolyard shooting, bringing with it a slew of ethical questions (what are the programmers’ responsibilities?), the perspectives that give the programmers a rude awakening as to the consequences of their actions (meeting with the victims’ parents), and the experiences of everyone caught in the media crossfire.

I have not heard of this play until just recently, but still, one paragraph in particular caught my attention, as it reveals a bit of the playwright’s take on the situation from which he drew inspiration:

 The play draws on the national debate over the link between violent videogames and school shootings, which first came to the fore after Columbine. Aaron, who now develops videogames, worked as a journalist covering the world of videogames at the time of Littleton, Colorado shootings and “wanted to write a play about the people caught in the echo chamber of the debate. What must it be like for the people actually accused of making a game that turns kids into killers? What about the parents of the victims? Their children are dead and the news is jam packed with talk of something so trivial as videogames!”

http://sfplayhouse.com/season0607/firstperson.php

Why can’t WE have something like that?

http://www.joystiq.com/2007/05/11/capcom-releases-japanese-textbook-about-video-games/

VG Cats, an online comic by Scott Ramsoomair, did an amusing little comic on the upcoming god (?)-game Spore. Likely to be prophetic, because, well, this is just about how much freedom Will Wright’s newest simulation will probably GIVE the player.

http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=199

What makes this instance TRULY interesting is the fact that the Spore development team actually responds.

http://www.vgcats.com/news/comic_spore_Will.jpg

The Warcraft series had its start a long time ago, back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and games ran in DOS. I recall reading somewhere that Warcraft was meant to be a corollary to another, older fantasy series, Warhammer ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warhammer), which explains a number of similarities (mostly in the green-skinned design of the orcs themselves). As such, Warcraft I: Orcs and Humans was a simple, straightforward clash between good and evil- evil extraterrestrial orcs invading the human lands, basically. No other races were actually introduced.

Warcraft II started throwing in more complexities: more races were introduced, including dwarves, trolls, elves, and ogres. The world itself evolved to fit, throwing in more locales, factions, and clans, and it became clearer that the (evil!) orcish Horde used demonic magics and necromancy, while the human Alliance used, naturally, holy magics and wizardry. The scale of the battling itself became broader, throwing in aerial warfare in the form of gryphons and mounted dragons, as well as nautical warfare, with wooden ships and submarine turtles alike. This game is also where Blizzard’s trademark sense of humor grew from- clicking on a unit makes it start spouting sound bytes and classic sayings (yes, this is where “Dabu” and “Zug Zug” comes from).

Then they came out with Warcraft III, which is where things started getting weird.

It turns out that the orcs AREN’T actually evil, just demon-possessed; MORE creatures, species, and races were thrown in, ranging from the tauren to the night elves to the undead to the naga to the furbolg to the OTHER types of trolls to the gnomes to the centaurs to the blood elves to the demons themselves, each with their own backstory (too many, perhaps), and it turns out that the world of Warcraft consists of more than one continent. And more than one world, to boot, which happens to be the vaguely specified homeworld of the orcs. History is expanded upon- it turns out that the demons were actually behind everything bad that happened to Azeroth, and there was a cataclysmic war between the magic elves and the hippie elves, and it ALSO turns out that certain forms of magic are addictive and/or corruptive, and dragons can actually transform into any species they want.

There is, in fact, a timeline stretching back from 10,000 years before the present day (or longer, depending on whether or not the creation of Azeroth is included). While it’s certainly not a BAD thing for World of Warcraft to be so thorough with its own history (and there’s always that visceral thrill present when a player recognizes references, characters, and events from previous games in the series), the fact still remains:

It’s still ridiculously dense.

http://www.wowwiki.com/Retcon

http://www.wowwiki.com/Retcon_speculation 

This is because the entire point of the game appears to be thus: 1) have the main character approach girls, and 2) touch them, because that’s the only way to determine whether or not they’re actually witches. Certainly a… unique… application of the DS’s touch-screen functions.

Apparently, when Doki Doki Majo Saiban was announced back in Q4 2006, gamer reactions ran the gamut from amused to flat-out denial. There was no way that Nintendo- the Pokemon Company, the bastion of family friendliness, the grandpappy of some of the most famous classics known to mankind- would ever allow a game like this to be released! It has to be a hoax of some sort!

And then follow-up screenshots were released, more plot details surfaced, and with Amazon.co.jp opening it up for pre-orders, it’s currently the top-listed video game on their online store.

I’m still not sure what to make of it all.

http://kotaku.com/gaming/top/snk-on-witching-touching-game-207023.php

http://kotaku.com/gaming/snk/more-on-that-snk-witch-touching-game-250873.php

http://www.dsfanboy.com/2007/05/02/amazon-co-jp-shoppers-are-crazy-about-witch-hunting/

http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/57111.html

First, I’m still surprised that World of Warcraft has hit it so big in China- along with the host of other American-based games that have gained ridiculous amounts of popularity in other parts of the world, and that it’s become so easy for video games to transition from one culture to another.

Second, I cannot find any sort of correlation between the commercials’ three “products” (I’m still not certain where S.H.E should be placed on this scale).

Finally… well, just see for yourself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOSrapbPrzU

More specifically, I thought immediately of the old Felix the Cat cartoon and ‘Duck Amuck’. Either way, both ‘Animator vs. Animation’ Flash movies are random in plot (great choices in battlefield), creatively executed (and how often they ‘break’ the fourth wall), and above all, highly amusing.

Animator vs. Animation- http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/316541

Animator vs. Animation II-  http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/368557

I’ve recently been reminded of an odd exception to this rule- the first is the now-defunct Working Designs was best known for translating and localizing the Sega Saturn-based (and later, the Playstation-based) “Lunar” series of role-playing games, as well as for bringing over the potentially less popular “niche” games that bigger companies were leery of spending money on (2D games when 3D was perceived as the wave of the future, or games with their stylistic roots in Japanese animation). WD was also renowned for pulling out the stops when releasing their games- releasing pricey but beautiful over-the-top special editions with various collector’s items packaged- as well as being among the first companies to completely re-dub the entirety of their games’ spoken dialogue into English, a hefty undertaking during the 32-bit era. It was probably thanks to them that the industry as a whole eventually took more care with their localizations, and that games previously seen as too oddball for America are starting to find their way into American markets (such as Katamari Damacy).

Granted, Working Designs was also quite possibly the only company that had the guts to splice, say, political commentary and pop culture humor into games where none previously existed (or, as many would say, SHOULDN’T exist- jokes about the Clinton administration in a fantasy-based setting, or references to Austin Power and M&M’s, can be jarring, to say the least).