blueZhift Blog

Well it looks like Senator, and prospective 2008 Presidential candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton has jumped on the anti-violent video games bandwagon. She’s slamming Grand Theft Auto for its violence against women and minorities and wants to spend $90M to study the threat that these games pose to children. So this makes it official, as I’ve mused before, there is no political downside to slamming violent and so called mature video games even if it means proposing laws that are clearly unconstitutional. You score points with the political right and conservatives without the danger that the bans and restrictions will stand the test of the courts. Then score more points complaining about the judges who strike the laws down. Since the democrats are on the out right now, watch for more dems to jump on the bandwagon. This is a no brainer!

Here is a bit of humor that I just got from a friend. I don’t know the original source, but you will say "Ouch!" at the end. Thanks John!

1. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country.

2. The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country.

3. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country and who are very good at crossword puzzles.

4. USA Today is read by people who think they ought to run the country but don’t really understand The New York Times.

They do, however, like their statistics shown in pie charts.

5. The Los Angeles Times is read by people who wouldn’t mind running the country — if they could find the time –and if they didn’t have to leave Southern California.

6. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and did a far superior job of it, thank you very much.

7. The New York Daily News is read by people who aren’t too sure who’s running the country and don’t really care as long as they can get a seat on the train.

8. The New York Post is read by people who don’t care who’s running the country as long as they do something really scandalous, preferably while intoxicated.

9. The Miami Herald is read by people who are running another country but need the baseball scores.

10. The San Francisco Chronicle is read by people who aren’t sure there is a country … or that anyone is running it; but if so, they oppose all that they stand for. There are occasional exceptions if the leaders are handicapped minority feminist atheist dwarfs who also happen to be illegal aliens from any other country or galaxy provided, of course, that they are not Republicans.

11. The National Enquirer is read by people trapped in line at the grocery store.

12. None of these is read by the guy who is running the country into the ground.

Cnet is reporting on a New York Times story that started making the rounds a few days ago about how physicists may have created quantum black holes. Even though I’m no longer a practicing physicist, I still love this stuff and it’s especially cool to hear about things from experiments that you or colleagues were working on. The Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) experiment studies the results of collisions between gold nuclei. One of my old professors is a part of the experiment and told me about it years ago when they were in the planning stages. He said that the goal was to create a quark gluon plasma, a whole new state of matter.

While they are not yet claiming to have created a quark gluon plasma, they do seem to have created something that at least acts like a mini black hole, though not necessarily the quantum black holes of theory. When I first heard this story, I couldn’t help but think of the SciFi series Lexx or the Dan Simmons’ novel Hyperion. In each of these, scientists created black holes with disasterous results for the Earth. Don’t panic yet! Nothing that’s been done in high energy particle accelerators is anything to worry about, but I did always wonder if we’d find something unexpected out at Fermilab. Man I still love this stuff! The real fun is going to begin when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) comes online and begins to create conditions at the interaction point very much like those in the early universe shortly after the Big Bang.

Today is the U.S. debut of Sony’s new Playstation Portable or PSP! I get all tingley just thinking about it, but I decided a while back that I would wait and see what happened with the first wave of hardware and software. It’s inevitable that there will be issues with both at the beginning of a launch like this, so I’ll try to be patient. Besides, yesterday I bought the Star Trek Original Series Season One DVD set, so I’m already on another plane of existence! Star Trek was my favorite show growing up and still forms the center of how I tend to look at the world around me. I used to record the episodes on audio tape when I was a kid and was so proud of the fact that the show I liked was deep enough that audio only was enough to convey its quality. Later I recorded and bought VHS tapes, but once DVDs started coming out, I abandoned the tapes and decided to wait until a really good set came out. So far I’m very pleased with the quality of the set and I am having a lot of fun introducing my oldest son to the stuff that makes his daddy tick!

So I guess I can pass on the PSP for now. Still I may wander over to Virgin or Coconuts later just on the off chance…

In a strange twist I found a story in which Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich blasts Narc for its drug use on  the same page as a link to a story in which the very same governor supports lowering the gun ownership age in Illinois from 21 to 18!

Now let me get this straight, simulated violence and mayhem is so bad for young people that we must usurp parental authority and trample all over the U.S. Constitution in order to ban the sale of violent or sexually explicit video games to minors, but it is okay to arm teenagers with real weapons. Now admittedly, the story about lowering the gun ownership age is nearly a year old, so I wonder why it would still be a related link. Nevertheless, I can smell some serious political pandering going on as the governor seems to be trying to appeal to conservative voters and the gun lobby as his reelection campaign begins. In light of the recent teenage shooting rampage in Minnesota, I wonder if the governor is still so gung-ho to put weapons into the hands of teens.

As for Narc, I guess the governor and the game stand to gain handsomely from all of the free publicity even if both of them are full of crap. Okay, okay, that was a little harsh. Only one of them is full of crap, but I’m not saying which one!

It’s been about 20 years since I experienced my first Spring Break in Chicago and global warming notwithstanding, from a temperature perspective, it still sucks! Today is a relatively nice looking day, partly cloudy with a gentle breeze. But man it’s in the frickin 30’s (near 0C for my metric using friends)! I can’t remember a single spring break in Chicago that had genuinely warm weather! Still, I love Chicago, but spring weather this is not!

On the plus side, it seems that the streets are beginning to fill with tourists once more. I especially like all of the matched moms, daughters, and dolls near the American Girl Place. Here you will see moms, daughters, and American Girl dolls all dressed up in the same outfit! Some people think that’s creepy, but I actually think it’s rather cute, something the world could use more of I think.

This space reserved for the now deleted comments about the attractive women on the streets of Chicago…

The irony of the Terri Schiavo right to die (or right to live depending on your take) case is almost too much to take. It’s ironic that the condition that resulted in her vegetative state was an eating disorder and now for 15 long years what’s left of her has had to endure being fed via a plastic tube down her throat. Now with the, hopefully, final removal of the tube, the death watch has begun or is it perhaps about to end? If indeed our immortal souls are somehow tied to this plane of existence until the physical body ceases to function, then I can only imagine the 15 years of hell Terri has had to endure. I hope that God and the prayers of her friends and family have been of some comfort to that soul, but there’s no way to know. The final irony is that because many of us don’t really know what life is and fear death so much, Terri’s body must slowly starve to death.

There’s no room in our hearts for a merciful end that even the most vile murderers are entitled to. Starvation is a cruel and painful way to die. We put people in jail for starving animals, why can’t we give Terri a dignified send off to the next world? In the same situation, I think I would want my body put down in a gentle and dignified manner rather than be at the center of self serving politicians and misguided do-gooders both causing pain to the ones I love. One could argue that such euthanasia usurps God’s role as master of our lives, and is driven by the selfish urge to escape the physical pain of death. But I would argue that we must also consider the pain of those around us, in which case a dignified death becomes a sacrifice for the sake of those we love. Which is better?

I ran across a couple of articles concerning making games for girls and other people who we don’t usually think of as playing games. On Cnet News there’s an interview with game developer Sheri Graner Ray who is currently the lead on content for Star Wars Galaxies. This is well worth a read because I think that she hits the problem of making games that appeal to women right on the head. Players, both male and female, want to be able to identify with the central character, that avatar has to be something they are comfortable with. By and large that leaves males with appropriately heroic character models, whereas women are stuck with models that look more ready for sex than slaying dragons! This I think explains what I consider to be one of Star Wars Galaxies best features, the ability to finely tune your character model. SWG is the only game I know of that gives such a high level of flexibility in character model creation.

The other article I read today was in the GamesIndustry.biz newsletter. It described the great risk that Nintendo is taking to reach groups of people that don’t normally play games. These are people well outside of the legions of hardcore players and the games they would play may not even appeal to the hardcore. Here’s an excerpt.

"Nintendo president Satoru Iwata makes no bones about what his company
is trying to accomplish. He wants to sell videogames to people who
don’t want to play videogames. He wants people who turn their noses up
at interactive entertainment to stand in line to buy new consoles. He
doesn’t just want to find new ways to entertain existing gamers - he
wants to show the rest of the world how much fun our medium can be as
well."

Iwata-san is taking a big risk when Nintendo is already being squeezed by Sony and Microsoft, but I think he is on to something. With the consolidation of so many smaller developers under a few large publishing companies, many fear that creativity is being squeezed out of the market in favor of safe games that appeal to the same established audience. But at the heart of most game developers lives a passionate artist for whom making yet another sequel to Gran Turismo or Grand Theft Auto just isn’t enough. Maybe Nintendo will become the new home to the dreamers and risk takers who will take the games industry to the next level while Sony and Microsoft duke it out in the past.

It’s fun to be just a little ahead of the curve. When Yahoo released their search API, I jumped in a built a video game news search tool because it was something that I had a need for. Then I thought it would be cool to create an RSS feed from the search results that I could display on my Proliphus Enterprises page. These things were done and I learned a lot from them, so I posted a link to my source code on the search page so that others could go and do the same or make something new.

Well it seems that Amazon.com has caught up so to speak. Today they announced that developers will be able to tie into their A9 search engine and create feeds from the results. It’s nice to know that I’m doing something useful!

At this year’s Game Developer’s Conference a central mantra coming from the major console owners was that the next generation machines will be developer friendly. On Monday, Microsoft released XNA Studio which they claim will make it easier to develop for the Xbox 2 and no more expensive than current Xbox development. A little later Sony promised that Playstation 3 developers would have an easier time developing games for the new console. The Playstation 2, though a powerful box on its release, was notoriously difficult to develop for, which is a bit ironic since Sega’s dual CPU Saturn was doomed in part by the difficulty of development compared to the very developer friendly original Playstation. While Nintendo did not make any developer tool announcements at GDC, prior to the conference, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata turned heads by saying that Nintendo Revolution may alienate some 3rd party developers. That doesn’t sound very developer friendly on the surface, but the gist of what Iwata-san was saying is that the Revolution console is not going to be focused on making the prettiest graphics at the expense of the gameplay experience. In other words, developers won’t have to sweat the graphics (which is a pain and drives up costs), instead they can focus on innovative and fun gameplay which is often less toil and more fun for the developer. Game publishers more interested in glitz than substance may be turned off by that.

Despite Sony’s current dominance, could such overt efforts to make life easy for developers mean that some kind of parity has been reached? Sony isn’t likely to lose it’s big lead anytime soon, but the next generation race so far looks like anybody’s to win. Microsoft is even showing a threat in the Japan market by signing on Final Fantasy creator Hironubo Sakaguchi and other Japanese heayweights, and giving them a free creative hand on Xbox 2. In the end, this dogfight can only mean good things for the hearts of gamers, and bad things for their wallets!

Now I’ve seen just about everything. Not too long ago I was admonishing my oldest son for refusing to go to the bathroom because he was too wrapped up in his video or computer game. Needless to say, things ended up somewhat wetter than they should have been. Now I see on CNet an article about a Portable Peeing Appliance for the PC-bound. It even has an adapter for female gamers so that my youngest daughter, also an avid gamer, won’t feel left out! Oh well, I guess some things are more important than going to the bathroom! The University of Chicago part of me feels that there are the makings of a good study in here somewhere…

I’ve been having a lot of fun playing with and tweaking my Video Game News Search tool and I found this story with headline Playboy sex game attacked. This is a prime example of a sensationalist story in which no one seems to have actually learned anything about the game itself before making pronouncements on it. The gist of the story seems to be that the game is aimed at teenagers and will turn them into child molesters. Say what? Did I miss something here? Ironically, the story features a picture of the game box which clearly shows the game’s M rating from the ESRB. An M rating means that the game is not intended for play by teens under 17 at all, so parents, don’t buy it for them! Now in all fairness, apparently the powers that be in New Zealand ignored the rating and gave the game a local rating of R16, so the row is primarily about an R18 rating being more appropriate with which I agree. And I’ve seen nothing in the marketing of the game to suggest that teens are the target audience. That said, having been a teen who read Playboy: The Magazine for many years, I know teenage boys will be interested in this game even though it is not a very good one. So there really isn’t much marketing to do anyway. I only saw ads on internet gaming sites and a few in game magazines.

But Society for the Promotion of Community Standards spokesman David Lane’s statement that, "I believe it will breed a new generation of child molesters. It’s absolutely sicko." is absurd. There’s nothing in the game even remotely related to children at all. In fairness to Mr. Lane, I would hope that this statement is something that has been taken totally out of context in this relatively fact free article about a lackluster game.

Yesterday Yahoo! announced its new Yahoo! Developer Network and web services API. As I’m always looking for new toys to play with, especially if they might be useful, I’ve quickly whipped up a Video Game News Search. This should be useful to anyone who follows the video games industry. This is based on the Yahoo Search Example code bundled with the SDK, but with lots of tweaks and more to come!

Click Here to Use the Video Game News Search Powered by Yahoo!