There are already plenty of cases of adults or college students who have lost jobs and dropped out of school due to MMO gaming obsessions. Now we're going to unleash this on our kids?

If you're thinking of letting you kid play an MMO, be very careful about what game you choose and be sure to set limits on how and when they play.

Hellgate, a soon-to-be-released video game includes a license agreement that forces players to accept the harvesting of identifying information from their machine. This is part of an in-game advertising scheme that, so far, doesn't quite reach the level of what the Penny Arcade cartoonists prophesied, but it's getting closer.

(H/T to Slashdot for the link)

I was glad to see this Ars Technica article about how casual gaming is a huge thing especially in the arena of casual MMOs. This is what I've been saying all along with my City of Heroes webpage.

I don't know a lot about this game other than it's very violent and has been banned from the UK. Reading about it doesn't make it any better:

“In Manhunt 2, players can mutilate their enemies with an axe; saw their skulls in half castrate them with a pair of pliers; or kill them by bashing their head into an electrical box, where a power surges eventually blows their head apart,” the letter charges. “On the Nintendo Wii, players will actually act out the violence. One review of the game describes using a saw blade to "cut upward into a foe's groin and buttocks, motioning forward and backward with the Wii remote as you go.”

Wow, you couldn't make it more real if you tried. Parental groups in the US aren't necessarily determined to ban it and would be satisfied with just giving it an Adult rating. While this is a completely reasonable request and, as far as I'm concerned, a blatantly obvious decision, Take-Two (the game's producer) is fighting this for purely monetary reasons:

An Adults Only rating, however, could be a death blow to the game, since Nintendo and Sony, maker of the PlayStation platform, currently have policies that bar AO-rated games for their systems. That would limit sales for use only on personal computers.

You've probably heard that online gaming can be addictive and destructive. Click the link to read about one person's eventual exodus from the gaming reality he spent years creating.

Someone has finally sued second life for "seizing" his assets. Linden shut down his account and removed the rights to his property.

Considering that Linden sells virtual property in online auctions for real money, this would seem like a fairly strong case on the part of the player… if it wasn't for the fact that the guy got the property through cheating the auction site.

Anyway, it should be interesting to see how this plays out. One thing's for sure, if this guy wins, virtual land will become solidly a real-world asset. I'm not looking forward to the IRS taxing game playing.

Apparently, a student made a game map of his school and uploaded it for his friends to play on. What this means is that anyone who plays on that map could play a given game and have a virtual shootout at the school.

People have lined up on both sides of this issue saying that it was harmless and others who think it encourages school shootings. To each I ask this question, if a neighbor kid had made a game map of your house and yard where the goal was to break into the house steal, rape, and kill the people inside, would you be ok with it?

Make all the custom maps you want, but if you want to model real structures then you'd better be prepared to justify it.

(H/T to Slashdot for the link)

I'm not ready to say that video violence leads to real violence, but I do know that fantasy violence is desensitizing (after 7 years of CSI, I don't even flinch anymore). More importantly about this article is the discussion of gamer addiction which is a very real problem and likely to get much worse.

The title is the Addictiveness of Virtual Violence, but even by admission of thier own article, it's not the violence that's addictive, but the psuedo-social aspects as well as the feeling of building something worthwhile. "If I just work another 8 hours, I'll gain a level (whee!)".

On that note, you might be interested in my article about avoiding gaming addiction while still playing the game. In my case, I play the far less popular City of Heroes (as opposed to the massive audience of WoW), but the principle still applies.

Despite what many people think, violent games really has little to do with why people choose to commit violent crimes and apparently Rush Limbaugh agrees.

But how many people are playing video games out there? How many millions of people play video games, and how many millions of people have guns?

If you start blaming the video games, you may as well demand video game control because it's the same thing when you start trying to blame guns for this.

Shigeru Miyamoto asks in Yahoo's answer service, "How old were you when you first heard of Nintendo and what does it mean to you?".

Now that Google is getting in the game (so-to-speak), the chance of seeing in-game advertising has just skyrocketed. Would a company like Google who tracks your searches match your ads to your search habits? Hmm…I guess Penny Arcade was right.

Ars Technica has an article about the IRS wanting eBay to turn over information on its users' earnings.

This pretty much sums up the issue:

With so many people making part or all of their living through eBay, the government wants its cut. This isn't an issue of any new taxes, but an attempt to collect the income tax that is already required. Because eBay does not report information about its sellers to the government, income reporting is left up to individuals, and the temptation not to list eBay revenue as income can be a strong one—and in some cases, it's not always clear when one has to do so.

And,

eBay isn't the only Internet business that has been feeling the heat in recent months. The government is also considering how to apply tax laws to virtual worlds and goods, and it faces some of the same problems that it does with eBay. While some sellers can make a good living out of hawking such items, few report the profits as taxable income, and Uncle Sam wants its cut.

To me this seems like one of those things you know is wrong, even if you can't articulate exactly why. Second Lifers, and Warcrafters beware.

In an analysis of studies done showing violent video games leading to real world violence, Dr. Christopher Ferguson explains that current work doesn't take into account real-world situations and other violence factors such as family life.

The overall conclusion is that there does appear to be a connection between violent games and violent thoughts in a laboratory setting. But the connections between such thoughts and violent behavior in the lab or elsewhere are tenuous at best. The studies that try to address those questions currently suffer from a lack of a standardized measure of violent behavior and a lack of sufficient background on other potential influences on the test subjects' tendencies towards violence, such as family environment.

Here's one for you. People who are violent already are drawn to violent video games. Duh.

Gamasutra reports that Nintendo is looking into possible solutions for the accidental destruction of TVs or nearby items/people when players in America get a little too excited when playing and accidentally throw the remote.

The article quotes Ninetendo execs as having considered ways to prevent people from getting so excited or by making a special glove people could wear. Apparently they haven't thought that strengthening the wrist strap and putting a small amount of rubber gripping on the edges of the remote where it's held would likely fix the problem just fine. For an extra measure, put rubber edge protectors on the four corners of the front of the remote so if it did fly, it would be less likely to damage anything.

I had to laugh when I read this today at Penny-Arcade:

I must say that, completely independent of actual gaming consoles, the these squabbles over resolution in next-gen displays are mainly disheartening. From a consumer perspective, it's a bramble. Now the discussion is about whether or not the device is actually displaying the full resolution it's capable of, or if the television is upscaling it, or if there is a token on the media explicitly disallowing full res, and it's a pile of shit. All of this confusion for paying customers, so that pirates will be detained an additional fifteen minutes before they descend, their scythes awhirl.

For those who don't know, Penny-Arcade is a site that has been doing comics centered on the gaming industry for years. They are well known in the community and make enough money now to basically play games all day. That way, they usually have something to say about every system and every game