Massive Multiplayer Online

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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.

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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.

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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 keep it to yourself.

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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.

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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?".

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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.

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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.

So… what if people who are violent already are drawn to violent video games?

Eventually, they just upgraded the strap to prevent breakage.

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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.

Oh no! People are stealing our games!

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

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. This commentary refers to the various tricks and traps companies use to try to prevent people from pirating games that don't work and may never work. Ordinary players are bothered and inconvenienced essentially for no reason.