Says AIG, “We’ll give half back.”

“Okay,” says America, “we’ll only beat you half to death.”

Have these people no shame?

With that aside out of the way, I noted a weird confluence of gamer diatribes about race, what with Ben Croshaw’s social commentary on 50 Cent’s second computer game, and Shamus Young’s refutation that Resident Evil 5 has racial overtones. Both have sort of a hard-hitting tell-all motif that immediately become muddled by their tittering comments boards’ nervous glee at having landed a blow on overzealous political correctness.

Why nervous? Because they’re all one-upping each other about why X or Y is providing a good or bad model for Blacks or why A or B is or isn’t offensive to Blacks, but they’re not really getting any Black input. The online gamer demographic is largely white and middle class, and so the rather voluminous debates take on a vaguely scandalous tone, as if they’re getting away with something. In a sense, they are: They’re confirming their convictions through repeating one another. But that, still, muddles the topic at hand. Read the rest of this entry »

The old site ate my second rant about Grand Theft Auto – part of what prompted the updating of the site – and considering the popularity (read: Rabid fanboyism) of the first, I thought I’d try to paraphrase what I put there.

Grand Theft Auto 4 is turning into something of a parable of the computer gaming industry in general right now. Now, I’m of the technically-minded persuasion – or to put it another way a long-time PC apologist – so I wholeheartedly accept the myth of PC gaming’s “Gold” and “Silver” Ages; namely the careers of Sid Meier, Will Wright, Peter Molyneux, John Romero et al and the companies Looking Glass, Bullfrog, Westwood, Interplay and LucasArts (back when it was doing adventure games) as inventors of the market and giants upon which the industry as a whole grew.

The market had a great number of things to say about game design, processing tricks and how us nerds saw the world in the first place: Insightful and compelling Sci Fi universes and not much in the way of human interaction. Like reading an Asimov series and trying to infer relationship advice from it. Read the rest of this entry »