Weekend News Spin — March 24-25 2001

Violent games lead to midwifery?

The Boston Globe's digitalMASS column looks at female gamers who play games like Quake online.

"Jack" is a Waltham mother of a three-year-old and an infant. Then there's the Wakefield grandma and mother of three who goes by "Fragmistress" or "Bitchgoddess" in games -- I'll use Bitchgoddess; it's fun to type. Both moms play computer games every day, and they do it well. Want more irony? They're both current or former aficionados of the violent game Quake, but Jack makes her living as a midwife and Bitchgoddess is a therapist on a psychiatric ward. So much for first-person shooters leading to real-life massacres. Maybe they lead to midwifery.

It's a short read, but kind of fun.

Ashcroft blames games for shooting violence

U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft is making the talk show rounds, blaming violent games for acts of violence, according to a USA Today article.

"The entertainment industry, with its video games and the like, which sometimes literally teach shooting and all, we've got to ask ourselves how do we as a culture respond to be more responsible," he said on ABC's Good Morning America.

According to Ashcroft, gun laws and federal money won't solve the problem, nor will trigger locks. Yahoo also has a transcript of the Attorney's General appearance, and has such nuggets of wisdom about shootings in schools as follows:

It's a crisis for anybody who's in a school where there's this kind of problem.

Yeah, we guess someone shooting at you can be considered a crisis situation.

And, of course, it's illegal for anyone, not only a child, to carry a gun to school....

But if we outlaw guns in the schools then only the outlaws in the schools will have guns!

Wizards of the Coast and the death of its strange "vision"

Salon has part one of an article, Death to the Minotaur, that looks at the unique corporate culture that Wizards of the Coast engendered as Magic: the Gathering fueled their growth:

...That honor lay with his dream of revolutionizing corporate culture itself, of making Wizards a new kind of company. We would build an alt-culture workplace of smart young people. We would destroy hierarchies by a resolute program of egalitarian consensus. We would earn fabulous paychecks and free dental treatments. We would encourage diversity in every form.

Best of all, though, we would fuck like rabbits. On "Who Knew? Day" employees wore badges proclaiming their sexual orientation. Intimate relationships sprouted like mold on bread, cutting across departments and seniorities with the hierarchy-smashing fervor of our consensus-driven team meetings. Heedless of status, even peasants and princes coupled, and fell apart.

The example was set right at the top: Peter and his wife, also an employee, had an open marriage. Wizards was a big horny summer camp, and we were starring in the teen sex comedy of our fevered dreams.

Geeks make a lot of money and have lots of sex? This can't last. We're looking forward to part 2 on Monday when the suits from Hasbro take over.

Green on Smart

Jeff Green's CGW article about Derek Smart is now up at ZDNet's CGW section.

What started out as the dream of a lone, unknown programmer mushroomed into the longest, most savage, and most ridiculous flame war this industry has ever seen, with Smart as much at fault as anyone else. Even now, five years after Battlecruiser's release, the game is not completely dead. Type Derek Smart's name into an Internet search engine, and you'll see strands of it all over. There are websites dedicated to ridiculing him, and guys who follow him around mercilessly, pouncing on every post he makes. Any thread that Derek Smart appears in, regardless of the original topic, devolves into a Derek Smart flame war.

Console miscellany

In the console world Sony's reporting that 10 million PS2s have been shipped to stores and Nintendo is cutting it's first day allotment of Game Boy Advance units from one million to 500,000 for the June U.S. launch. Nintendo's also reporting that nearly all of the 650,000 Game Boy Advance units in Japan sold during the first day it was available. Nintendo expects to ship 24 million units this coming year.

Finally, after a one-week surge due to pricecuts that saw the Dreamcast outsell all consoles in Japan, Famitsu is reporting that things are back to normal, with the PS2 outselling other consoles by a wide margin for the week of March 12-18. The PS2 sold 43,000 units, with Game Boy Color selling 17,000 and the Dreamcast coming in third with sales of 15,000 units.

Smarty-pants computer games

The BBC News website has an article about artificial intelligence in computer games. Much of the article focuses on Black & White and includes this quote from Peter Molyneux:

"It is easy to design an AI driven player that cheats, that can do anything you can but faster," said Mr Molyneux, "the real trick is to make them do exactly what you do and instead of making them insanely hard to beat, making them entertaining and challenging."

We spotted this story at Blue's News.

3am

Dracula Land is on the way. The Romanian government wants to build a theme part that will capitalize on the evil Count's name, probably in Transylvania, according to a BBC news article. The Tourism Minister Matei Dan dismissed critics of the venture:

There are some voices in Romania who accuse me of selling a false legend," the tourism minister said.

"But I am a pragmatic man and these critics do not put me off.

In other satanic news, the San Francisco house used by devil-worshipper Anton Lefay as the center of his Church of Satan is about to be demolished, according to a SFGate story. Maybe someone will make a Church of Satan theme park?

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