GayGamer.net

EA, Take Two, Activision Take Stock Market Loss In Violent Video Game Fallout

2012-12-31T14:00:00Z

This sort of imagery is beginning to scare investors.

There has been much consternation in recent weeks about the effects of violent video games - much more than usual. While some of it has been level-headed (seriously, read that link; it's excellent, and should be required reading for anyone interested in the topic), much of the response has been shrill and reactionary. This is no surprise, given the 24-hour news cycle's propensity towards simple narratives and fear-based marketing.

However, rich people who can afford to gamble on the stock markets these days (and, depending on how they're managed and if you can afford them, your bank investments) are feeling the consternation financially in the form of up-to double-digit stock price losses for major video game manufacturers. Activision and EA each saw an eight percent drop in their stock prices last week, while Take-Two saw a fifteen percent drop. These losses are being blamed directly on the cultural aftermath of the Newtown massacre in the United States as analysts fear for these companies' 2013 sales outlooks and the potential for a sustained backlash against violent video games.

Whatever your opinion on the supposed link between violent video games and real-world violence (full disclosure: I have written ad nauseum about my take on the matter), a conversation about the issue is being pushed forcefully, and from many directions.

Video: My Ex-Boyfriend The Space Tyrant

2012-12-17T14:00:00Z

Billed as "the perfect gift for Christmas", Up Multimedia's My Ex-Boyfriend the Space Tyrant is a gay-themed (actually, "gay-themed" is probably understating the matter) interstellar point-and-click adventure staring - get this - Captain Tycho Minogue. Yes. Minogue.

Like many point-and-click games, it's heavy on style, and the game's art is done cheekily (pun intended) by Joe Philips. You may not know his name, but you've likely seen his art before, and it's work that sells the title as exactly what the developer pushes it as: Funny and adventurous. (Full disclosure: I haven't played the game at all yet, though I will once there's a Linux distribution, which they say is coming soon.)

Labelling it as "Approved for distribution by the Ministry of Homosexual Pornography" certainly helps with the humour, and helps differentiate it from many of the queer-friendly games we've reported on recently - either those in which you can choose with whom the protagonist gets it on, or those trying to embed more intimately LGBTQ themes into the narrative - and puts it more in line with light-hearted gay fare like the up-coming (and NSFW, depending on how far into it you get) Coming Out On Top.

My Ex-Boyfriend the Space Tyrant is already available for PC and Mac, and as I mentioned, I'm hoping to get a chance to dig in to it soon. I'll report back when that happens.

[via: towleroad]

Playing Violent Video Games May Cause A Cumulative Increase In Aggression

2012-12-16T22:00:00Z

I'm running out of entertaining "violence" images for these research articles.

A recent study out of Université Pierre-Mendès-France, conducted with researchers from Ohio State University and the University of Hohenheim suggests that there may be a cumulative effect in aggression and the expectation of hostility among players of violent video games.

The researchers assigned 70 undergraduate students to play either violent video games (Condemned 2, Call of Duty 4, or The Club) or non-violent video games (S3K Superbike, Pure, or Dirt 2) for twenty minutes on three consecutive days. After each session, participants were asked to read the beginning of a story and then come up with twenty possible actions for the main character to take. Researchers then coded participants' responses, counting how many aggressive or violent actions were included. Subsequently, participants were told they would engage in a competitive task with an unseen other participant (there was no other participant); participants were told they could send the "other player" a noise blast through their headphones, and that they could choose how long and loud it would be.

The researchers found that those who played the violent video games gave more aggresive/violent actions for the story's main character, and gave the fake other participant a louder, longer blast of noise. Brad Bushman, one of the lead researchers, holds that:

People who have a steady diet of playing these violent games may come to see the world as a hostile and violent place...These results suggest there could be a cumulative effect.

And:

Playing video games could be compared to smoking cigarettes. A single cigarette won't cause lung cancer, but smoking over weeks or months or years greatly increases the risk. In the same way, repeated exposure to violent video games may have a cumulative effect on aggression.

Unfortunately, none of the reports linked above mentions the size of the effect, only that it is statistically significant. But a statistically-significant increase can be anywhere from a fraction of a percent, to a thousand-fold, or more. Data from the study's publication in the Journal of Experimental Social Science suggest the violent-video-game group was about twice as hostile and twice as aggressive on the study's measures as the non-violent-game group after three days. What happens after three days, however, is anybody's guess.

Interestingly, the results of this study contradict earlier research that suggests the degree of competitiveness a game, rather than the degree of violence, is responsible for the increase in aggression.

Some Casual Games Taking Lessons From Gambling To Hook Players

2012-12-09T22:00:00Z

Video games have been taking lessons from psychology for quite some time; heavily-stimulating with quick rewards, they've been providing gamers' brains with bursts of dopamine since they first graced the primitive displays of yesteryear's mammoth computers. Ever since, the anxious parents of the world have been wondering what on Earth all of this overstimulation will do to the children - as though that were even remotely important compared to the steady stream of anxiety-inducing, self-esteem crushing stupidness from the adult world (you know, like resource wars, body shame, homophobia, classism, and so on). Meanwhile, ~~saner~~ other people spend more time wondering why oh why they spent so much time playing Angry Birds.

Well, game designer and psychologist Ariella Lehrer lays bare in interview with ABC what should already be apparent to students of psychology: Casual game designers are using the same operant conditioning techniques that casinos use to hook players.

Operant conditioning is one of the most fundamental mechanisms of learning; it describes how rewards and punishments can be used to shape animal behaviour. Give someone a treat for pressing a button, and they'll keep pressing the button; this is called "conditioning." Stop giving them the treat, and after a while they'll stop pushing the button; this is called "extinction." What Lehrer argues that casual game makers (herself included) are doing to hook gamers is using a different reward schedule, intermittent positive reinforcement. In this system, the reward for performing a behaviour is only sometimes reinforced, exactly like slot machines in a casino. Knowing that they might win, the player pushes the button more and more, and occasional wins entrench this behaviour.

One of the most worrisome aspects of intermittent positive reinforcement, especially in regards to gambling and compulsive behaviour, is that extinction is harder to induce than with any other form of reinforcement (except for extremely deeply-ingrained conditioning paradigms oriented around survival, such as taste aversion). This helps explain the "just one more try" effect many games, especially clever casual and puzzle games, instil in their players.

While it's not surprising that games are using this technique to hook players and keep them that way, what is illuminating is that at least one designer is admitting that they are purposely doing it to snare people within the first twenty minutes of play.

NASA Finds Pac-Men In Orbit Around Saturn

2012-12-02T01:00:00Z

Seriously, it looks like Pac-Man is about to eat an impact crater.

The Cassini spacecraft has been in orbit around Saturn for the better part of a decade, dropping probes into other worlds, finding extraterrestrial methane lakes and dunes made of hydrocarbon sand, documenting storms bigger than Earth - and, in 2010, finding out that Saturn's moon Mimas has a heat-signature that looks like the spitting image of Pac-Man.

For real.

Now, Cassini scientists have found a second one, as you can see above, meaning that both Mimas and Tethys are in orbit around Saturn like some sort of celestial Pac-Man arcade game in Predator heat-vision. But seriously, the presence of two planets with such a strikingly similar, and strikingly unique, heat signature is proof that the effect seen on Mimas is no fluke, but that something more systematic is going on around Saturn. Scientists postulate that both moons are being regularly bombarded by high-energy electrons in select areas, decreasing the ability of those areas to absorb heat from the sun. Therefore, when viewed with Cassini's infrared spectrometer, those areas appear darker and lead to the effect shown above.

FYI, Tethys is named after the eponymous Titan and alleged mother of the ancient world's rivers, and whose real-world history may be related (in the way that many Indo-European gods are related) to the Babylonian primordial goddess and embodiment of chaos, Tiamat; and Mimas, which rather famously looks like the Death Star (thanks to that prominent, Australia-sized crater), is named after the serpent-legged giant son of the Greek creation goddess Gaia.

And with the trifecta of video games, space, and mythology completed, my Saturday can officially end.

Wii U Impressions

2012-11-24T22:00:00Z

By now you've likely seen and heard about Wootini's adventures picking up a Wii U on launch night in New York. My introduction to the system was significantly more...well...Canadian. That said, I purposely avoided getting the system in my home town, Toronto, where launch days tend to be a different kind of Canadian than people are familiar with. Picking up a home console on launch day in Toronto is a lot like this; frenetic, shall we say. Instead, I pre-ordered one out in the middle of nowhere and was treated with typical Canadian politeness. A Futureshop employee even called me the day before, just to let me know he had my system in his hands and was writing my name on it as we spoke. I could pick it up any time within 72 hours of Sunday morning.

How lovely.

That policy made for the most civilized launch-day experience of my life. I got dropped off at the store Sunday morning, sauntered in and had my system in my hands in moments. A younger couple (they might have been roommates, but they were a bit too touchy-feely) was behind me and wanted to get some accessories for their iPhones too, so one of the staff escorted them, their system and games, to the cellphone section, helped them pick everything out, and walked them back.

So that bit of it was quite pleasant. How about the rest?

I figured I would be in dereliction of duty if I didn't give some impressions of the Wii U, but I find myself as conflicted writing these things as I do reading them. So, I will promise you that I won't do the stuff that drives me nuts when I read reviews. I won't pretend to tell you I know what you should spend your money on. I won't give it some numbered rating, as though there were any kind of interrater reliability with reviews. I won't pretend I can see the future, and tell you whether this console will do well or not. And I certainly won't pretend that I'm unbiased.

But, what do I think of the system? Am I having buyer's remorse? How many crudely-drawn penises have I seen in the Miiverse? Follow along, after the jump.

]]> A little disclaimer

For clarity's sake: I don't get paid for this, I'm not made of money, and, you know...I got sh-t to do. (As la reine américaine once said, I'm busier than a one-legged man in a butt kicking contest.) I'm reviewing a product that I wanted to buy. It has pros and cons, but if I didn't expect the pros to outweigh the cons, I wouldn't have bought it. I'll do my best to weigh things out thoughtfully for you but, like I said already, I won't pretend to be unbiased. I want every console to succeed, the Wii U included. I think the current recipe of Sony and Microsoft competing for technical superiority and Nintendo (and, increasingly, Apple and indie developers) throwing out major wild cards every so often to keep the industry innovating is a marvellous recipe for gamers.

Long may it last.

The system update.

And speaking of long-lasting: How's about that ungodly long system update? It sure sucks having to sit through that when you've just opened up the box for your shiny new toy. Five days later, though, I couldn't care less about it. I'm not holding grudges over that sort of thing. Annoying, yes, but whatever. Life goes on.

And anyway, once the download's over with the Wii U is pretty cool.

Another disclaimer, before we move on:

I've been growing increasingly bored with video games as the years have progressed. I remember unboxing my NES, you see. I remember (mind you, I can remember things from before my second birthday) my older brother playing his Atari.

I've been doing this video game thing for a long time. Hell, in gay-people years, I'm basically a senior citizen.

And, like one of Anne Rice's long-lived vampires, at a certain point a terminal boredom sets in. Things are shinier and have more colours. We're spoiled for choice these days, really: Not just one good system, but three! And all those great old-school systems to boot! However, a definite video-game-related ennui has been setting in for me since the PlayStation/N64 era.

So it was with an unsettling amount of uncertainty that I bought my Wii U. It had better not bore me, I thought. I purposely bought the Wii because it promised something else. It mostly delivered what I wanted; I have more games on my Wii shelf than I do for any other console. But I simply don't know how much more ennui I can tolerate. I need the Wii U (and at least one of the other two consoles up-coming) to be different.

And, at first, I was a bit underwhelmed.

As the SNES after the NES, or the 360 after the Xbox, it felt like more of the same; more bells and whistles, but prettier. Pretty is important, yes, something I want, yes, but I want more. (Fanboys take note: I hold no grudges against the SNES or 360; they are great systems, two of the best, with outstanding libraries; but two which, like many others, felt to me like iterative advancements over their predecessors.) Nintendo's answer to Steam is there. Nintendo's answer to Xbox Live is there. Nintendo's advancement of the Wii remote concept is there. Nintendo's inevitable integration of the DS dynamic is there. This is no HD-free Wii, or disc-drive-less N64. It doesn't feel like something vital is missing.

They're probably holding this kind of game for next year...

But what about the graphics?

Understandably, some gamers (yours truly included) are upset that the system doesn't leapfrog over its current competitors' hardware. I don't like it, and it's the system's biggest vulnerability, at this point. As I said above, pretty is important. At the least, I would have preferred to see a launch title that showcased its graphical strengths - after all, the GPU and available RAM are supposed to be greater than its current competitors. But Nintendo has been very, very clear it has no intention of getting into a graphics arms-race with Sony or Microsoft, and the boring, practical grown-up in me gets that. Both of those companies can (or could, back in 2005/2006) afford to produce ahead-of-their-time hardware and loose rafts of money on each console sold. I'm suspicious of how eager they are to repeat that in this economic climate, of how tenable a $500+ price tag will be in a world of recessions, worker riots, and austerity measures. People are, after all, complaining about the Wii U's $350 price. The beautiful little Vita, with its great tech, is drowning. Sony and Microsoft are surely paying close attention to that as they firm up the hardware for the rest of the next generation. Moreover, given that the highest-powered console hasn't been the biggest-selling console since the SNES, I hope neither Sony nor Microsoft relies on graphics alone to push their new systems.

But, the Wii U will continue to produce lovely, HD graphics for years to come. After all, the woefully under-powered Wii provided some beautiful games with standard-def graphics. And the Wii U is better than that. It has its innovations, its competent online services, all of that.

Boxes duly ticked.

And for my first half-hour with the system, that's all it felt like. Boxes ticked.

But then, playing New Super Mario Bros. U and NintendoLand, I started seeing how skillfully Nintendo has integrated what will almost certainly be its first killer app, the Miiverse, into its games: It really does make gaming more fun. Nintendo set out to make a playground with the Wii U, and with the Miiverse they did it. It's nothing new - bulletin boards have been around for ages - but they've done it just right.

On the Miiverse and crudely-drawn phalli.

Posting thoughts and screenshots to the Miiverse is simple - so simple that it took me a while to figure it out. All you do is press the home button, touch the Miiverse icon, and up it comes. Tap "post" and the screenshot is already loaded. I was looking through manuals to figure it out while it was right in front of my face. It's clear to me now that the 3DS's SwapNote was part of a testing ground for the Miiverse; and, frankly, this is what PictoChat should always have been.

You can draw, type, share pictures, and reply to others easily. Interested in a game? You can select that game's Miiverse community, see what people are saying about it and ask questions. And while it's curated by Nintendo, they don't delete criticism, which to me speaks highly of the service. By reviewing posts in a game's community, this helps to figure out what games are your speed. The consensus in the ZombiU community, for example, is that the negative reviews (for those who don't follow these things with the cultish focus I do, it has received both wildly positive and alarmingly negative reviews) are way off-base.

The big question on my mind was "how long before this degrades into a flurry of artless penis sketches?" I'm pleased to report that, almost a week in, it hasn't. I've seen hundreds of posts, and exactly two crudely-drawn penises (which were both removed within minutes and both from the same user) and, perhaps most surprisingly, one remarkably artfully-rendered penis; seriously, it looked like it was right off a Bel Ami model (and no, boys, I'm not hyperlinking that). That one took a little longer to be deleted, but it was. As for flaming or hate speech, I've only seen one example - someone who still thinks that the whole "Asian people can't say 'L'" thing is actually funny. Regrettably, it was still around, last I checked.

The Miiverse is beautifully integrated into the Wii U. It's nothing new. As with analogue sticks, analogue buttons, force feedback, motion control, and touch-screens, it's been done before, but Nintendo has done it with the aplomb and confidence it takes to really sell it. And now, when you boot up your Wii U, WaraWara plaza presents you with the Miiverse instantaneously, with real gamers' thoughts, doodles, complaints, and accolades at your fingertips.

We're only days into the Wii U's lifespan, but I can see how the Miiverse will likely be one of the console's defining achievements.

Wrapping up.

The system's cons are there: It's too slow to move from one function to another, the firmware download is too long, and the game pad's battery life is woefully short. Though, the first two can be repaired in future updates, and plugging in the game pad's lengthy power cord feels like a minor hassle, really. Remember back when all the controllers were all plugged in with a cord?

Some things I thought would be cons aren't really. The lack of dual-touch on the game pad's screen was completely out of my mind until someone asked me about it, and even then I had to say I didn't miss it. The game pad, after all, has two analogue stick and a raft of buttons. And the graphics, while not bleeding-edge, are lovely.

The pros, however, are many. The selection of titles at launch is very promising. They're not all gems, but I would bet that Nintendo, at least, is holding back its biggest guns for the launch windows of Sony and Microsoft's next consoles. The Miiverse is, with the exception of how long it can take to load, superlatively executed. Nintendo Land is a great display of dual-screen play's promise, and being able to pick up and move from room to room is handy. While motion control is still very much in play with the Wii U, Nintendo seems to be letting an olive branch out to gamers who dislike it, offering options in NSMBU and many Nintendo Land games to click a button or move a stick instead of shaking, pointing, or waggling. The game pad offers lots of promise, with its touch screen, speakers, microphone, near-field sensor, and traditional controls, and the system's alternate control schemes have proven their worth in previous generations.

There is still much to be seen.

This point can be either exciting or off-putting, and ultimately I fall in the former category, but it feels like the Wii U still has much to unfold. It would be tempting to mistake graphics from yesteryear for a lack of ambition, but after playing with the system, it's clear that the Wii U is trying to deliver a lot. It offers multiple control options, a much-improved and deeply-ensconced online component, and a modern, easy-to-use online store. If there was one defining problem with the Wii, it was that it relied on one gimmick, albeit a very, very lucrative one. The Wii U feels like a much more robust system with much more potential. It also feels like a system that's designed for the times, selling at only a small loss, which should help Nintendo remain profitable even if the world's economic fortunes remain rocky.

If there's any word I could apply to the system, it would be the same one I initially applied to the DS, a shockingly large number of years ago: Curious.

The Wii U is a curious console. It's a bit weird, and that's what really won me over. Why? Because Nintendo is most interesting when it's weird, when it's doing strange things and pushing out at the edges. The NES pad with just two buttons (and what's that + sign doing!?!), the three-pronged N64 controller, the bizarro Wiimote, the two-screened handheld. All of those things took me places I hadn't been before and helped keep me hooked on an industry that - heresy! - often bores me.

So please, Nintendo, bring on the weird.

FF XIV Reboot Will Let You Marry Cat People As Long As You Aren't The Same Sex.

2012-11-20T15:00:00Z

A few character types from Final Fantasy XIV

You may have heard that, following a disappointing launch, Square-Enix is going to re-debut Final Fantasy XIV. According to the company itself, the staff listened to all of the complaints about FF XIV, and have, quite nobly, entirely overhauled the game:

Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn is not an expansion, it's not an update to the original. We at Square-Enix consider it a completely new game that we've built from the ground up that will give players a completely new experience compared to the original.

A Realm Reborn will have all kinds of new features that fans were clamouring for, including the option to get married. Just not if you want to marry someone of the same gender:

As for same-sex marriage, this is an extremely controversial topic that has been under discussion in the MMO world for the past few years. First we would like to start out with opposite-sex marriage, and then consider the feedback from our players in order to make a careful decision.I can't say whether or not it will be possible at this point in time. I'd like to keep dialog open with our players as we deliberate the matter.

As it is impossible to read minds (...I'm pretty sure...), we can only speculate as to what the producers are looking for in that dialogue with their players, and what the resultant response would be. Will they cave if the homophobes come out in droves? Will they cave if the queer players grovel at their feet for long enough, or get angrier than the homophobes? Are they hoping ~~to drum up press~~ controversy will encourage a greater dialogue about their relaunch?

Having originally planned a most-likely-too-lengthy opinion piece about the matter, this former Final Fantasy XI fiend took a moment to breathe and chilled out a little. This is an MMORPG, I thought, not a real place. And where I live, and am married to a person of the same gender, equal marriage has been law for almost ten years - it is not at all controversial any more. But the rest of the world is different, and straight people get all wound up in knots about this; at least these guys, with all their heterosexual privilege, want to talk about it rather than stay silent and hope no one notices.

But one can't help wondering why this is actually an issue, and even the insinuation that the company might not want to do something gay because it might hurt sales is odious.

One way or the other, in Final Fantasy XIV: A Realm Reborn thinly-veiled elves will be able to marry cat women - as long as they're not gay about it. If this, or the sort of casual homophobia that considers people of the same gender loving each other "controversial," upsets you, do tell the folks at Square-Enix what you think. You can do it here, or here, or through the Twitter, or whatever else the kids are up to these days.

[pre-text image via: joystiq]

Sony and Microsoft Both Passed On The Wiimote's Tech

2012-11-18T02:00:00Z

On the eve of the launch of the Wii U, it's somehow easy to forget that the Wii is about to sail on to Old-School territory. With the industry's eyes focused on the future, whether it be the Wii U, the PS4, or whatever the next Xbox is going to be called, it feels like a lot of air is getting sucked out of the current generation's room. Thankfully, Rob Crossley at CVG has produced one hell of a look back on how the curious Wiimote came to be - and fittingly so, as Nintendo's shiny white toaster looks to surpass the 100 million units-sold mark.

In 2001, Nintendo bought in to a tiny American company called Gyration that owned a world-wide patent on the motion control technology that would end up being the foundation of the Wiimote. This was after Gyration's owner had pitched the tech to both Microsoft and Sony, thinking that Nintendo was on its way to being an also-ran in the video game world. The tech was rather tersely rebuffed by both companies, and only then did Gyration go to Nintendo. The timing was ideal, as Nintendo was struggling to compete in the home console market against its much larger competitors, having seen a drop in overall hardware sales and market share in every generation since the release of the NES. It wanted out, to innovate and expand the market rather than go toe to toe with companies in much higher weight categories.

The rest is well-known. The Wii, with its innovative controller and appealing price, brought Nintendo unprecedented success in the home console market - selling far more than even the NES - opening up the new, friendlier markets it was looking for. And while it delighted many and changed much, it failed to deliver on everything it promised, and left others deeply unhappy, gamers and developers alike. But, it would seem, nowhere was the upset felt more strongly than in the boardrooms of Sony's and Microsoft's gaming divisions where, following lacklustre sales in the face of a light-weight competitor, heads rolled, hurried me-too hardware was ordered, and (ultimately) motion control was brought in to the fold with Kinect and Move.

I'd urge anyone interested in the gaming industry to check out CVG's article, which provides a very rare insight into the internal workings of the industry's biggest movers and shakers, and a fascinating look at how it came to be that a funny-sounding console from a company many expected to go the way of Sega made such a big splash.

[via: Kotaku]

God-Tier Dad Hacks Wind Waker So His Daughter Can Play A Girl Hero

2012-11-10T17:00:00Z

Little girls don't have a lot by way of female heroes they can look up to in video games. In fact, they're about as rare as Ponycorns. Thank goodness there are dads (and moms, of course) willing to go to just about any length to make the world more open for their kids.

Take, for example, Mike Hoye, a self-professed "inveterate Legend of Zelda fan" who has been playing through the Wind Waker with his little girl, dutifully reading out the text for her as she's not old enough for that yet. (Full disclosure: This whole story makes my biological clock bang away harder than a taiko drummer, and completely melts my heart; I can't even try to be objective on this account.) According to his blog entry on the matter:

It's annoying and awkward, to put it mildly, having to do gender-translation on the fly when Maya asks me to read what it says on the screen. You can pick your character's name, of course - I always stick with Link, being a traditionalist - but all of the dialog insists that Link is a boy, and there's apparently nothing to be done about it.
Well, there wasn't anything to be done about it, certainly not anything easy, but as you might imagine I'm not having my daughter growing up thinking girls don't get to be the hero and rescue their little brothers.

So what did he do? He hacked the Wind Waker. More than that, he's provided others with details of how to do it. Unfortunately it requires emulators and actual computer skills, but for one little girl, at least, the gaming world is a more inclusive place.

Silicon Knights' Fortunes Go From Bad To Worse

2012-11-09T17:00:00Z

The ironically-named Pious Augustus, from Silicon Knights' heyday.

It does this Canadian gamer no good to see Silicon Knights fall so far.

Once lauded as the studio behind the masterful GameCube title Eternal Darkness, a game that deliciously and purposely screws with the person holding the controller, the company has produced only three major games since: GameCube's well-received Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes (dig the oh-so-subtle homoerotic innuendo), and then this generation's Too Human (generally considered okay) and finally X-Men: Destiny (generally considered not okay). Each GameCube title was made in collaboration with Nintendo, while the latter two were made in an abortive relationship with Epic Games' Unreal Engine 3. That relationship went sour, with Silicon Knights suing Epic Games, alleging that they pulled support of the Unreal Engine and put the money into developing Gears of War, thus damaging both Too Human and X-Men: Destiny. Epic counter-sued, and ultimately prevailed, and a recent investigation by Andrew McMillen at Kotaku contains allegations of all sorts of unsavoury practices from Silicon Knights' management.

Now comes news from keen-eyed NeoGAF poster Xenon that Silicon Knights was not only ordered to pay 4.5 million USD in damages to Epic Games, but the court also ordered that:

"Not later than December 10, 2012, Silicon Knights shall destroy all versions of the Licensed Technology in its possession, including (but not limited to) the video game code and game engine code for Too Human, The Box/Ritualys, The Sandman, X-Men: Destiny, and Siren in the Maelstrom, all versions of the Unreal Engine 3, and all copies of any information obtained from the licensee restricted portions of the Unreal Developer Network."

Ouch.

Sources in the Kotaku exposé claim that staff were pulled from X-Men: Destiny to work on Eternal Darkness 2, but Silicon Knights' staff is reportedly decimated from layoffs, and one wonders if the company has the resources to create a game of that scope at this point.

I won't lie; I loved Eternal Darkness. I would equally love to see Silicon Knights pull itself out of the ditch and get on with a great sequel to that game, but the signs are not auspicious.

Twitch To Bring Live Broadcasting To Sony And Planetside 2

2012-11-04T17:00:00Z

Love how 8-bit era cover art this looks.

Sony Online Entertainment and Twitch are teaming up to bring live broadcasting of players' gaming sessions to SOE's upcoming PlanetSide 2, with plans to expand the service afterward. The game, which releases November 20, is seen by Sony and Twitch as an ideal testing bed for the integration of broadcasting into SOE's games, with John Smedley, president of SOE, attributing that to PlanetSide 2 being a MMOFPS (and then jumping into some corporatespeak jargon about "emergent experiences" and one-click interfaces and whatnot). Regardless, players should be able to broadcast their exploits to each other and to other Twitch users with ease. This is no small thing, as Twitch had over 23 million viewers and 300 000 broadcasters in October, and PlanetSide 2, currently in beta, will have a patch delivered soon to integrate broadcasting for early adopters. The game's creative director, Matt Higby, calls it a "next-generation experience", and though live broadcasting of games isn't exactly new, this sort of experience does seem to be part of the direction the big players are taking steps toward in the next generation; Sony teaming with Twitch neatly coincides with Nintendo's delivery of the Miiverse on its new home console, which will also encourage players to share their gaming experiences.

As ever, we'll have more for you as it develops.

(This post was updated within an hour of publication as, for some crazy reason, an old, grammatically ridiculous, edit was published in place of what you see above. The content remains the same.)

Research: Gender, Box Art, And Sales

2012-11-03T21:00:00Z

Scrutiny of the portrayal of gender and sexuality in video games has (thankfully) been growing in recent years. Headline-making controversy over tent-pole games like Tomb Raider, Metroid: Other M, and Dragon Age keeps popping up as both gamers and game makers (a bit of an arbitrary distinction, as most game makers are themselves gamers) awaken to issues of gender role stereotyping. It would be easy to posit that this would be a slow awakening as gaming is an industry run mainly by males from majority demographics - people who are rarely exposed to what it's like to live without their privileges - but this would ignore the complexity of the societal and financial forces (again, a false dichotomy as society and finance are inextricably intertwined) at work in the industry.

A new piece of research by Christopher Near of the University of Michigan, published recently in the journal Sex Roles, explores how some of those forces play out. In particular, the research examines the relationship between the portrayal of gender roles in box art and game sales themselves. Near posits that a focus on non-sexualized female characters (Princess Peach, for example) would be related to lower game sales, while box art focusing on men of any type would be related to higher sales; further, box art in which female characters are not the focus but are sexualized (Cortana, for example) would sell better. To quote the author:

In short, it is expected that "sex sells," but only when the sexualized women portrayed are also depicted as marginalized, consistent with a gender coding of the game that fits cultural stereotypes (Kimmel 2008). In this view, the success of Lara Croft was anomalous, as she was depicted as a central (albeit highly sexualized) female protagonist in the box art for Tomb Raider.

Follow along after the jump.

]]> Of course, there's much more that sells a game than box art, so the research factored out variables such as reviews, when the game was published, ESRB rating, genre, system, and producer. But Near found that, even with all of those variables controlled for, the hypotheses were supported. Putting female characters front and centre, especially ones who are not showing cleavage, in a swimsuit, or off to the side, was associated with fewer game sales. Unfortunately, the statistics show this is a rather strong effect, and it is independent of who published the game, for what system, when it was published, and so on.

Blockbuster casual games like Wii fit may be more likely to feature women prominently.

As Near readily points out, however, this is early research from an incomplete data set. The study examines US data only, and boxart can vary from region to region, so limiting the generalizability of the findings. Only games with ESRB ratings T and M were included, which are " a subset of games that are most often targeted at young males and are the most likely to feature sexualized women. " No PC games were included, and data suggest higher presence of women in casual game content, and more women playing casual game content. Importantly, while the regression analysis performed by the author is good at parsing the effects of different variables, it can't tell you how X causes Y - or even if X causes Y. In this case, it would make little sense to suggest that poor sales retroactively result in non-sexualized, central female characters being on the cover of a game, but if production companies don't believe those images will sell AAA titles, you won't see those images on box art or in other promotional material. Having women front-and-centre might only happen, therefore, for games that companies don't expect to sell well - or signifiers of a main character's femininity might be either obliterated - ehem - or purposely sexed up - ehem.

But levelling criticisms here is simply meant to point out what considerations need to be taken in future research. While it doesn't take empirical analysis to tell us that women are less-than in the video game industry, Near's bit of analysis shows that featuring women prominently, and especially when it's not in a sexualized way, is involved in a game's sales being lower than others.

And how sad is that?

Zynga Lays Off 100 People, Looks To Gambling For Profits

2012-10-27T21:00:00Z

As you may have heard, Zynga is not doing so well. The company, famous for Facebook games such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars, has been suffering as its perhaps fickle user base has moved from harvesting peas and broadcasting ~~annoying~~ wall posts about it to flinging angry birds, slicing up fruit, and playing any number of other games their phones. It's reputation has also suffered from accusations of atrocious labour practices, allegations that it repackages existing games, and an unsavoury benefits claw-back scandal prior to its initial public stock offering. And since that offering, its stock prices have shed 75% of their value. This past week the embattled company fired 100 employees, with plans to shut down as many as three offices in Japan, the US, and the UK. It also plans to terminate thirteen of its existing games and strictly rein in its budget. All this has grown consternation that the Zyngapocalypse could herald another dot-com bubble bursting. After all, it was less than a year ago that the company was worth over 7 billion USD, and Facebook, where Zynga found its greatest success, has seen its own very public stock meltdown this year.

Others, like EA's Peter Moore, lament the job losses but see this as contraction of an overheated market:

"I think it just got a little overhyped. And now the demise is being overhyped the opposite way. I still think there's a strong place for social gaming. I think a lot of social gaming is moving mobile. We feel well positioned to take advantage of that. And people shouldn't read too much into whatever is going on with Zynga."

Of course, this comes from the same EA that is suing Zynga for copyright infringement, alleging it stole core elements of The Sims Social when it put together The Ville. Zynga will no doubt have more bad press over the coming months as it fights the charges.

A less-hyped part of this story is that Zynga is turning to online gambling in the search for more stable future revenues. While this isn't legal in all parts, reports also have it that Zynga has been actively lobbying for changes to online gambling laws in the US. But Zynga will enter its first foray into the market by partnering with UK company bwin.party, meaning that subjects of the Realm can look forward to Zynga poker and FarmVille-branded slots (I sh-t you not; it says so in the Fast Company article: FarmVille-branded slots) as Zynga attempts to staunch the bleeding it has been experiencing over the past months.

More Aliens: Colonial Marines Details: Multiplayer, The Queen Alien, The Return Of Hicks And More

2012-10-21T21:00:00Z

While earlier this year Alien fans had the rather divisive Prometheus to look forward to (but that was one hell of a trailer, wasn't it?), the folks at Gearbox and Sega have been cooking them up what is apparently a canonical sequel to James Cameron's tour de force Aliens. While most fans would like to pretend that Alien 3 (and every Alien movie thereafter) never happened, the events of the upcoming Aliens: Colonial Marines take place shortly after the events of the unfortunate threequel, and seventeen weeks - a sly homage to one of the series' great lines - after the destruction of Hadley's Hope, the human colony on LV-426, as told in Aliens.

In response to the thermonuclear explosion and loss of the Sulaco, the ship that carried Ripley and company, crews of Colonial Marines and of evil corporation Weyland-Yutani's private army are sent to the abandoned ship, the ravaged ruins of Hadley's Hope (which somehow weren't immolated in the nuclear "cloud of vapour the size of Nebraska" which destroyed the air processing station at the end of Aliens), all of which are re-created with care to ensure that they closely resemble the events of the film. Lance Henriksen, who played the android Bishop, and Michael Biehn (Corporal Hicks) are both lending their voices to the game, which is curious considering that both were ~~criminally~~ written off in Alien 3. The game also includes designs by Syd Mead, who did the original interior designs for Aliens, and the creators collaborated with Ridley Scott early in the game's development to ensure that the story aligned with the events of Prometheus - a rather unsubtle hint that the events of Colonial Marines return to the derelict engineer ship from Alien, and Aliens' deleted intro scenes.

Read on, after the jump.

]]> Aliens: Colonial Marines. Now with women!

The game, which can be played solo or co-op throughout, is reportedly as much about tension-building as it is about shooting things, with lengthy stretches of investigating the carnage from the films and preparing for the worst punctuating the action. Players will have to fight against hordes of aliens as well as the Weyland-Yutani troops who, given the series' predilection toward sinister corporate conspiracy, are likely after collecting the aliens for their bioweapons division.

And though the game will star a male character, at least one female character will also be playable in the main campaign. Gearbox claims that was the plan all along, contrary to earlier reports that there wouldn't be any women in the game

Multiplayer, meanwhile, will allow for characters to play as Colonial Marines or aliens - no surprise there. Players will be able to play online or in split-screen, and will have to work together as marines in first-person view, or in third-person as aliens picking off panicky humans. Word is Aliens: Colonial Marines' multiplayer distinguishes itself nicely from other FPS multiplayers out there.

Oh, and this bitch is in the game:

Aliens: Colonial Marines will be released for PS3, the 360, and Wii U starting February 2013.

Minecraft Developers Cite Alien, Firefly As Influences For 0x10c

2012-10-14T16:00:00Z

If the above video looks a lot like the N64's GoldenEye 007 in space, that would be because 0x10c is still very, very early in development. The game's physics, art, and lighting engine aren't quite set yet, meaning it's got a long way to go as a game. That said, Marsh Davies at PCGamer flew on over to Mojang headquarters, and Minecraft mastermind Markus Persson and his crew were ready to talk.

As we reported earlier this year, Mojang is building 0x10c to be a "hard science-fiction" game built around the idea that humans took to space in starships run on 16-bit computers. In the game, you'll take command of your own ship as you fly from planet to planet. Key design elements include the ability to program and fix your ship, and seamless transitioning from space to a planet's surface. This continues what Mojang started with Minecraft in delivering high-concept, highly-interactive gameplay.

Our last report on the game was in April, and since then much about the game's core mechanics has been fleshed out.

Mojang is citing Alien and Firefly as influences for the game, especially in regards to interaction with the ship itself. Your craft is meant to have "a personality," and you are meant to put a lot of stock in it. Keeping it going won't be easy in that Mojang intends to reflect the brutal difficulty of interstellar travel in the game. Accidents will happen. Parts will break. Landing will be hard on the ship. Even the game's physics engine is being built around the idea, with Persson reporting that the game's gravity will mimic real life: If the gravity generator goes down, you'll notice the effects of inertia and momentum in real-time. That said, the developers were clear that 0x10c won't exactly mimic real life, as any actual accident in space, or while landing, would pose a high likelihood of destroying ship and crew. In 0x10c, an accident may happen to the ship in flight and you have to fix it as it malfunctions around you, or you may damage it while landing and have to scrounge for resources before you can lift off. They want the game to be realistic, but still accessible.

And more than just being accessible, Persson wants the game to be fun, an element he intends Mojang to work on as soon as the game's engine is solidified: "As soon as it's fun, I'm going to do the multiplayer. But nothing in the game is fun right now. I need to figure out what is actually a fun game mechanic in all of this." Minecraft has, if nothing else, its light-dark cycle and the need to survive the onslaught of nocturnal monsters - though simple, a compelling mechanic that brings an intensity to the daylight hours and a sense of anxiety that makes what you build more than just a Lego tower. What Mojang intends to bring to 0x10c in that department we have yet to see, but this reporter looks forward to finding out.