Gamers are a growing demographic of the American electorate. So it's about time that candidates start showering the very same kind of pandering love on gamers that they show to every other constituency under the sun. To that end, Comedy Central's Indecision 2008 offers a few suggestions (lifted straight from the InDecider's pen):

1. Making jokes about how "the cake is a lie" and perhaps even making actual cakes shaped like videogame characters would be a good start. Arguing about which console is best will get gamers interested, but the issue is violently divisive, so if ever asked, the best response is just to say, sagely: "It's a shame the Dreamcast never got the chance it deserved."

2. Games like Halo and Call of Duty on the Xbox Live service provide gamers with a platform for their concerns and complaints; a modern town hall, if you will. If John McCain appeared in a Big Team Battle ranked match, tagged a flag carrier with a melee kill and told his opponent to "get out my house, fool," he could pretty much count on both the Covenant and Spartan votes (the parasitic alien Flood haven't been able to vote yet, though they are reportedly gnawing on the brainstems of certain Congressional heavyweights until they get the majority they need for an Amendment).

3. Garnering the votes of gamers isn't a tough task at all -- they'll do almost anything you want as long as you give them points for it and let them brag about it to each other afterwards.

4. Mock up a few extremely high resolution screenshots (again, big guns and scantily-clad women will serve you well here), send them around to the major game sites, and mark them something like "Goldeneye 64 Sequel -- Top Secret!" Then, you simply create a countdown on a website counting down to "Election Day" (use some weird phrasing like "110408" -- gamers enjoy solving easy puzzles), and then, as a masterstroke, install polling places at all videogame stores.

[via Comedy Central's Indecision 2008]

Conservative blogger and GamePolitics reader Lori Ingham is a mother and a gamer. She recently wrote an opinion piece for New Hampshire's Union Leader about the videogame legislation. Ingham's editorial is written from the point of view of a parent who's also a gamer, a vantage too often absent from the debate. She explains how she and her husband do their own policing of their children's access to inapporpriate games while preserving their own ability to play mature-rated titles:

My husband and I allow his almost-14-year-old son to play a couple of M-rated (mature) games that we don't think are too bad. But most are off-limits. That's because we know him and know that playing "Call of Duty 4" is not going to cause him to go on a shooting spree. Games like the "Grand Theft Auto" series we do not let him play because we know they are highly inappropriate for him.

But because my husband and I also like to play video games, we do have a couple of M-rated titles hanging around for us to play that the kids know they shouldn't. How do we know that they aren't playing these? Because the TV that is hooked up to play these games is in the living room where I can see them, and so is the computer.

Simple but apparently effective.

Ingham's opposition to game legislation stems from similarly parent-minded concerns:

As a parent, I don't want to have my rights taken away in any regard as to what my husband and I think is appropriate for his kids as well as the son we have coming on the way. I don't want a clerk at a department store refusing to sell me a game that I want to play because he thinks I might be letting the kids play it. And I don't want some group telling me what is right for my children. Only I should be the one to determine that.

Most of the time, the argument against game legislation is cast in terms of the rights of artists to free expression or the "infantilization" of a medium that adults consume at least as much as children. It's refreshing to be reminded that the debate over game legislation is also a debate about the right to be a parent.

[via Union Leader]

Eric Brevig is a special FX and stunt artist whose worked with Michael Bay and James Cameron on films from Pearl Harbor to The Abyss. He recently did an interview with about his work on the recently released Journey to the Center of the Earth, a reimagining of the classic Jules Verne novel.

Technology has come along way since Henry Levin directed James Mason in the 1959 movie about a group of explorers who discover Pangea, a verdant jungle ecosystem nestled beneath the Earth's crust. For the 2008 movie, Brevig used cutting-edge computer graphics to render the film's pre-cambrian environments. One of the most interesting parts of the interview is when Brevig explains how 3D digital technology allowed him to get almost instant feedback on scenes:

What we did is we had a full-size screen because I needed to see the imagery full size because our eyes don't scale down.

Because we were studio based, we took over an abandoned section out of… it was probably the cafeteria or something at one point, but it had a high enough ceiling. We installed a thirty-foot screen and two projectors, and that was a standing dailies screening room the entire time we were there. Literally, I could shoot at lunch, walk over with the tape and see it the same way the audience sees it, full color, sound, 3D, full size screen, judge all the issues, looking for eye strain, any problems in focus or whatever might creep into it, and call them back on the phone across the lot and say, "Okay, you can tear down the set, I'm done with it," literally thirty minutes after walking off of it with the actors. That was definitely the filmmaking of the future, and if you visited our set, we had a ten-foot screen in a tented area on the soundstage that was getting a live feed from the cameras so that guests to the set could come and sit in there with 3D glasses on and watch live while I'm filming what I'm doing.

Sounds like the kind of iterative development that was previously the exclusive realm of software developers. It's amazing to to see how movies are increasingly adapting the techniques of game design to bring virtual worlds to life on the silver screen.

[via ComingSoon.net]

Webcomics are a staple of game culture, combining humor and an often encyclopedic knowledge of the medium to make us laugh at the (sometimes inordinate) influence games have on our lives. Ozge Samanci, a Ph.D. student in digital media at Georgia Tech is making the relationship between games and comics even more intimate. He's making them interactive.

Working with assistant professor Alexandra Mazalek, who has a film background, and Yanfeng Chen, a master's student in human-computer interaction, Samanci has built a system that uses cameras to capture a user's gestures. These gestures are then translated to a avatar on a large screen. Depending on the user's gestures, the avatar triggers different conditions, which drive the comic down a narrative path. The result is a printout of your interaction as a traditional comic strip.

Samanci's first interactive comic drew on the most basic bit of human slapstick, the courtship of sperm and egg. "I wanted to do something absurd and funny and shocking," Samanci told the Atlanta Journal Constitution. "Also something that's a playful challenge. You don't often have the chance to be inside the female reproductive system."

In the comic, the user plays the part of an egg, who must choose a sperm. By waving one's hand over a swimming sperm, the user can view a snapshot of how the product of that union would develop. One possibility, for example, is that the zygote might become a scientist working in a digital lab on interactive comics! (It's good to see that Samanci's work preserves the game comic's penchant for self referential humor.) A demo video of the work is available at Samanci's site.

Scott Snibbe is another artist working on comics that accept user input. Snibbe recently had an installation up at the Berkeley Art Museum called "Falling Girl." As a girl falls from a skyscraper in dreamy slow motion, she witnesses and responds to the events that play out in the windows she passes, which are rendered in silhouette. By the time she reaches the ground, the girl is an old woman, completely transformed by the fall. Visitors, caught on cameras in the museum, may see themselves appear in the skyscraper's windows, reacting with varying levels of engagement or indifference to the female form drifting past.

Maybe someday in the not too distant future, interactive comics will come to the web, and we'll be able to share and influence the lives of Tycho and Gabe. Then again, we already know what their lives are like. We live them every day.

[via AJC.com]

Before Masi Oka became a Hiro on TV, he played at being a ninja for Playstation's Shinobi. This commercial, which goes back to the PS2 era (a whopping six years ago), shows what a little work on a ninja simulator can do for your career. Next thing you know, you're a time-traveling geek who saves feudal Japan and becomes a vaunted Samurai legend.

Wii Fit has finally found the yin to its calorie burning yang. Later this year Mastiff will publish Sensory Sweep's Major League Eating: The Game. That's right, the Wii is finally getting its very own simulator for overeaters. Sad about your inability to gorge yourself sick like the inimitable Kobayashi, who faked an arthritic jaw injury this week at the Nathans Hot Dog Eating Contest in order to throw American piggy-pounder Joey Chestnut off his, um, game? Well, cheer up and chow down. Thanks to Major League Eating, you can use the Wiimote to shovel food into your gaping maw till your virtual heart bursts.

Shock value bought Major League Eating a spot on the always-hep Today Show recently with Kathy Lee Griffith and some other woman with excessively white teeth. After a tutorial from one of the game's pro eating endorsers, Crazy Legs Conti (who had to clue them each into the existence of the 'a' button), the two women least likely to ever have played a videogame gnash away at their wiimotes until one of them vomits (alas only their avatar does) somewhere around 2:55.

Although Major League Eating looks absolutely abysmal, even for a Wii Ware game, this is one title we'd love to see added to DirectTV's Championship Gaming Series roster.

Matt Harding is a serendipity magnet. That's how pal Gary Schyman describes the former Activision designer who gained fame after he left Pandemic Studios to roam the world. While on his travels in 2005, he had a friend film him doing a silly little dance, not very good at that, in every town, village, city and burg he passed through. The dances were edited together and eventually found their way from his blog to YouTube where he scored millions of views, found his 15 minutes of fame in the national media and picked up Stride gum as a sponsor to further his globe-hopping journeys.

Harding's most recent version of his "Dancing" videos is cast against a stirring bit of world music accompanied by the beautiful voice of a 17-year-old Minneapolis high school student. Palbasha Siddique is the owner of that voice and thanks to "Dancing 2008," she has become the top download on Amazon, displacing the likes of Madonna and Mariah Carey. The video has been viewed more than 4 million times in the past fortnight.

Harding started out working at a videogame store and then became a games journalist for GameWeek. At 19, he put down his pen and became a game designer at Activision, Los Angeles. After nearly a decade in the industry, Harding realized he no longer wanted to spend his days behind a monitor "growing fat and getting pale skin." A sarcastic crack about the cliches of shoot 'em ups to a friend at Pandemic Studios reportedly spawned the idea for Destroy All Humans. Uncomfortable with spending the next two years writing a game about killing everything, Harding took it on the road and began his jig-fueled odyssey.

Harding's dancing videos are wonderful because they use an absurd little dance to reveal how enormously similar we all are, regardless of culture. It's a powerful message that has touched many people's lives, and the video has given a Minnesota teenager a chance to do what she loves. Harding is also a living example of the very best that game culture offers, the ability to build communities that transcend time and place, and he's a reminder that even bad dancing is still good.

[via Minneapolis Star Tribune]

Good games can be great teaching tools. Skillful modeling of complex systems can give players new insight to problems and issues. Artful presentation can keep players immersed in subjects that might otherwise bore them. The truly great games, like SimCity, Balance of Power or Civilization serve up both. But what about bad games?

Bad games with a 'serious' bent (those that have some goal beyond simple 'fun') can be downright dangerous, trivializing their subject or killing interest in an important issue by sheer dint of boredom. PopSci has released just such a bad game with Walker.

Unfortunately, PopSci's latest Flash game has nothing to do with Chuck Norris. That's a shame because Walker could certainly use a kick in the ass. In an effort to educate players about the importance of thoughtful energy consumption and the use of mass transit, PopSci came up with what it describes as "an eco-themed take" on the classic Frogger. Commissioned as part of its "Future of the Environment" special, Walker wants players to navigate across a trio of roads in order to make it to school on time.

The presentation is middling. For a game that claims to be based on one of the true classics of the 8-bit arcade era, you'd think some stylized pixel art would be in order. Not so, instead you get some bland sprites that are supposed to represent alternative transportation vehicles, although what those modes of transport might be remains a mystery, due to bad design. (It turns out that the sprites represent "pod cars, driverless buses and rail pods. Not so much alternative transportation as something out of the Jetsons.)

• Read On

Capcom is creating  “subliminal mind programming techniques.” It's not as bad as it sounds.
The “techniques” are actually part of Capcom's new educational program, developed with University of Portsmouth e-learning professor, Nipan Maniar. The professor is now helping Capcom's European division add subtle lessons to their major releases, hopefully creating educational games kids actually look forward to playing.

The idea struck Capcom research manager, Rhys Cash, while play testing the company's Wii game, We Love Golf, and noticing that to do well players had to make complex calculations on the fly.

“Things like how spin affects the flight of the ball; it's incredibly complex physics that people understand instinctively. We just want to point that out to gamers so if they're learning about, say, parabolic motion at school they'll be able to say, 'that's just like the golf game I played.'”

According to the Guardian, Capcom faces an uphill battle in changing many teachers' opinions on videogames in the classroom, with a 2006 survey finding 37% of teachers did not want gaming in their classes. Though Capcom doesn't need to worry much about perception as these games are meant to teach on their own, without an educator guiding the student through the game's lesson.

The benefits of the program speak for themselves, which could be the reason Capcom's PR department seems to have slept through this one. Good intentions or not, the phrase, “subliminal mind programming” is a risky description from the company famous for Resident Evil.

[Image Source: SiliconEra]

Games are taking an increasing share of the world's entertainment muscle, eclipsing movie box office receipts, rivaling sports and putting the book industry to shame. In China, they're also taking a lion's share of the computing power.

According to the Register, experts have been puzzling over a list of the top-ranked supercomputers in China. The list starts off as one might expect. An oil company, the China Meteorological Administration and a supercomputing research center. The next five systems on the list, however, tell a dramatically different story.

Five of the top ten (and 12 of the top 100) supercomputers in China belong to none other than The9, a local game publisher best known for running the Chinese version of Blizzard's World of Warcraft. Although the supercomputers on the list only rank in the top 500 worldwide, The9 has at least five machines boasting clusters of more than 1950 cores and has at least 18,000 cores worth of processing power at its supercomputing disposal.

That means that 10 percent of the fastest computers in China are dedicated to serving up raids, PvP and phat lewtz. Despite all those cycles spent crunching stats, resolving battles and generally keeping a bevy of virtual worlds humming, even The9 has not escaped criticism from users over the bane of online gamers, network lag:

The9's servers has long been a source of frustration for Chinese WoW players," complains one local. "Many irate players refers to them dryly as 'Little Overlords,' a brand of cheap basic home computers (or 'learning machines' as they were advertised) popular in China in the 90's that were less powerful than Commodore 64s."

That same player ridicules The9's servers as being of "questionable quality" and the cause for massive amounts of downtime during peak playing hours.

In the real-world they say there's no such thing as being too thin. Apparently in the virtual world there's no such thing as being too fast.

[via The Register UK]