Other guests included Dean Takahashi, columnist for the San Jose Mercury News and author of The Xbox 360 Uncloaked:: The Real Story Behind Microsoft's Next-Generation Video Game Console; Clive Thompson, writer for the New York Times magazine and contributer to Wired, Discover, and the New York magazine; Steven L. Kent, author of The History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokemon, a few other gaming books and a Sci-fi series of novels.

Hit the link below to check it out. Brian Crecente

Listen Here

Last year, Wired News kicked off the sexiest geeks of the year list with such hotties as Tiny Nibbles Violet Blue and Gawker founder Nick Denton. But there wasn't a damn gamer among them.

This year, the list has decided to let the masses, as in you, nominate the geeks you find sexiest. So far the list of 60-plus submissions for this year's list include gamers J Allard, Clive Thompson, Jessica Chobot and Jonathan "Fatal1ty" Wendel.

Somehow both CliffyB and (sigh) Jade Raymond haven't popped up on the list yet. Insanity!

2006 Sexiest Geeks [Wired]

Over at Wired News, there's a pretty accurate encapsulation of all the forum whinging that has gone on over the past few years about save games, specifically within the context of Dead Rising's draconian and merciless save system.

You should read it, but it concludes with this ludicrous analogy:

This is why gamers have such heated debates about save mechanisms: They're metaphoric stand-ins for the way life works. Playing a game with frequent save points is kind of like being the child of a billionaire: You can soar through life without worrying about financial problems because if you fail, there's a "restore" point waiting for you. Games with few save points force you to live like a scrappy, coming-from-nothing immigrant: You embrace scary amounts of risk to get ahead because you've got no safety net.

Um. No. Paris Hilton isn't like instant save at all. Nor is it like being a hopped-up, meth addicted trailer park monkey.

For me, the debate really ends with the convenience issue. There is no CD I can't turn off mid-way through the album, only to pick it up again later on, when my attention isn't divided. Books do not become unread when you stop in the middle of a chapter. A DVD has chapter breaks specifically to allow you to come back to it. Entertainment media is about your convenience, not about the pompous, uninterruptable infliction of art upon a squirming audience.

If you don't want to save anywhere, you really don't have to, as long as the designers don't cave to the instinct to degrade their game to make saving every five seconds a necessity. Ultimately, though, it's less about the saving mechanism than the loading mechanism. You ought to be able to save anywhere, in any game, so you can put it down when you want to. However, if a designer wants to limit my ability to load my save games, preventing me from save-hopping my way through their game, that's okay. Okay with me, that is. But maybe not with you.

Thoughts, oh commenters? Florian Eckhardt

Saved by the Bell [Wired]

I was lucky enough to get a chance to sit down with some of the Rockstar guys last month in their SoHo offices and look at and talk about Bully for a package of stories I was working on for the Rocky Mountain News.

Earlier this week I had a news story up about the game, today I have a story up about Bully that looks at censorship and the medium of gaming coming into its own as a social commentary. The story includes interviews with the executive directior of the National Coalition Against Censorship, Clive Thompson, the Miami-Dade school board member who banned the game, Rockstar founder Terry Donovan and our very own Alice Taylor, of the BBC.

It's a controversy launched by a sentence.

The video game Bully, from the makers of Grand Theft Auto, has been called a Columbine simulator and an impetus for teen violence. The House of Commons condemned it, the Miami-Dade School District banned it, and anti-violence activists have protested it.

Until this week, the only thing these vocal critics knew about Rockstar's upcoming game came from a single sentence released in 2005:

"As a troublesome schoolboy, you'll laugh and cringe as you stand up to bullies, get picked on by teachers, play pranks on malicious kids, win or lose the girl, and ultimately learn to navigate the obstacles of the fictitious reform school, Bullworth Academy."

But with this week's announcement of the game's October release, more details have emerged — as have advocates for the game. Where some people see controversy, others now see a cause. Months before its release Bully may be evolving into a benchmark game for issues ranging from censorship to the stature of video games as relevant social commentary.

Make sure you check out the full story. I think it touches on some interesting ideas about gaming and its place in popular culture. Brian Crecente

Evolution or Explotation [Rocky Mountain News]

Ah, nothing like a bile-clearning rant to kick-start a Monday. Clive Thompson's latest column is all about the pure, simple, violent pleasures of running-and-gunning first-person shooters. Screw plot, screw game mechanics, screw intricacies, screw complexity, sometimes all you really need is to deliver an up-close-and-personal gut shot to a friend with a sawed off.

Let us now praise insanely violent first-person-shooters.

Let us praise the joys of double-wielding a pair of Uzis with unlimited ammo; let us delight in the gorgeous fractal carnage of a rocket launcher as it slams into your target. Let us talk openly about how just totally awesome it is to grab a fully loaded railgun in Quake 4 and wade into a mass of gibbering Strogg aliens and kill and kill and kill again, until there are guts on, like, the ceiling.

While we're at it, let us meditate on the subtle joys of deciding, while playing Far Cry, that this sneaking-around "stealth" stuff is for the birds, and it's way more excellent to just barge out into the open with fully loaded machine guns and slice through waves of oncoming mercenaries with the crimson fury of the angel of death himself, blasting and blasting until your trigger finger is aching and you are basically tripping over the corpses, and the battlefield is silent but for the distant plaintive cawing of seagulls on a far-off beach.

I probably sound like I've lost my mind.

I haven't. No — it's just time to defend the indefensible: The allure of grotesquely violent shoot'em-ups.

Amen. And now, let us gib.

The Glory of the Shooter [Games Without Frontiers]

Clive Thompson follows up his article about the end of days at Asheron's Call with a quick post showing an image of the last moments and some painfully geeky lost quotes from gamers.

I still remember the end of the Ultima Online beta. There was plenty of warning so people had time to do a lot of goofy stuff. I ended up leading a rebel army against Lord British's castle, which was a lot of fun. To make things interesting I got everyone to dye their clothes yellow and then we marched across the countryside. By the time we got to town we were so large the guards couldn't handle us. Although I managed to get inside the castle, but I found it empty. It wasn't until months later, in the real game, that someone managed to off the tyrannical Lord British.

Why is it that certain knowledge of Armageddon gets people to behave so badly? Why not just go about your routine, or run around doing nice things? Has anyone else experienced the end of a virtual world? Post away.

The final words as Asheron's Call dies [Collision Detection]

Clive Thompson tracked down a very interesting use of machinima that he posted about over on Collision Detection. The French Democracy is a short about the riots in France that uses the dramatized lives of three black French citizens who follow different paths but all end up rioting. Thompson points to this piece as a bit of thinking Machinima, a genre seldom seen in the burgeoning art form.

I ve gotta ask Alice if this was an entry for the annual Machinima contest she s helping to judge.

A machinima commentary on the riots in France [Collision Detection]