"Ms. Cobain is extremely upset about Activision's use of Mr. Cobain's likeness to sing the songs of others in its Guitar Hero game," Keith A. Fink, Love's attorney, told Kotaku. "Activision was granted permission by Kurt's trust solely to use his name and likeness. Activision was not given an unbridled right to use Mr. Cobain's name and likeness. Kurt's songs have a special and unique meaning to his fans and his image and legacy are very important to Ms. Cobain. The agreement Activision has with the trust doesn't allow them to use his likeness in ways that denigrate his image. We would hope Activision would do the right thing on its own and prohibit game users from using Kurt's image to sing others songs and if they don't we expect the trust to take appropriate action to protect Mr. Cobain's image."

Activision told Kotaku earlier this week that Love signed the agreement allowing the use of Cobain in the game. But what appears to be driving most of the controversy is the ability for gamers to use Cobain's likeness to perform in and sing other songs.

Love posted on her Twitter account that she was going to sue Activision and that the way Cobain appears in the game is a breach of contract. She also said she was sickened by how he is used in the game.

Krist Novoselic and Dave Grohl, the two surviving members of Nirvana, released a joint statement saying they too are upset over the way Cobain can be used to pantomime other artists' music "alongside cartoon characters."

"Kurt Cobain wrote songs that hold a lot of meaning to people all over the world. We feel he deserves better."

The are asking Activision to "re-lock" Cobain's character so he can only perform his own songs in the game.

Update: Yup. This sucker's been de-listed. Couldn't've seen that one coming. Now, back to our original story ...

That picture above is one of two provided by the seller at the listing. He's claiming that it "was autographed at the governors picnic on July 24, 2009, in Wasilla, Alaska, just two days before her resignation as governor of that state." She did indeed have a picnic in that town on that date. But if she signed a console there, this is the first I have ever heard of it. And such things usually trickle onto the blogs.

We put the picture to a forensic examination by Kotaku's Bureau of Questioned Documents and could not make a conclusive determination either way, fake or 'shooped. Turning around and comparing it to her actual signature also produced no conclusion one way or the other.

But that $1.1 million price tag is fishy as Fairbanks. Not that any of you do have $1.1 million to drop on a tagged 360, but if you do, you probably know some appraiser who can certify this before eBayer dmorrill123 gets the money out of escrow. According to this list, $1.1 million would be a record for anything signed by a person still living when it was sold. Fellow-soliloquy writer Shakespeare's is valued at $5 million.

Just don't play it. Because if it red-rings and you send it in, well, don't expect Microsoft's power-washers to know the value of political memorabilia.

Sarah Palin Signed Autograph XBOX 360 [eBay]

Even more interesting is the fact that the ad in question is for Guitar Hero 5, making it the second Guitar Hero ad to get prime placement on the much-watched O'Reilly Factor, unaltered.

While Activision has yet to say that the video, featuring confirmed song names from the upcoming game, is a viral advertisement for Guitar Hero 5, that's the theory O'Reilly floats and the LA Times seems to agree. Kotaku was even notified about the O'Reilly video by a viral marketing group that drew parallels between this video and the one for Guitar Hero World Tour featuring Heidi Klum, and also aired on O'Reilly's show.

Did O'Reilly knowingly run a viral ad at the behest of Activision? Has the "culture warrior" and America's "moral barometer" become the conservative mainstream face of Guitar Hero or does he just like to watch naked or nearly naked women prance around on his show?

We've reached out to O'Reilly and his people for comment but don't expect more than being labeled a pinhead if we hear back at all.

"We are treating game openings like movie openings if they're cool," he told Kotaku. "Video games are interesting, I think it's something a lot of people do now.

"It's entertaining and it gets your mind off things like my life sucks, or I have to pay the bills. It's almost like meditation for me."

And Fallon's not just tapping into a hobby that he thinks he viewers might find interesting, he's a life-long gamer himself.

"I'm 34, so I think I grew up in that generation where video games were always a part of my life," he said. "Getting an Atari 2600 was a huge deal for me, I think I had that before I had cable."

The next big thing for Fallon was Nintendo and Super Mario Bros. an experience that made him a stalwart fan of Nintendo and their consoles. Nowadays he owns all of the gaming systems, including a modded PSP that he rarely touches and an iPhone, but rarely has the time to play on them.

He says that they have all of the consoles at the studio, but people rarely have the time to use them and when he's home he tends to spend his down time with his wife.

Fallon says he just landed a copy of Ghostbusters, but asked me how it was because he hadn't had a chance yet to check it out. (I haven't either.)

Growing up, Fallon said he never really stopped playing games. When he was at Saturday Night Live he was one of the people who helped get pieces on video gaming into the weekly show.

"I shared my office with Horatio (Sanz) and we had an Xbox," he said. "You're up so late at Saturday Night Live, it's kind of like a dorm vibe."

And out of that came several funny skits.

On Late Night With Jimmy Fallon, the crew doesn't really have time to play games, but Fallon still thinks incorporating gaming into the show is important.

Fallon played Punch Out!!! on the Wii on his show earlier in the year, and last week sent a correspondent to E3, SNL's Jason Sudeikis. Tonight he will have Microsoft's Kudo Tsunoda on to talk about Project Natal, something Fallon had heard about but hasn't seen.

He said he didn't want to know much about the system before tonight's show so that he could see what someone new to the idea can do with it.

And Fallon isn't gun shy about having game developers and producers on his show either. He recently invited Double Fine's Tim Schafer to come on the show with Jack Black to talk about their collaboration on Brutal Legend.

That flies in the face of the argument that game developers may not be as entertaining on a talk show as a musician or an actor.

"I think it's all about how interested you are in talking to these people," Fallon said. "There are some really famous celebrities out there that aren't that exciting.

Tsunoda says he happy to see video games getting so much time on Fallon's show.

"I am really excited to be able to show him the Project Natal technology and how it works," Tsunoda told Kotaku. "We have been working on this project for so long in secret, it's awesome to finally be able to show it off. Hopefully, we can bring that same spirit of fun we had during E3 to the Late Night with Jimmy Fallon show."

And what about showing the people at home what the bottom of an avatar's shoe looks like?

"That was something totally improvised," Tsunoda said. "I'm not even sure what possessed me to do that at the time. I'm sure something just as fun will happen tonight on the show."

You can catch Fallon and Tsunoda on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon on NBC tonight.

"That's great," Nintendo of America president Reggie Fils-Aime said as he looked at it for the first time during his interview with Kotaku.

"We know that he is a fan of what we do, and we're thrilled to have him as a passionate Nintendo fan. Maybe we'll have to go play some Wii Sports Resort as well as Super Mario Bros Wii."

So, no cease and desist, Reggie?

"No. For Conan, we'll let that one slide."

Credit to SeriousLunch.com for first spotting the Conan-Mario connection and enhancing it.

The star of Bionic Commando, that is. Heather Mills. Yeah. The action game follows the adventures of one-armed hero Nathan "RAD" Spencer.

A source tells The Sun, "She was insistent she wouldn't do it for a smaller fee and said the producers should make her the star. The request was way, way over budget and they certainly weren't keen on basing the game on her."

Mills' account of how it went down is quite different. In her official Twitter account, she tweeted,

Got offered to promote an amputee bionic computer game, from a wealthy computer games company I said if you donate a large sum to charity.

The stingy company came back saying they couldn't, what happened to charitable businesses, seems they just want to exploit and give nothing.

It may make sense to take the offer but I'd rather donate regularly to many charities much more than they're offering and not be exploited.

About those claims The Sun has made, Mills quipped, "Connect Sun journalists to a lie detector machine which triggers an electric current attached to their privates."

Capcom has declined to comment about this incident. Heather Mills, it seems, has not.

Greedy Mucca's out of lucka [The Sun via VG247]

Spore, Will Wright's far-reaching game about life, the universe and everything, is a journey, not just from microscope to universe, but of discovery and imagination.

It's also the clearest example of how, in creating his games, Wright taps so deeply into the principals of his grade-school education which was based on a pedagogy built on child development first formulated more than 100 years ago in Rome.

Because of this, Wright's greatest achievement isn't delivering the universe as toy in Spore, the digital dollhouses of the Sims or even the planned towns of Sim City.

It's his ability to touch a gamer's imagination and inspire their intellect. To create not just games, but places and spaces of exploration

Interesting Playthings
The secret of good teaching is to regard the child's intelligence as a fertile field in which seeds may be sown, to grow under the heat of flaming imagination. Our aim therefore is not merely to make the child understand, and still less to force him to memorize, but so to touch his imagination as to enthuse him to his inner most core. — Maria Montessori

In Montessori schools, the emphasis is on instilling a desire to learn in children, not in lecturing them.

"In western education we take theories, we deconstruct them, we categorize them and then we teach them in classrooms," Wright says. "You are going to a school, going to a master, learning theory before you could go practice it."

"Before that system, it was about practice, it was more of a failure based learning. I think that's almost a more natural approach. It seems that Montessori is going with the grain in that naturalistic sense. It was later we moved to this narrative method, sitting back, listening-to-a-lecture model ."

The pedagogy was developed by Maria Montessori while working with intellectually and developmentally disabled children as part of her post-graduate research. By removing the idea that children were adults in tiny bodies that had to learn through lecture and memorization, and instead focusing on sparking a thirst for knowledge, Montessori found children could direct their own learning.

"Her aim was to arouse in the children a spontaneous response to the materials and I see that in (Will Wright's) games," said Virginia McHugh Goodwin, executive director of the Association Montessori International, USA. "Creativity is a component to his work and that is also key to Montessori's work, because she sets the tone for creativity, the way she has her educational methods set up.

"To be creative you have to have the freedom to explore and to master the specific techniques and that leads to unleashing the human spirit so that the process of creating can come from within."

Montessori's first school opened in 1907 in Rome and her methodologies have since spread around the world. Including to places like Atlanta, Georgia, where Wright attended such a school until sixth grade.

Another important element of Montessori education is the use of self-correcting toys. These Montessori toys allow children to play without realizing they are learning.

"The structure of Montessori toy is that the kid will discover things while playing with a toy," Wright said. "Having the kid discover these principals is so much more powerful than a teacher coming up and saying we're going to learn about this.

"The way we approached Spore was a lot like that. What are the components I want a gamer to discover when playing with this?"

And that's not an unusual approach for Wright. None of his games are really games, he says.

"I build more interesting toys than interesting games," he said. "I always thought of Spore as a toy universe. I think there is an interesting distinction between toy and game. I think a toy is more open ended.

"The game is a subset of the experiences you can have with the toy."

And toys and play, Wright says, go hand-in-hand.

"Play is a toy version of problem solving that we're going to encounter later in life," he said. "Getting people to be playful around serious subjects is the most effective ways to develop an intuition to that.

"It gives us ways to kind of map things intuitively."

An Elegant Tool
"Free the child's potential, and you will transform him into the world" — Maria Montessori

Wright's first experience with Montessori was brief and intense, attending an elementary school in Atlanta until the sixth grade. The school introduced him to the idea of self-directed education through creative inspiration.

"I bring it up every now and the," he said of his Montessori education. "It gives people a grounding of where I am coming from. "

Goodwin says that many Montessori graduates tend to be more interesting in exploring things, in asking a lot of questions.

"They're critical thinkers, problem solvers, because they've had the ability to do that from a very early age," she said.

For Wright, Montessori helped him realize that when he was personally involved or interested in something he learned about it much more efficiently.

"When I was starting to research SimCity I started reading about urban dynamics," he said. "It became more of an obsession, because I was able to play with my guinea pig simulation, instead of trying to learn facts and figures.

"When Sim games started moving forward we wanted to draw that out."

He did that by creating games that were a form of autodidactic toy, that taught by inspiring people to become interested in a subject.

"It's about getting a player creatively engaged," he said. "Computers can get students very motivated to be interested in things."

But Wright contends that Montessori isn't as direct an influence on him as some might think. He doesn't, he says, come up with his idea for games from Montessori.

"I pick themes, things I've been fascinated with, then it's ‘How can I convey this to a lot of people?'," he said. "Montessori seems like a very clean, natural way to make these subjects approachable."

Instead, Montessori's influence is more subtle.

"I don't think it's something you work into a game, I think it's inherit in the structure itself," he said. "It's in the design premise.

"It's an elegant tool. It's not the end state goal. It just happens to be the best tool for the job."

Loops of Super Mario Bros.
Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed. – Maria Montessori

As with the Montessori Method, in Wright's games failing is almost as important as winning.

"Montessori knew that children needed freedom to make mistakes, to develop skills that are unique to his or her personality," said Goodwin. "The freedom allows for the development of the creative thinking and the problem solving skills. To be able to look at things from a different perspective.

"Montessori allows for success and failure. She felt that people learned from mistakes. Mistakes are not looked down upon or frowned upon, they are part of the process."

For Wright, that was one of the hardest things to come to grips with as a game designer.

"One of the counter intuitive things I needed to learn as a designer was that players enjoy failures more than success," he said. "As long as it's diverse, they like to explore the failure space of a game."

All games are made up of what Wright calls interaction loops, events that have both a success and failure side to them.

"In Super Mario Brothers, once you succeed at knowing how to make him move you go on to the next step. Now you go up and hit a creature and you fail a different way."

Wright's games have always had a diverse and interesting mix of what Wright terms the failure space.

"It's the failure that's fun," he said.

But what you won't find in Spore is any form of direct competition with other gamers, another tenant found in Montessori teachings.

"Montessori does not encourage competition in the traditional sense," Goodwin said. "The idea with Montessori is that children strive to do the best that they can do."

Instead, in both Spore and Montessori, the emphasis is on collaboration.

"Children learn to collaborate and work with one another and then each child is motivated to reach his or her potential so they can contribute to the project in a collaborative way, their best skills," Goodwin said. "So there is competition, but it is done in a very nice way. And I don't see Wright with a lot of competition in his games."

Imagination Amplifier
We especially need imagination in science. It is not all mathematics, nor all logic, but it is somewhat beauty and poetry. – Maria Montessori

Because Wright isn't trying to lecture gamers or teach them the nuance of physics, evolution, of astronomy or biology, the science of Spore wasn't designed to be "dead on accurate".

"If you step way back and look at Spore as a whole it's meant to show a grand arch, the story of life," her said. "The Sims is like the story of life on Earth, Spore is life with a capital L."

"I wanted people to have a sense of the vast scope that their life is inside of. There's a journey in Spore from microscopic to galactic. There aren't too many experiences in games, books or movies that gives you that distant perspective."

And along with that perspective, the different stages of Spore allow a gamer plenty of aesthetic and strategic creativity, all geared at getting players not to learn but to express their creativity.

"A lot of people have a very low opinion of their own creativity," he said. "When you give them a tool to make things that they didn't think they could make it can be very powerful, especially when five or six people comment on it."

Goodwin says Spore "amplifies the imagination."

"When I look at Spore, that's what it seemed to say to me," she said. "That it really uses the imagination.

"Another thing I think I saw with (Wright), is that he is really, really into that idea of discovery and exploration. That is one of the key tenants of Montessori's work. The materials that she designed allow the child to discover"

They are, she said, manipulative materials that go from something concrete to the abstract.

After the game's launch, Wright and his team started to see people step outside the limitations of Spore and continue to create.

"People were creating narratives of who their people are and how they evolve," he said. "It was really about ownership at some level."

Manchild
The greatest sign of success for a teacher... is to be able to say, "The children are now working as if I did not exist. — Maria Montessori

The more than four hundred pages of Maria Montessori's book, The Montessori Method, is packed with lessons that seem at times written as much for game development as they are for education.

It often talks of creating a system of rules that don't inhibit, but enhance the experience.

Wright laughs in surprise when I tell him that after reading the book it seems to me that many games treat gamers as children, puppets that are lead through games by a strict set of rules, rules that often harm the experience.

He seems to be agreeing with me when he says that Spore was created to be very player focused.

"Where Montessori is very child centered," he says, "we are very gamer centered."

But modern games aren't as condescending in their design. They expect more now from players.

"If you look at them ten years ago they were more linear," he said. "But now the Sims, Grand Theft Auto, Roller Coaster Tycoon, even the Wii games or music games, they leave a lot more room for creative expression of the player."

And it's that desire to free that expression that seems to keep driving Wright back to Montessori's methods.

"I'm not trying to evangelize Montessori," he said. "I want people to feel creative and involved and feel like they've doing something constructive. Montessori is a great tool for that purpose."

Almost ten years ago, I was on the grass at Clement Park adjacent Columbine High School covering what would become the world's most iconic school shooting.

Last week, I was on the Internet reading about the Winnenden, Germany school shootings, and nothing had changed. The breaking news in the search for answers was a familiar brew of gun control, parenting, and violent video games. A tough Spiegel Online piece Monday brought them all together when a commentator wrote, "But we have debated about weapons laws and video games for long enough. Our biggest problem are parents who aren't doing their jobs."

I can't fully point the finger at the Winnenden parents, nor the Columbine parents. We still don't have enough information on either of them. (Although sadly, you might note, it's ten years after the April 20, 1999 Columbine shootings, and only about ten days after Winnenden.)

But I was surprised to see video games become the bogeyman again. Call me naive.

Tragedies can bring about positive change, and Columbine is no exception. Police have adopted "active shooter" policies to charge in rather than hang back and form a perimeter when facing school shooters. And there has been new scholarship into what makes school shooters tick.

I began a ten-year odyssey of book research because I felt there had to be some common denominators causing school shootings. Traditional theories of juvenile delinquency would not do; school shooters did not tend to be warped by drug abuse, physical abuse, or poverty.

It's wrong to say the video games played by Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had no effect on them. As I write in the book, previously excerpted here on Kotaku:

Video games may have given Eric and Dylan paths for their anger: Postal had details that previewed Columbine, and Doom's philosophy of the lone Marine against the rest of hell helped inform Eric and Dylan's us against them mentality. The game's tough as nails descriptions also seeped into their brains and influenced Eric's writings. Staring at the computer screen would keep Eric and Dylan from developing the social skills to merge with the rest of the world they so desperately wanted to connect with.

But Eric and Dylan were not the only ones exposed to the joysticks: In one week in 1997, sales of Postal hit 15,000 copies, according to the Wall Street Journal. The video games did not cause their anger. That came from elsewhere.

That elsewhere, I have found, is in America's seemingly picture-perfect backyard: Suburbs and small towns in the South and West. Virtually every Columbine-style shooting has occurred on those grid points. My forthcoming book Columbine: A True Crime Story, a victim, the killers and the nation's search for answers notes:

There is not just a psychological profile of school shooters, but an environmental one - one which fits both Eric and Dylan. School shootings overwhelmingly occur in suburbs and small towns, which may be rich in sports, shopping malls, and BMW's, but poor in diversity and tolerance. Deviation from the whitebread norm is punished, and the high school campus is often the sole arbiter of adolescent status. A loser at school feels like a loser through and through. School shooters have no escape hatch, and nowhere else to turn for self-esteem. Options outside of school off ered by a big city are not found in small towns and suburbs: There is no Hollywood Boulevard for the punk rockers.

The template for suburban school shootings may be the inner-city, youth violence epidemic from 1985 to 1995 that "seeped into pop culture" as one study put it. Columbine, along with Littleton and the other school shooting locales, are the exact opposite of crime-infested, poverty-ridden high schools in Detroit and Watts. But thousands of Columbines across the country are tough, in their own suburban and small town way. Status and cliques are as virulent as gang warfare, and the outcasts face stiff odds. After too many marginalizations, dating rejections, or bottles thrown at them white, middle-class, disaffected youth may have hijacked the violent, inner-city solution.

The homes to school shootings have different names but the same genetic makeup: Springfield, Oregon. West Paducah, Kentucky. Pearl, Mississippi. Santee, California. They form a violent crescent through the South and West. Here, the spiritual forefathers of school shooters are Western gunslingers and Southern duels. Simply put, the psychologist Richard Nisbett notes, "The U.S. South, and Western regions of the United States initially settled by Southerners, are more violent than the rest of the country."

Jeff Kass, a former reporter with the Los Angeles Times and more recently the Rocky Mountain News, is the author of Columbine: A True Crime Story - A Victim, the Killers and the Nation's Search for Answers

Excerpts from his upcoming book.

It's a trickier question than meets the eye. As players, it's easy to yearn for more adult content in games. Part of this is curiosity–sex is always titillating on a base level, after all, but more than that, the interactivity and apparent potential for narrative depth that video games offer prompt an interest in how human fundamentals might show up in games.

Another part of it, though, is that we're eager to see some of our video games reach a level in theme and narrative that we can consider sophisticated, that has a place in conversation among grown-ups. Sure, some games have taken a few brave steps– but while wide audiences applaud the sophistication in how sex and violence are presented in today's film and television dramas, when Mass Effect came out in May 2008, it was not permitted even a tasteful moment by most of the mainstream press, and even gamers treated it like a novelty they could distill from the rest of the game's context.

Although BioWare's Ray Muzyka hoped that Mass Effect's sex scene would help lead the way to validating games as an art form, the disconnect here is that we're equating sex with maturity. To be fair, that's not necessarily an unfit thought pairing. As long as sex remains a fundamental part of human adulthood, it will play a role in sophisticated human interaction in entertainment narratives whether in games or elsewhere.

Defining Maturity
From Lara Croft to Grand Theft Auto, though, it seems video games have tossed in a pair of boobs and called themselves mature–but that's what adolescents do, not adults. Writer and designer Erik J. Caponi of Bethesda Softworks agrees: "We think of the word 'mature' as a rating more than we think of it as a narrative goal or a certain set of subject matter," he says.

"The word really has two meanings when we apply it to media. One is 'not appropriate for children' and the other is 'exploring subject matter in a sophisticated fashion,'" Caponi explains. "Ironically, the word mature when applied to games tends to have a very childish connotation."

As he aptly puts it, "Maturity does not come from the number of f-bombs you can manage to drop, but rather from the subject matter that you choose and how you explore it."

Dangerous Themes
Writers Guild of America award-nominated designer Keith Nemitz wanted to explore more sophisticated adult subject matter in his acclaimed indie Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble, a story-driven puzzle RPG that features teenage girls winning out against bullies and sinister mysteries.

But last month Nemitz came up against one of the primary obstacles to maturity in games: a reactionary audience offended by its themes. DHSGiT was pulled from casual games portal Big Fish Games due to an outcry from uncomfortable players who felt the game promoted bullying. The bigger issue around the game's takedown, however, was a late-game scene that asks the player character to protect her friend from an attempted rape by shooting the perpetrator in the head.

Fans of DHSGiT took issue with the tonal shift in what was generally a black-humored, somewhat lighter narrative up to that point, but most of the game's complainants at Big Fish had enough at the very idea of a scene that involved rape, murder and teenagers, period.

But Nemitz defends the scene's inclusion, explaining its role in the story. "It's a critical plot element," he says. "It serves two purposes: The primary purpose is to challenge the player with the true evil of rape, and to assert it is a situation where survival may require killing. The assault's realistic appearance in an otherwise fantastical narrative is meant to shock."

"Reactionaries crying out against this part of our game couldn't deal with the shock and therefore wanted to be protected from the game," he says. "My opinion."

Misperception And Risk
Bethesda's Caponi says situations like Nemitz's occur because even as the audience for games continues to expand, too many people still view them as childish. "In the current environment, there will always be a number of people who react negatively to the inclusion of sexuality or sexual themes in a game," he says. "And so long as the notion that games are exclusively for children persists in those people's minds, we can just expect that."

Video game publishing is already a high-risk proposition as it is, and conservative approaches to sexual content in games is just good business sense for publishers in the current environment. "The industry is about making money," Nemitz admits. "I'm an indie developer, but one of my goals is to earn a living. That means my products need to appeal to an audience large enough to pay the bills every month." In the end, Nemitz slightly edited the controversial scene in his game to make it much clearer to avoid misinterpretation of his intent.

But Caponi notes how comic books eventually earned their license to explore more adult themes as the perception that they're only for children began to fall away. "The public at large understood that like any art, some comics are suitable for children, and some aren't," he says.

"I think that this is happening more and more every day with games. And the more it does, the less risky telling mature stories will be, and designers will be able to explore those subjects without risking financial failure."

Still Growing
Unfortunately, a high-risk business climate and stodgy consumers aren't the only obstacles to grown-up games. It's easy to blame widespread political furore over Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas' hidden Hot Coffee scene or a Fox News' infamous Mass Effect "SeXbox" campaign of ignorance for the limitations placed on adult content in games– but a hard look at where games are on their evolutionary path shows that in many ways, games just aren't there yet.

Nemitz is blunt: "I think the majority of game designers aren't mature enough to make games with mature themes well," he says. "It's the difference between Uwe Boll and David Lynch. Most computer games deserve Uwe Boll to make movies of them. How many games are worthy of David Lynch?"

To be fair, games are quite young relative to other media, and the idea that games could be used to tell stories and provide more complex experiences than just twitch-jumping over pixel pits is even newer. With so much still in development, it's hard to blame games for acting like adolescents about mature content– they are adolescent, only just now beginning to learn how to express themselves.

"When you look at film, there are certain things we know we can expect from scenes. We have a sense of how graphic violence will be, we know roughly how sex will be shown," says Caponi. "In games, we haven't really established that language yet, so it's difficult to judge when you might be pushing things a bit further for effect, or when you're backing off of things to allow them to be understated."

In effect, games are just hitting puberty compared to the elegant ladies of film and the established and ageless scions of literature, who've had much longer to establish their unspoken language. "We have very little of that to go on," says Caponi. "Right now, that language is being developed. That's one of the reasons why I believe that this is a silver age for gaming. We're starting to come into our own, and there is a lot of exploration and experimentation to be done as our storytelling matures."

Why It Matters
With all of this complexity and challenge around sex and maturity in games, it's tempting to toss the issue out entirely. Why do we even need grown-up games? Can't they just be fun?

Plenty can, of course. But there's an appetite for sophistication in games as the audience that grew up stomping goombas now reaches adulthood, and yearns for games to grow with them. Part of that growth means the ability to derive emotional and intellectual sophistication from games, and sexuality can play a role.

"Sexuality can inspire any emotion, from love, to violence, to despair, to bliss, and I think that a willingness to approach it from a mature angle absolutely will help us create better stories," says Caponi. "Relationships inspire emotion, and emotion motivates both story and the player as a participant in that story."

Every player creates his or her own experience in a game, but creating relationships within the narrative can help players become more immersed and invested in the gameworld, Caponi says. Not only can complex adult storytelling enrich games, but sophisticated games have the potential to enrich storytelling as part of culture.

"One thing I am personally interested in as a narrative designer are the ways in which games are the only medium where the player can be an active participant in the relationships and narratives of a story," he says.

Possibilities For The Future
Nemitz believes that finding tactful, tasteful ways to push the limits can be a starting point for further maturation in games. "Writers and designers can readily implement mature themes without being shocking, and perhaps that is the best way to bring intellectual respect to the art of games," says Nemitz.

For an example of how this worked in the past, one can look to Old Hollywood's Production Code. It held sway over content in the movie biz from 1930 to 1968, providing moral guidelines over what was and wasn't allowed to be portrayed in films. In effect, it was censorship — editing out nude scenes, childbirth scenes and any kind of content that made "perversions" appear sympathetic, for just a few examples. It limited films, but ultimately it challenged directors to find new ways to portray maturity, and Nemitz believes that game designers now face the same challenges — and will end up benefiting from it in the same way.

"In one aspect, the old movie code may have helped to mature the art of film," he says. "Directors didn't back down on the content. They creatively worked around the code's limitations."

Whether or not audiences are ready for games to start pushing the envelope is a different matter. "We've been pounding visually gimmicky stuff into gamers for decades. Few have become hungry for enlightenment," says Nemitz. "People, especially Americans, are not ready to deal with mature content, because the system protects them from it. It is time, however, to expose them to it."

Caponi is more optimistic that audiences are "without a doubt" prepared to receive more adult content in games. "I think the audience has been ready for a long time," he says. "I look forward to the sort of stories that we'll see as developers expand their ability to tell mature stories."

Truly adult stories will need to evolve beyond a single sex scene in a game, and developers will need both resourcefulness and genuine maturity to craft nuanced, complex adult content. The adolescent years are always awkward — let's hope a healthy adulthood follows for video games.

[Leigh Alexander is news director for Gamasutra, author of the Sexy Videogameland blog, and freelances reviews and criticism to a variety of outlets. Her monthly column at Kotaku deals with cultural issues surrounding games and gamers. She can be reached at leighalexander1 AT gmail DOT com.]

I used to work with Jeff Kass, the author of the book, at the Rocky Mountain News and he was kind enough to send me some of the book's video-game related excerpts to reprint on Kotaku.

The excerpts unveil a more complex take on Harris and Klebold and their love of computers and gaming.

Both, Kass writes, enrolled in the school's computer programming class and Harris handled the web pages for the school's physics and science departments. They seemed drawn to computers and programming because of the total control over an environment it offered them, something highlighted in the famous 1986 manifesto The Conscience of a Hacker, later found Klebold's home.

The two would also, Kass writes, "embed themselves in violent video games." Harris enjoyed Postal, both, more famously, played Doom.

Harris even wrote a paper about Doom for school:

“Picture an Earth that has been obliterated by nuclear war and alien attacks leaving cities and military forces in ruins with only a lone marine as humanity’s last fighting force. Picture holographic walls, crushing ceilings, oceans of blood and lava, strange ancient artifacts, and horrible sour lemon and rotten meat stenches in the air. Imagine being trapped on an abandoned cold steel base floating in space for eternity, a leathery skinned monster roaming under a strobe light waiting for a fight, and astonishing weaponry designed to your special needs. All these places and ideas have been created and recreated many times by yours truly.

“To most people it may be just another silly computer game, but to me it is an outlet for my thoughts and dreams,” Eric wrote in his class paper. “I have mastered changing anything that is possible to change in that game, such as the speed of weapons, the strength and mass of monsters, the textures and colors used on the floors and walls, and greatest of all, the actual levels that are used. Several times I have dreamed of a place or area one night, then thought about it for days and days. Then, I would recreate it in Doom using everything from places in outer space with burned-out floor lights and dusty computers to the darkest depths of the infernal regions with minotaurs and demons running at me from every dark and threatening corner. I have also created settings such as eras of ancient abandoned military installations deep in monster-infested forests with blood stained trees and unidentifiable mangled bodies covered with dead vines and others that portray to futuristic military bases on Mars overrun with zombies that lurk in every corner. These places may seem a bit on the violent side and, I assure you, some of them are. However, many times I have made levels with absolutely no monsters or guns in them. I have created worlds with beautiful, breath taking scenery that looks like something out of a science fiction movie, a fantasy movie, or even some ‘eldritch’ from H.P. Lovecraft.”

Kass also talks a bit about Harris' mod of the game that used Brooks Brown's neighborhood as a Doom setting and Brown's house as the target. The mod, which took an estimated 100 hours to create, locked players in an invincible god mode and had dying characters yell out "Lord, why is this happening to me?"

Doom, Harris wrote, was the best way to show his creativity and intelligence.

Kass is clear to point out that while video games may have given the two "paths for their anger", with Postal providing potential inspiration and Doom a philosophy that helped inform Harris and Klebold's mentality, video games certainly weren't the cause.

"The video games did not cause their anger," Kass writes. "That came from elsewhere."

There were plenty of incidents leading up to Columbine that had nothing to do with video games. Among the first cracks in Eric’s psyche, Kass writes, was when Harris coated his head and neck in fake blood and lay on the ground next to a bloodied rock to try and shake up an ex-girlfriend.

The deeper issue, it seemed, was that the two failed to fit in, to be accepted as part of "team Columbine."

"Their computer skills were sharp, but could not vault them over the ruthless world of high school social popularity contests," Kass writes. "They didn’t have the right good looks, money or athletic prowess. Their social skills were hopeless."

The book is a reminder that the cause of such shootings are rarely as black and white as they initially seem. Columbine and the slew of school shootings that followed it are not the product of a single problem, but something endemic of a far more complex issue. A by-product, perhaps, of a society so rife with cultural taboos and niches that not fitting in can become for some a problem larger than life, literally.

Check out the full, three-page excerpts, first published anywhere, from the book here. And if you find it as enthralling as I do make sure to pick up a copy of the book, published by Ghost Road Press.

Jeff Kass

Pa2Play was just submitted to Apple for final approval, in preparation for getting the App Store game out to the public. Described as a "Illinois Governor trading game", Pay2Play give gamers 30 days to pay back the unions, make tons of cash and get out of town, all before getting impeached.

As if courting political scandal wasn't enough for developer Yanki.JP they've also made sure to include in the game "alcopops", the flavored beverages recently banned from advertising in games by the Illinois legislature.

Pay2Play [Yanki.JP, thanks HR]

Using Fallout 3, Totilo wandered around the bomb-blasted, irradiated and devastated Washington D.C. to try and capture, in-game, some of what you'll be seeing today on television if you watch the inauguration.

His photo tour of Fallour 3's D.C. starts out with a glimpse of the National Mall as viewed from the top of the crumbling Washington Monument. It ends with a glimpse from the ground of the mall looking up at the Washington Monument.

It's an interesting use of gaming to try and reflect on the day's news and makes me wonder why more developers don't get involved. I suppose it might not be taken the right way if Bethesda released an Obama patch for Fallout 3 today.

Barack Obama Inauguration Site, Rendered Via ‘Fallout 3′ [MTV Multiplayer]

In it he blames America’s (in particular America’s newspapers') fascination in the trivial and trite when it comes to pop culture and celebrity, for the death of more thoughtful analysis and prose in newspapers.

Film critics, he says, are the canaries in the coal mine of America’s newspapers. Having worked in newspapers for a fraction of Ebert’s career in print, both as a news writer and a feature writer, I was both deeply touched by his analysis and a little put off.

I hate to say this, but Ebert is just noticing something that has been going on for years. Perhaps it’s just come to his notice because he is walled away in the sacrosanct tower of not just criticism, and film criticism at that, but as THE film critic. Perhaps he never took notice of those fighting this same good fight over a lifetime of dailies, blurbs and briefs in America’s news sections.

It’s as if he awoke one day in France’s 1789 to discover that perhaps cake wasn’t a good replacement for bread.

When Ebert says that newspapers want to devote less of their space to considered prose and more to ignorant gawking, I don’t disagree. It’s true, but that’s not something new. You can trace the slow, mournful death of newspapers back years, perhaps decades.

If you want to assign blame I suppose you could point a finger at USA Today, at how that national McPaper turned every story, no matter how important, into a glorified brief with colorful charts.

Over the years, papers across the country scrambled to follow suit, shrinking their stories to fit smaller and smaller holes in the paper. Sure, some of this was done because of the desire to run more ads in a newspaper, but most of it was the product of focus testing, of hitting the streets and asking people what they wanted. What they wanted, apparently, was not to think too much about anything.

So papers, first small, then large, begin to cater to the lowest common denominator, what they thought was a genuine desire for short, fast reads. I remember working at a large newspaper when an edict came down that all stories had to be a certain word count, that the first sentence of every story had to be only so long, rather short.

But, some would argue, news can be brief. Perhaps the soul of journalism is brevity.

And so it goes. Until that slow creep of small stories and smaller thinking hits features. I was at the Rocky Mountain News when that happened. When a group of features writers were told they had to move back to news, not because their coverage of pop culture wasn’t important, but because news was more important.

So the creep got a toehold in the untouchable world of features, a place born of long ledes and stories slow to unwind. Soon feature stories starting shrinking. “Think pieces” went away. And next on the cutting board? Critics.

If you don’t have the space to cover news properly, to write long features, why take the space to cover a movie? Or so the thinking went. So Ebert’s right, well sort of right.

There is a canary in the coal mine of American’s newspapers, but they’re not the movie critics, they’re the writers, the men and women who fought daily to get more than just the facts in the paper, who worked to not just report the news, but explain it.

I’m not dismissing the importance of criticism. The fashion writers, the video game writers, the music and, yes, the movie critics, the people who cover all acts of expression and deep thought, are the barometer of today’s modes and morals.

It is through these writers that we discover ourselves and are reminded daily that life isn’t all pain and suffering, city council meetings and school board elections. But their loss isn’t the sign that it’s time to get the hell out of the mine, it’s the last thing you see before a deep, unending sleep.

So I don’t join Ebert in mourning the potential passing of a great institution, but only because I’ve been mourning its death for years.

Death to film critics! Hail to the CelebCult! [Sun-Times, via N'Gai Croal]

This hits three years after the first and last game to take on the World Trade Center hit Brooklyn.

Honestly, we're not quite sure what's going on here quite yet, as we didn't know the German translation for "What the fuck?" We do know, however, that the 8-bit tower jumpers and the negative score applied to each WTC tower to indicate damage aren't going to sit well with, we're thinking, everyone we know who doesn't hate freedom.

Update: It is an art exhibit, according the the French-American artist.

Gary Gygax [Troll Lord Games Forums]
Photo by Alan De Smet

Sir Howard Stringer hangs with Ludacris at the New York City PS3 launch event last night. Word has it that teh two homies are tight... TIGHT!

Thanks to Sir Richard Blakeley for the, as usual, awesome vid. Sir Brian Crecente

For about thirty minutes yesterday, this site frankly became just a hell of a lot better. In what is internally being described as the weirdest tech problem in Gawker history, all of the network's sites went through a Brundlian teleporter together and grotesquely metamorphosed into half-breed mutants of one another.

Who was the fly on the glass when we teleported? No less than Fleshbot, Gawker's porno blog, and the one all of us secretly want to write for anyway.

Unfortunately, the only images we have were of another mash-up that briefly happened during the same time: thanks to Destructoid for recording our Defamer mash-up for posterity. It'll be tough finding a pic more homoerotic than Hoff to post on the front page, but I think Crecente's doing a cracker-jack job with that picture of him playing Guitar Hero he posts every time he mentions RedOctane. Florian Eckhardt

Kotaku has a momentary blog fart [Destructoid]

Business 2.0 just released its list of "50 Who Matter Now" and "10 People Who Don't Matter". These winners and losers were chosen by the entire Business 2.0 editorial staff. This wasn't a list of the rich and famous, resting on former glories. The publication states, "Instead, our goal was to identify people whose ideas, products, and business insights are changing the world we live in today." And apparently, Ken Kutaragi is not. Business 2.0 writes:

Remember the Betamax debacle? Sony seems to have forgotten all about it. Under Kutaragi, who is the power behind Sony's PlayStation videogame consoles, the company is launching another format war with its Blu-Ray high-definition videodisc, the successor to the venerable DVD. Unfortunately, the PlayStation 3, which was supposed to put Blu-Ray into millions of living rooms, is months late and hundreds of dollars more expensive than competing consoles from Microsoft and Nintendo - largely because it includes one-of-a-kind technologies like Blu-Ray. The delays and cost overruns are likely to make both the PS3 and Blu-Ray nonstarters.

How sad. Happiness after the jump.

The list did include some winners like Blizzard honcho Mike Morhaime, about whom Business 2.0 writes:

It's easy to dismiss World of Warcraft as just another videogame. Easy, but dead wrong. The spectacularly popular MMOG (massively multiplayer online game) developed by Morhaime's company is the planet's biggest and fastest-growing virtual world — launched just 18 months ago, it already boasts 6.5 million players (including more than 3 million Chinese). Each player pays $15 a month for the experience, bringing Blizzard and parent Vivendi $700 million in revenue last year. Far more interesting, however, is the scope of the WoW economy: Virtual gold pieces and character enhancements are put up for sale in thousands of eBay auctions, while third-party resellers offer virtual currency trading services. In China, meanwhile, hordes of "gold farmers" earn a living by selling the fruits of their WoW labors to time-strapped players in the United States. Industrywide, the out-of-game MMOG economy has grown to $200 million — from zero just a few years ago — in tandem with the growth of WoW. In other words, the Metaverse is finally open for business.

Getting pwned by Morhaime and coming in one spot behind is our own Nick Denton, Gawker Media's bossman. Here's what the publication had to say:

Denton says he's not in the blog-publishing business for the money. (Though, given that competitor Jason Calacanis's blog empire fetched $25 million from AOL, Denton's could be worth as much as $35 million.) So take him at his word: Money, schmoney. Besides, Denton's editorial strategy — publishing the blogs that influence the nation's influencers — has been a smashing success when gauged by a more elusive currency: power. His surgically targeted titles take aim at the New York media (Gawker), Beltway pols (Wonkette), Hollywood moguls (Defamer), and Silicon Valley techies (Valleywag). Combining a signature mix of news, gossip, celebrity worship, and snark (not necessarily in that order), Denton's properties shape the conversation among the heavy hitters who read them.

Crocodile tears for Kutaragi, cheers to Morhaime and Nick! Brian Ashcraft

More Here [CNN Money]

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