Take Africa, for example. For years, the continent - and, let's not forget, the continent's inhabitants - had been largely ignored by an industry focused on aliens (space), fast cars (race tracks) and Nazis (rural France).

Yet in a six month period over 2008-09, two major, high profile games (sorry, Afrika) weren't just set in Africa, they were really set in Africa. With real Africans and everything.

Those games were Resident Evil 5 and Far Cry 2. Sure, one did a better job of depicting the continent's complex political and racial situation than the other (hint: it was the game not made by Capcom), but at the end of the day, both titles had put Africa on the radar.

Crytek's games - the first Far Cry and Crysis - have done something similar, the German developers carving their own niche on sunny tropical beaches while other FPS teams continue to set games in mud under grey skies. The same goes for New York City, both Grand Theft Auto IV and Prototype replicating the Big Apple in their own special way.

It's like Yoda said. Always two, there are.

So what will gaming's next hot destination be? It can't be any of the above locations, they're old hat. It has to be somewhere not only new, and fresh, but interesting. Somewhere that, like Far Cry 2 and GTAIV, is as big a part of game's appeal as the mechanics and characters themselves.

Here are some of my ideas; feel free to chime in with your own in the comments section.

AUSTRALIA - Bias, perhaps, but hear me out; the world's smallest continent is also one of the most varied, with deserts, rainforests and everything in between. It's sparsely populated (so there's less work for developers), has great weather (blue skies are always fun) and a history of open roads and lawlessness (in case anyone is thinking of a Borderlands sequel/clone).

Best part? It's criminally under-represented in games, making any game set in Australia - regardless of the tone or time period - truly unique.

MONGOLIA - Know what was most interesting about Uncharted 2? The way it took you to Nepal, an area you'd probably never been in a game before. Well, Mongolia is kind of like Nepal, only instead of snow, you could have plains, and yurts, and horses, and throat singing.

ICELAND - Know what's weird about Iceland? There's no trees. Well, there are some trees, but not like there is anywhere else that's not a desert. And there's your appeal; it's like a desert, only instead of sand, there's grass, and fishing villages, and - timeline dependant - vikings.

KOREA - Korea stands poised this decade to be like Japan was in the 80's; a fascinating, vibrant Asian powerhouse. But just like the war that shares the nation's name, developers seem to have forgotten Korea even exists, with any and all Asian settings focused on China and Japan. Something set in present-day Seoul would be a nice touch.

Note I'm talking locations only, not themes. And by themes I mean "World War Two", or "Zombies". We'll get to those later in the week!

But it's what Wonder, did with the moment that shows why the man is and has been so respected, for so long, in both his art and popular culture. In praising the rhythm genre for creating accessibility to disabled gamers, Wonder - blind since birth - called on the industry as a whole to follow that example, and find ways that this emerging art form may be enjoyed by everyone.

Yes, "video game" would imply that sight is a necessary condition of participation. People have had the same assumption about baseball, which is also played by the blind; basketball is contested by those who use wheelchairs. On and on. These are not the games many people choose to play, and they are not the ones we watch on television. But the value these sports present to their participants can't be qualified by whether the fully abled would want to play.

Similarly, perhaps a game for the blind, whatever form it takes, would not be one that you or I would buy. But Stevie Wonder is right; as the art form mainstreams, it acquires mainstream obligations to serve more communities that wish to enjoy it. His message last night was on the mark. This is a remarkably creative industry, and it can find a way.

Stevie Wonder Pleads for "Disabled Accessibility" [The Lost Gamer]

As an example, the above player was auto-named "Jason Gay" at the online TeamBuilder site. But imported into the Xbox 360 version, the player was renamed "Jason XXX." Users may manually change the name back in all modes of play into which created teams are imported, both online and offline.

The filtering, however, does make EA Sports look like it's demonizing the word, a delicate and persistent issue in online gaming. But in fact, EA's code has no problem with it; in the game, play-by-play man Brad Nessler says the name for players who have it.

Asked for comment, Electronic Arts provided this statement:

We are aware of the situation in which some auto-generated player names used online in NCAA Football 10 are being edited, due to Microsoft's Xbox LIVE language filter. EA encourages diversity in our online communities, and providing a safe place for gamers to play is a high priority at EA.

When we went to Microsoft for a comment, a spokesman acknowledged the ongoing debate and pointed to the XBL terms of use, which prohibit text in Gamertags or "other profile fields that include comments that look, sound like, stand for, hint at, abbreviate, or insinuate content of a potentially sexual nature."

Both sides gave - quite understandably - policy-based answers to what is ultimately an incremental development in this issue. NCAA 10 may not have the kind of user base that gets fired up about this, after all.

But whether or not "gay" is more a self-identifier or a term of abuse, it continues to be someone's last name. Rudy Gay. Tyson Gay. Efforts to proactively micromanage this evolving word's use may, privately, have the intended effect. Publicly, it will continue to create instances such as these, in which some major corporation wittingly or, in EA's case, unwittingly and through no fault of its own, puts its brand on the implication that the word is inherently shameful.

Microsoft says it's still exploring ways to integrate the word with its community and its TOS. But, really. As decisions go, you're gonna make it now, or make it later. Let some churlish gamer's ugly behavior speak for itself, and deal with him tomorrow. But you can take "gay" off the filter list today, and end this as a controversy.

This stumble in Nintendo's stride has gained little attention as its competitors chase its dust. It's about the key tool for movement in this big gaming movement.

The original promise of the Wii's controller, the Wii Remote, was that it would augur a revolution in game control, a Motion Control Revolution.

Yet nearly three years later, with the Wii Sports' sequel, Wii Sports Resort,on the verge of its U.S. release, the triumph of the Motion Control Revolution is debatable at best. At the very moment when the wisdom of releasing the Wii is beyond dispute, it can be argued that the Motion Control Revolution has stalled — failed even — and that Wii Sports Resort is the next best hope (the last one?) to save it.

First shown at a game conference in Tokyo in September of 2005, the Wii Remote was going to make imitation swordsmen and dentists of us all. It was going to turn us into sharpshooters and champion fishermen, or so Nintendo's video sizzle reel hyped.

When Wii Sports was released in November 2006, that Motion Control Revolution seemed assured. We swung the Remote like a tennis racket and heaved it like a bowling ball. Those motions first delighted our families at holiday gatherings and then an audience at The Oscars. Day after day, the anchors of cable news seemed charmed to play a game on a console whose name they struggled to pronounce.

Yet, since the Wii Remote birthed the great Wii Sports, it's no stretch to claim that the revolutionary Remote has spawned no other great motion control games.

That's Nintendo's hidden stumble, this struggle for the motion-sensitivity of the Wii Remote to prove itself the equal of traditional button and stick controls, to say nothing of establishing itself as the superior option. Gamers groan at the flimsy motion controls mapped to action games. A shake of a hand replaces what could have been the press of a button. In game after game, motion control presents a different option, but one that seldom seems better.

As right as Nintendo was about so many things, maybe it was wrong about this. Or, as is so often the case with Nintendo's Wii project, the failure here may be one of critical imagination. That happens. Forty years ago on Monday, a human being first stepped on the moon, and what people assumed would happen in the next four decades — trips to Mars, cities in space — have not been built. The guessers often guess wrong.

The future we may have expected in 2006 — of a 2007 and beyond filled with motion-based greats manipulated with a Wii Remote — has not come to pass. The lightsaber, magic wand and music-conducting Wii games we expected were made. But they felt constrained and inaccurate. Mario and Zelda have not been transformed into adventures of motion-based brilliance. Magnificent as that motion control in Wii Sports was, the ability to let a player control their game by swinging the Wii Remote appears to have inspired little confidence and limited mastery even in some of the world's most expert game creators.

Even in Wii Fit, the great successor to Wii Sports, the Wii Remote was all but relegated to a laser pointer used to select menu options. Meanwhile, the mechanism for the game's motion was the Balance Board, a controller inspired by a bathroom scale.

Other Wii designers minimized their use of the Wii Remote's motion control even more. Chart-topper Super Smash Brothers played without it. Blockbusters Mario Kart Wii and Guitar Hero tucked it away in shells shaped like wheels and guitars, doing little to convince anyone that motion control was a must.

A new Zelda down-played it. A new Mario limited its motion-control element, as have so many Wii games, to the occasional vibration of a player's right hand. This fall's New Super Mario Bros. Wii, made in the two years since the last Wii Mario, uses motion control no more than the last.

Some games have used the Remote's motion control aggressively. MadWorld, No More Heroes and Manhunt 2 harnessed its potential for violence. Wii Music marshaled motion for musicality. Boom Blox made it the mechanism for hurling baseballs at stubborn bricks. But fun as some of those games were, they were not hits.

In that dust behind Nintendo's Wii, Microsoft and Sony are in the chase. Last month they revealed their own Motion Controllers, tied to cameras and, in the Xbox's case with Project Natal, absent the need for players to hold anything in their hands. One wonders if the companies have noticed Nintendo's struggles with motion control amidst the Wii's triumphs. The use of arm and body movements to play games has not proven a game-changer in and of itself. By making games more appealing a wider audience, its been a component of a bigger change. But it's also been a red herring.

Designers borrowing ideas from Wii Sports had had better success drawing from the game's accessibility than strictly from its motion controls. The simplicity of its design made Wii Sports approachable, streamlined and friendly, the least intimidating game many people had played since Pac-Man. It has one of the shortest gaps between being turned on and being fun. These have been its smarter qualities — and have revealed that the genius of the Wii Remote may not be its swing but its shape. It can be understood when seen from across a room and clearly it's no threat.

If the lack of games doing great things with motion control was one sign of trouble for the Motion Control Revolution, another was last summer's revelation that Nintendo was building a gadget that would enhance/repair/improve the Remote's motion-sensitivity. Bundled with copies of next Sunday's Wii Sports Resort and made to be plugged into the base of a Wii Remote, the MotionPlus add-on is, in Resort, a necessary attachment for better sword-swinging, archery, bowling, golf and more. A swing is a swing and a flick is a flick, and the controller feels like it finally knows — instead of merely simplifies — how the player is moving.

After years of playing games made during Nintendo's era of the Remote, playing Wii Sports Resort with MotionPlus attached suggests that we've been using a tool that was too blunt for the task. It is a technological success but also an admission by its manufacturers that the original Wii Remote was not capable of the motions we imagined — or that were teased in that sizzle reel.

Wii Sports Resort has greatness in it. A couple of days playing it — of going back for more and more — reveals it to be another joyful construction, a game with plenty of fun to share. The necessary bolting on of MotionPlus could be proof that, like Wii Fit or Guitar Hero, the greatest, most accessible motion-based games needs a unique device of its own, a controller shaped to the actions and fantasies of the game it supports. Wii Sports Resort suggests that for all the virtues of the Wii Remote's simplicity, it was too simple on its own to enable a line of games made great by its motion control.

By exposing what's been wrong with it, Wii Sports Resort may be the game to save the Motion Control Revolution.

(All images via Nintendo of America's press site. Super Smash Bros. player image from Nintendo/Stuart Ramson)

It's a blog post that's a bit too sensitive and an argument that's a bit too convenient and dramatic for my taste, but the Houston Chronicle's Game Hacks blog tees up the Big R in a color-by-numbers mainstream look at something - which is, more or less, that any three can make a trend. In this case, the writer takes controller-dropping offense at participating in a story as a Confederate sympathizer (Juarez).

The game that really inspired this blog entry was Ubisoft's "Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood." The game starts out with players assuming the role of Ray, a Confederate officer, working to save his brother, Thomas, who's pinned down by Union soldiers. I nearly dropped the controller. I have so much respect for President Lincoln — he wanted to preserve the Union and ended up freeing the slaves — and have just as much respect for the Union Army.

This guy may legitimately feel that way. Fine. I think if Call of Juarez was overtly sympathetic to Confederate aims of slavery, instead of just framing the story of two mean-ass brothers in the context of soldiers of a failed cause, we'd have a different discussion. Similarly, it'd be a big problem if Left 4 Dead 2 was explicitly about Katrina and the institutional racism that fueled such a listless response and collective shrug at a disaster we thought only could happen in the third world.

But this sort of rumination seems to me to be picking a fight where none exists. And it points up the difference between sensitivity and tolerance. Not everything has to provide a teachable moment or avoid an uncomfortable subject altogether. Look at film.

Racism in Video Games: The New Norm? [Houston Chronicle via Trueslant]

The delay to BioShock 2 was what was getting reporters and developers talking yesterday.

This fall, stocked as it is with some very exciting games for hardcore gamers, is lacking something most gaming falls have had: an absurd abundance of big games.

Downgrade this fall's line-up to maybe just a notable abundance.

Last holiday season ran from Lego Batman to Prince of Persia, with Fallout 3, Fable 2 and Far Cry 2 in between. It had a new Call of Duty, a new Gears of War, a new Resistance and curiosities like a new Banjo Kazooie and Spore. It had the standard stock of racing, sports and music games and the added bounty of the Dead Space and Mirror's Edge experiments. Nintendo failed to offer anything deeper than Animal Crossing, but on other platforms than the Wii, Crysis, Brothers in Arms, LittleBigPlanet and Tomb Raider games got their chance to shine. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and Left 4 Dead were hits.

And this was all in a year, 2008, that already gave the world a new Mario Kart, a new Grand Theft Auto, a new Smash Brothers, a new Metal Gear Solid and Wii Fit.

Maybe the fall of 2009 never had a chance to outshine that.

There will be another round of sports, racing and music games this holiday season. And then, for gamers looking for something to sink their controllers into, there are likely the big titles: Halo 3: ODST, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Assassin's Creed 2, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Borderlands, Uncharted 2 and Brutal Legend. Those are, as best can be determined from the way major publishers have been structuring their press events that Kotaku has attended, the flagship games for Microsoft, Activision, Ubisoft, Nintendo, Take 2, Sony and EA.

Games are falling out of these final few months of the year. Singularity was pushed back. BioShock 2 got bumped. Army of Two: The 40th Day could be the next to go, if it ever did have a shot at 2009. Marked for a winter release it's been absent from EA's 20-plus title holiday showcase in New York last week and isn't slated to be shown at the publisher's big Comicon event next week. (An EA rep, sticking to winter as the last announced release, told Kotaku today that the game will be at Gamescom in Germany next month. UPDATE: There will be a Comicon panel for Army of Two, it's jut not one of the dozen or so titles EA has offered the press hands-on time with, for whatever that's worth.).

There won't be a lack of games to play in late 2009 — not with Dragon Age, The Saboteur, The Ballad of Gay Tony, Splinter Cell, MAG, Ratchet & Clank, Left 4 Dead 2 and the August-slated Batman: Arkham Asylum showing up. The portables have some excitement with Scribblenauts and Zelda for DS and a new PSP hitting in October.

But the buzz that was at last night's event — which was for Borderlands — was that this just doesn't seem to be as well-stuffed a holiday season for hardcore gamers. Perhaps that's a benefit, as a crowded marketplace gets a little less crowded. Companies such as Capcom switch their prime release window to the early part of the calendar year, in that publisher's case, pushing major Resident Evil and Street Fighter sequels early in 2009, and promoting the untested Dark Void and the latest Hail-Mary-for-the-hardcore on the Wii, a second Resident Evil light gun shooter, for the fall.

Perhaps another culprit for the lessening of options for serious gamers this fall is a result of what's showing up press events: More general-interest games. More games for kids and girls and moms and grandpas. Beyond just sports, racing and music titles, EA, for example is pushing its successful Littles Pet Shop brand, some Spore expansions and more spin-offs of The Sims. Activision and MTV Games are splintering their brands and throwing all the more of them into the season: Rock Band 2 of fall 2008 begets fall 2009's Lego Rock Band and Beatles Rock Band; Guitar Hero: World Tour of late '08 spawns Guitar Hero 5, Band Hero and DJ Hero. Tony Hawk is back as a peripheral-based game.

Maybe the publishers are just less in it for just the hardcore than they used to be. Nintendo leads the trend, outbalancing Mario and Zelda with Style Savvy DS for girls, a new Pokemon: Mystery Dungeon for kids and Wii Fit Plus for, no pun intended, a bigger audience than they might ever reach with any games targeted for the hardcore gamer. Take Two has a game based on the circus. Sega's got a Sonic kart-racer. And money will be made.

The holiday rush was often too much for the kind of gamers who want to experience the big brand blockbusters from the big-name studios. Not enough money. Not enough time. So maybe this slight calming, this change from a mouthful of cotton candy to a mouthful of Gummi Bears is slightly healthier.

It doesn't look like a slow season to everyone, after all. In a note to investors regarding the BioShock 2 delay, financial analyst Michael Pachter referred to this holiday season as "among the most crowded ever." And it could also be a dangerous one for game publishers, with Take Two chairman Strauss Zelnick attributing part of the reason for delaying BioShock 2 to a shrinking of initial orders for new games from retail and a smaller number of games being kept in stock by the gaming shops.

There's reason to celebrate or to be concerned here. You could do both. This fall, the gaming holiday season won't be what it used to be.

(For those who think 2010 won't be able to keep up, check this post to see the traffic-jam-in-the-making. To say nothing of this.)

It's these settings, so artfully detailed by Dante, that Electronic Arts hopes to tap into when turning the books into a video game, the developers told me.

The game opens, I'm told, on a scene of Dante sitting in the poem's secluded wood as he silently stitches a tapestry of his life into his own flesh. The introduction flashes back to Dante's real world military experience fighting with the calvary in the battle of Campaldino.

The first scene the developers showed me involved Dante, a lanky warrior dressed in armor and wielding an over-sized sword, clearing out a group of nondescript enemies packed onto the boat crossing the river Styx to the shores and gate of hell.

Instead of being piloted by Charon, the boat is Charon, his skeletal head forming a sort of figure head for the ship.

The fighting is combo-heavy, fluid, but stylistically not much different from other games of its ilk.

Other scenes in the game had me climbing along a well, talking to an ethereal Virgil, and finally doing battle with an army of unbaptized babies.

In the Inferno, one of the first scenes that Dante comes upon is a the first ring hell. It's here, in the original work, where unbaptized children and virtuous pagans live. It's a scene, when turned into a battle, that could be problematic, it seems. But the developers when animating these children damned by original sin turned them into spider-like creatures with scythe's for arms. The reimagining removes the shock some might experience when confronted by children sent to hell simply because they weren't baptized, but it also will likely remove some mainstream flack the game could have received.

Included in the game too are some of the real-world historical figures written into hell as a sort of literary punishment by Dante.

These shades keep their names, their punishments, you can even read about their real lives in the game, but instead of being perpetually punished for their in-life crimes, Sisyphus-like, Dante gets to pass judgment on them.

When Dante comes upon the 30 or so shades found in the game he can choose to punish or absolve them, permanently changing the metaphoric landscape of Dante's hell.

The developers acknowledge that when making the game they couldn't just follow what happened in the book, instead they used the vividly described hell as their backdrop.

"The setting is what we really latched onto," the developers said. "We wanted to visualize what he wrote."

Dante's Inferno the video game, I was told, is a tour of a broader hell than the one found in the poem it is based on.

But if it's the setting that the developers want to build a game upon, why drag Dante's characters, and Dante himself into their work? Why tinker with such a recognized and important work?

The impact of the Divine Comedy can not be overstated, it literally gave birth to the Italian language by combining the regional dialect of Tuscany and Latin. And it wasn't just that he used the language in his single greatest works, it's that those works proved just how expressive, how poetic this freshly minted language could be.

In Dante's books, the author is a voyeur, a passive witness to the many plights of man in hell, the perpetual wait of purgatory, the sublime rewards of heaven. He is not there to influence, or even to judge, but to report. The book, on some level, is the author's last chance to correct his ways, to return from his journey and to start living at a milestone halfway through his life.

Beatrice, Dante's great love both in life and in the fiction of the epic poem, is an unrequited love, an ideal never tested, never fully realized.

Not so in the game. While the developers seem genuinely interested in trying to present a tour of Dante's hell that remains at least mildly representative of the original works, it can't remain a passive experience and still be a mainstream video game.

Their answer: Make Dante the game's hero, Beatrice the game's damsel in distress.

It's this shift in perspective, no matter how tangentially rooted in history, that most threatens to deflate the experience of Inferno.

While I have concerns about the game and how its translation of one of the central works of the Middle Ages seems to strip away the work's nuance, message and importance, but the developers seem to be aware of this concern. And there are things they told me that give me hope.

The game won't explore the same common human experience of morality and redemption that the book did, it does look like it might refocus itself to explore one man's struggles with the same issues

In life, Dante was a very conflicted man: Married to one woman, in love with another; an exile of his beloved Florence; a reluctant warrior.

The game, the developers told me, will delve into Dante's personality and haunting experiences in the war in which he fought. It will also focus in on some smaller ideas and characters presented in the book and make them more central to the experience.

If Dante's Inferno succeeds does that mean that the team will begin working on games that translates purgatory and heaven into something that can be played through?

The developers acknowledged that Dante's three poems represent the full experience of his Divine Comedy and that it games that continue that story started in Inferno could happen, but for now, they remain focused on the current title.

I suppose, in making the game, the developers could argue that allowing the player to impact the experiences of hell, to fight against the damned and their eternal punishments, to finally realize the love of an ideal, is a reflection of today's mores. But this modernization of the classic undermines the lesson of the work: The choices made in life have serious and lasting impact on how you will spend eternity.

Dante's Divine Comedy is about, more than anything else, the redemption of man. Dante's video game is about finding a powerful setting, and perhaps, allowing gamers to act out a shallow farce.

And they almost certainly won't be the last. Homosexuality has long been a controversial issue amongst gamers, developers, and publishers alike. With the ever-growing popularity of online games, players often bring their intolerance online, sharing it with their friends, teammates, and guilds. This tends to lead to knee-jerk reactions from the industry, with an unfortunate emphasis on the word jerk.

Consider the example of SimCopter. A designer named Jacques Servin decided of his own accord to include a bit of beefcake in Maxis' SimCity spinoff, giving birth to "himbos". "Himbos" were shirtless, Speedo-clad men with nipples as bright as runway lights. The men would gather together in large numbers on certain dates, taking the place of some of the scantily clad women originally featured in the game. Servin, himself openly gay, included the bit of secret code on a lark, figuring Maxis would find it amusing.

They did not.

The Easter Egg was discovered shortly after the game's initial release, with 78,000 copies making it out the door beforehand. Jacques was terminated, and Maxis created a patch to remove the half-dressed men, also offering a service where customers could call in to get their disks replaced. Jacques' comments at the time neatly summed up the atmosphere of the early 90's.

"I didn't do it out of anger, just kind of `Why not?' I can't quite figure out why they would be so angry. It's not a game for kids; it's for 20-year-olds. But you put gay and kids anywhere in the same sentence and people explode."

SimCopter was released in 1996. A decade later and game developers were still reacting poorly to homosexual concerns.

In 2006, Blizzard scolded a player in their popular massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft for advertising her guild as gay and lesbian friendly, claiming she was violating the game's harassment policy. Following up on the issue the player, Sara Andrews of Tennessee was informed that her advertisements might cause other players to become abusive. Players who otherwise would have been content to sit at the auction house shopping for spell components, driven to the brink of homophobic madness by the mere mention of gays and lesbians.

After spending several years playing World of Warcraft, one could sort of see their point...but that point is beside the point. In trying to invite others to a guild where they could be comfortable, this player was exposed to an extremely uncomfortable situation. A situation that sparked threats both legal and otherwise against Blizzard.

Lambda Legal, one of the nation's oldest organizations dedicated to protecting gay and lesbian rights, examined the situation and came to a conclusion that seemed sensible to everyone but Blizzard: "You can't tell gay and lesbian people that they have to be quiet so other folk won't harass them."

Blizzard eventually apologized to both Lambda Legal and Sara Andrews, calling the situation an "unfortunate mistake", explaining that their game master who dealt with the issue misinterpreted Blizzard's rules, and that "it has always been, and will remain Blizzard's policy that LGBT-friendly guilds are allowed to announce their existence, and to recruit members in the same manner as any other guilds."

The World of Warcraft incident highlights one of the key issues that developers face when dealing with the subject of homosexuality. It generally isn't the reactions of the developers and publishers themselves that cause problems. It's their perception of how the players will react that results in them making unwise decisions.

Case in point, Microsoft's handling of a situation last year involving an Xbox Live gamertag. A gamer going by the handle "theGAYERgamer" was surprised to find his gamertag banned from the service, with Microsoft requesting that he change it before playing games over Xbox Live. According to reports, the company had received complaints that the name contained sexual innuendo and was in violation of Xbox Live policy. More recently, a lesbian gamer was banned from Xbox Live because her profile indicated a sexual preference.

Some would say that sexual preference has no place in online gaming, with Microsoft stating that a gamertag that read "theHETEROSEXUALgamer" would be treated the same way, but it isn't quite the same thing. Heterosexuality is a popular assumption. Homosexuality is considered an alternative. A straight male doesn't have to go out of his way to let women know that he is straight.

Things are looking up for Microsoft, having recently been in talks with the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation regarding their Xbox Live policies. Perhaps they can come up with a better way of dealing with the homosexual lifestyle other than simply hiding it away.

This leads us directly to the recent troubles with Star Wars: The Old Republic. Following cries of discrimination following a moderator post stating that gays and lesbians did not exist in the Star Wars universe, community manager Sean Dahlberg apologized using the following excuse:

When I first built the word filter list, I added a variety of terms to the word filter that have been used numerous times in derogatory messaging.

While the SimCopter example was one of childish retribution by a developer who felt he was unfairly treated, both the World of Warcraft and Star Wars situations stemmed from employees of the respective companies that felt they were counteracting bad situations. Unfortunately, both representatives chose to attempt this by ignoring the fact that gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgendered exist. You can't address an issue like this by sweeping it under the carpet. That just creates bumps in the carpet that someone is eventually going to trip over, getting hurt in the process, and that hurt will rest on the shoulders of the company that did the sweeping.

What makes situations like these so tragic is the fact that other companies have taken great strides towards accepting "alternative lifestyles" in the recent past. Rockstar Games allowed for same-sex kissing to occur in Bully. Many massively multiplayer games not only allow for gay and lesbian couples to get married, but issue press releases to announce the feature. BioWare itself allowed for same-sex pairings in their epic science-fiction role-playing game Mass Effect, standing strong in the face of the controversy that those gameplay elements drew from the mainstream media.

The internet is a haven for intolerance. One could say the anonymity afforded by the world wide web serves to enhance it, allowing bigots to open their mouths wider without fear of someone placing a well-deserved fist there. We cannot ignore this fact, but we also cannot ignore the large population of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered gamers. Hiding them away is not the answer. Sure, they will be subject to ridicule and strife by those less understanding among us. It's almost unavoidable. The point is, just like anyone who doesn't fit into societal norms, I'm sure they'd rather walk tall and dodge the occasional cruel barb then hide who they truly are.

We first explored this topic last month, asking "What Could Make The Beatles: Rock Band Worth $250". We know now that the bundles will indeed include a replica Höfner 500/1 "Violin Bass", as used by Paul McCartney, along with the Ludwig drum set with the predicted black oyster pearl finish and vintage replica kick drum head. They've even thrown in a mic stand for good measure, but is it worth a quarter of a grand?

Well first off, we can pretty much discount the particular music choices from our calculations. The game is $60 no matter what tunes it contains, so the set list is a moot point. What we have here, is a game, a plastic bass guitar, plastic drums, a mic, and a mic stand. Let's break down what those would cost individually using Wal-Mart pricing, rounded up:

The Beatles: Rock Band game: $60
Wireless Rock Band 2 guitar: $70
Rock Band 2 drum set: $90
Rock Band Mic (Not Available, Estimating): $20
Rock Band mic stand: $25

Grand Total: $265

Assuming the Höfner bass guitar is wireless, this would put the bundle at $15 cheaper than individually buying everything included in the set, and that's including the generic Rock Band 2 instruments. Once you figure in the cost of producing the band-specific instruments, it actually isn't that bad of a deal. It's still more expensive than a boxed set of Rock Band 2, but then this set isn't for your average Rock Band 2 player.

My suggestion? If the price turns you off, then you probably shouldn't be buying it. If you've already got plastic instruments, then there really is no benefit to getting more plastic instruments anyway. This set is mainly for the consumer who is newly drawn to the Rock Band experience by The Beatles, and for them, paying a little bit more for a touch of authenticity might not be quite as painful.

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 serious question, really. This is my second apartment move in two years, and I could have sworn things went much smoother last time. March of last year things were relatively slow as far as game releases were concerned, so packing up the television was one of the first things I did. Not so this year.

Things started off well enough. I did manage to pack away the PlayStation 3 and the Wii, though every time I placed a game or a system into a box I felt a little twinge. Was it too soon? What if I needed to play Killzone 2 all of the sudden? Hell, even packing away my NES games had me itching to plug it up to the television and play a little Yoshi's Cookie.

When I got to the Xbox 360 I floundered. I placed a stack consisting of Street Fighter IV, 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand, and Star Ocean: The Last Hope into the box, and then took them back out again. Then I rummaged through the box for my copy of Burnout Paradise, because I didn't want to miss the release of the Toy Car Pack. I unpacked my DS and PSP next, figuring that they would help me forget about the Xbox 360, and wound up playing Puzzle Quest: Galactrix for three hours, which was really only about 2 hours plus load times.

How should I go about this? Should I suck it up and just seal everything tightly away, using the promise of a return to gaming motivate me to get the whole apartment ready to move, or do I leave myself the odd gaming nugget here and there, just in case I hit a slow spot and need a break?

How do you folks do it? I've seen some of the magnificent game rooms you guys and girls have. Do you set about tearing down your monument to your hobby first thing, or do you leave the up and running until the last possible minute - a shining beacon amidst a sea of boxes and bags?

Take your time answering. I'm going to go play some Star Ocean atop my hastily-constructed box throne.

$250 is a rather large chunk of change to lay out on another bundled music game. The Premium Bundle of Harmonix's Rock Band 2 only retails for $189.99, so what could make The Beatles: Rock Band so impressive that it cost $60 more? My only thought is that they're including a bass guitar in the package to provide a more accurate Beatles experience, though technically they'd have to pack in two guitars and a bass to really capture the band dynamic.

We've taken a look at the songs that simply must be included with the game, along with instruments they could reproduce in order to make The Beatles: Rock Band Premium Bundle worth picking up, even if we already have a living room full of plastic instruments.

Songs
The main problem I have picking out songs for a Beatles: Rock Band game is the fact that many of my all-time favorite Beatles tunes weren't songs that fit the guitar-bass-drum-singer formula that Rock Band has laid out. "Blackbird", my personal favorite, is just a guitar and a metronome, so that one is right out.

Here are a few of the more Rock Band-friendly tunes I think need to make the cut.

Helter Skelter: Paul McCartney's response to the loud and dirty sound of The Who's "I Can See For Miles", "Helter Skelter" is probably the heaviest song The Beatles ever produced, making it perfect for the Rock Band treatment.

I Saw Here Standing There: "She was just seventeen...you know what I mean..." "I Saw Here Standing There" is a classic rock tune, and while the instrument bits might be simple, the "hooooooo!" in the chorus makes it all worth it for the guy on the mic.

Lucy In the Sky With Diamonds: A prime example of The Beatles more psychedelic bent, the song may not have been written about LSD but it certainly has provided hours of entertainment over the years to those on it.

Help!: One of John Lennon's personal favorites, "Help!" has a nice tempo and vocals that would allow the singer to express a little bit of range.

While My Guitar Gently Weeps: George Harrison's ballad that featured guitar legend Eric Clapton on lead guitar is one of the most guitar-friendly tunes The Beatles ever released.

Taxman: Another song by Harrison, who wrote it when he realized that even though the band had started to make money, they weren't seeing most of it. This one is actually one of my brother's favorites, so I included it so he'd have something to play.

Paperback Writer: One of my favorites, and The Beatles first hit that didn't have anything to do with love.

Instruments
Yes, I know the Beatles made extensive use of Fender Stratocasters throughout the years, but I for one am not shelling out $250 for another plastic Strat. Here's some alternatives:

Epiphone Casino: The guitar The Beatles made famous. Paul, John, and George all used an Epiphone Casino sometime during their career, so it would almost be a shame not to see it included in the game.

Rickenbacker 325: Lennon's guitar of choice, once described as his dream guitar. Sweet curves and classic lines that would be easy to replicate in plastic form.

Höfner 500/1 "Violin Bass": Paul McCartney's signature bass guitar has an extremely distinctive look and feel to it. Anything else would just be another bass. Either that, or tap Mad Catz to make a jazz bass version of the Fender precision bass they've already manufactured. I wonder if they'll ship it left-handed?

Ludwig Drum Set: Let's face it...unless they completely redo the Rock Band drums, there isn't going to be much to customize here to make the set scream Ringo Star. The only feature they could tweak, outside of giving the set a faux bass drum with "The Beatles" written on it, is to give the plastic the Black Oyster Pearl finish that originally drew Ringo to the Ludwig set he used extensively throughout his career.

So what about you folks? What kind of instruments and songs would Beatles: Rock Band have to include in order for you to fork out $250 come September 9th? Fill the comments section with your opinionated joy.

With over 18 Commodore 64 titles already released on the European Virtual Console, it's a safe bet that we'll get a good idea of what's in the works simply by looking at what Europe already has. They've seen a steady stream of releases since March 28th of last year, when Uridium and International Karate made their debut, since then adding such classics as Jumpman, Boulder Dash, California Games, and the Last Ninja series.

Despite having been heavily immersed in Commodore culture back in the 80's, I am honestly hard-pressed to name any large Commodore exclusive titles, having played mainly ports of games that were created with other PC systems in mind. Add to that the fact that many of the games I played back then were text-based adventure titles, and the list narrows down even further.

When it comes right down to it, there really aren't that many Commodore 64 titles that you can't just find floating about the internet somewhere, so I'm not sure I can see myself forking out $5 for a Commodore 64 game, as novel as the idea might be.

Take a look at Wikipedia's gigantic list of Commodore 64 titles and see if any of them tickle your fancy, or at least stir the sort of fond memories that are worth 500 Wii points.

Lanchester, writing in a way that eases the typical London Review of Books reader into the scary world of video games, focuses on a number of bigger, more mainstream games to illustrate his observations. First up, BioShock. With its thread of objectivist philosophy weaving through the plot, it should be the video game that would convince the new medium phobic that, hey, games are art.

"The game was a huge hit," Lanchester writes "and I have yet to encounter anyone who has ever heard of it."

Lanchester shifts his tutorial on games to subjects such as Shigeru Miyamoto, the LEGO series of universe crossover games and big blockbuster fare like Grand Theft Auto IV, Metal Gear Solid, Call of Duty 4 and LittleBigPlanet. Many of his insights about the conventions found in these types of games are spot on observations about why people who don't play games... don't play games.

His definition of the current gaming population's wants?

"The same thing the audience for any new medium always wants: they want pornography, broadly defined. They want to see things they aren’t supposed to see. This is why video games, in general (and away from the world of Miyamoto-san) are so preoccupied with violence – it’s what young men want to see."

But back to the original question: are they art?

The author won't give a simple yes or no (it would've been a much shorter essay) but does give some indication of his own opinion on the matter.

"Games are not, in general, better than films," Lanchester writes. "But they are often better than huge-budget Hollywood films." They're not terribly better than television programming either, he says.

He nearly summarizes his future perspective thusly, "It seems clear to me that by the time my children are adults, video gaming will be a medium whose importance and cultural ubiquity are at least as great as that of film or television. Whether it will be an artistic medium of equivalent importance is less clear."

Lanchester's focus on nothing but the biggest, most base appealing games is probably not going to win him any fans from the serious, studios gamer, hopefully something that he'll address in a future pondering of whether games are art. Whether you'd agree or disagree with Lanchester, his perspective is definitely worth a read. And no "TL;DR" comments or I'll ban your ass.

Is it Art? [London Review of Books via GameSetWatch]

And so does Yahoo! Games, who paints a very bleak picture of the PSP's current performance and its future. Clearly, we're all beyond admiring the PSP's success relative to previous Nintendo handheld competitors and ready to start giving the PSP the what for over its middling 2008.

Yes, Yahoo! makes some good points — the 2008 software line-up was largely forgettable, as third parties have moved on from shipping PlayStation 2 to PSP ports to... well, not doing much at all on the platform. On the quality side, the DS has had more games rated 80% or higher, as Yahoo! points out. And that's translated to a bigger gap between the Nintendo DS and PSP, 1.5 million versus 420,000 units sold in the US in November.

But Sony's still holding its own in Japan, even if it's regularly bested by the DS — thanks to the recently launched DSi. But is it really over for the PSP? And, if not, will it really be over for the PSP when Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars makes its appearance on the DS next year?

I'd actually think that Sony is doing a respectable job of continuing to hold its own against Nintendo, despite seeing far fewer high quality releases on the PSP and that its transition from UMD only games to digitally delivered software is a step in the right direction for the next-generation of PSP.

Goodbye, Sony PSP [Yahoo! Games]

Sure the Playstation 3 didn't do so well last month, selling 378,000 console sales in November, down from 466,000 last November. And the PS2 also saw a drop in sales, with the company moving less than half what they did last year.

But sabotage?

XBox 360 has made serious inroads by dropping the price of its core system to $199. So how did Sony respond?

By releasing a new version of the PS3 ... that's $100 more expensive. Yes, it comes with a game, and yes, it has more hard-drive space, to which I respond: Who cares? Was the marketplace clamoring for more memory from the PS3? Is that why its market penetration is so low compared to its predecessors and competition? What were the Sony execs thinking?

Times' Sonny Bunch goes on to talk about the PS3's lack of Netflix support, what he calls Sony's poor marketing of Blu-ray, his point seems to be that "Sony seems bound and determined to do everything in its power to hinder the market penetration of the system in particular and Blu-ray in general."

The column begs the question, is the Playstation 3 destined to be the Gamecube of this generation of consoles? Maybe there is some truth to the old adage that you can't really have three successful consoles on the market.

Sabotaging the Sony Playstation 3 market?

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]

While Alt is enjoying MGS4, he's also puzzled by the game — especially the Otacon-Sunny relationship. He is by no means the first person to point out the odd relationship between the computer whiz and the little girl, he does do a good job at putting it all in context. Otaku context. Writes Alt:

The relationship between introverted computer genius Hal "Otacon" Emmerich and his charge Sunny (seen above) is a diamond-polished window into the soul of the young men who work for Japanese game companies. A doe-eyed nine- or ten-year-old who resembles a child less than she does a scaled-down maid café waitress, she waits on her guardian hand and foot, cleaning, assisting with programming, and serving meals. The pair live as virtual hikikomori shut-ins on a high-tech aircraft that serves as a mobile base for the game's protagonist.

Ah, the ever-changing face of otaku wish fulfillment. Once upon a time otaku dreamed of being international ladykillers like Lupin the Third, giant robot pilots like Gundam's Char Aznable, and invulnerable martial artists like the Fist of the North Star. Now it appears the ideal lifestyle is one of a digital hermit set squarely in front of a computer monitor with an elementary schoolgirl in fetishwear at his beck and call.

Oh ho ho. So by Alt's assertions, there's more afoot than simple creepy dynamics. There's creepy shut-in otaku dynamics.

Otacon/Lolicon [AltJapan]

[Update] While the writer stands by his call for the Obama administration to take some sort of leadership role in giving games developers some investment and advantages, he's disowning his paragraph regarding regulation of the used games markets. I've been in this boat a few times so I'll allow his response, but I'm keeping the original post in place because, lacking context, any response is hard to follow. It's on the jump.

This guy made his case, and I'm not going to gratuitously flame it, but if video games aren't recession proof they're still taking nowhere near the beating of other staple industries in the United States. Just a week ago at the BMO Capital Markets conference, all three console makers expressed some form of qualified optimism about the coming year, even in a fragile global economy.

That said, this editorial wants Obama action on a number of points, and I'm betting the biggie would really set your teeth on edge:

• Rein in the used games market. "It is fundamentally unfair that developers are being robbed of profits for work that they've done." says the writer, Nick Michetti. I see his point but I can't work up much sympathy for it. Especially when I just lost my job and made $185 on Half.com selling old video games, money that's going to put food on my table.

He goes on: "Publishers and developers should be entitled to at least half of the price from the sale of every used game. However, we need for there to be caps on used game prices and a Blue Book system for video games to prevent price gouging."

Can this possibly be serious? The creation of a Kelly blue book for video games? Does the used comics market — which sometimes sells items at four-figure prices — require or rely on transparent, government regulated appraisal? Does Marvel get half every time Amazing Fantasy #15 changes hands? Used cars get regulated by a blue book because, I'm assuming, vehicle licensing and sales are the provenance of state departments of motor vehicles, which gives them the infrastructure to regulate such things. It's also in the public interest not to get hosed on lemons, which is how regulations get passed. Not the case with video games.

To be fair, he goes on to say that developers should observe a mandate that DRM can't be used to inhibit game sales. But that's a regulation with such a pointilistic purpose it beggars the imagination that the federal government would impose it. Secondly, DRM is meant to prevent copying and distribution, and if it represses sales, it's usually because enough would-be customers have an ideological opposition to it. Maybe he means DLC, but then again, Harmonix, and many others, could easily argue that value-added DLC has grown sales for their titles. What constitutes a complete game anyway, just the retail title? Everything available for it online? Some of it?

• Government help to fund research and development for "affordable discs that all home console platforms should be forced to support in order to aid smaller or more multiplatform-focused developers." In a word, no. Stem-cell research is going to get government help first. I'm not sure owning a patent on video game media is something the government's going to plow a lot of money into right now.

• A package of tax cuts for middleware developers and smaller studios, to help them build technology that powers AAA titles, and cope with developing on expensive formats. I'm not opposed to these per se, but even if President-elect Obama plunked $40,000 down to buy ads in video games, it doesn't mean he's going to put his political capital in a sinking economy on the line for this special interest.

Besides, we all know Obama's top R&D priority. Getting Sega to make a new console.

Response from Nick Michetti:
It is true that enclosed in my editorial is a single paragraph dedicated to "reining in the used games market." It is also true that this paragraph was shortsighted and not anywhere near as well as thought out as it could've been, especially with implications for the market and government control. I will freely admit of my own volition that I did not fully grasp the implications of what I had written until some of the comments had come in. I admit this because I have realized that the full implications of the paragraph in question are the polar opposite of my beliefs. I do not support government control of our industry, nor is government control involved in any of my political beliefs. I'm an independent and a moderate who supported Obama through the primaries and the general election. I just happened to come up with a poor idea, is all.

How did the paragraph come about in the first place, then? Just an admittedly poorly thought-out ideological notion that if developers got a small bit of cash back from the used games market, it would provide them with less of an impetus to include DRM. That's it. No government control undertones or anything of the sort meant to be implied. To reiterate: it was a bad idea conjured up by a limited understanding of the scope of the implications of the idea, which never should've been written in the first place. If you were offended by this paragraph in any way, I apologize. Rest assured that if I could go back in time and rewrite the piece, I would eliminate that point entirely, for it doesn't accurately reflect my intent in any way, period.

So, I ask all of you: take a Sharpie marker in your mind and blot out that paragraph [on regulating used game sales] and the one other mentioning of that point, then re-read the piece, for those are the ideas that I stand by. Those are the ideas that are supposed to comprise and be the crux of my editorial, not that single paragraph. After all, if I had intended for that paragraph to be the crux of my editorial, I would've written an editorial about that, not as a single paragraph in passing.

How Barack Obama Can Bring the Change the Video Game Industry Needs [Kombo via GamePolitics]

When we created the Wii, we identified areas that would appeal to everyone in the household... One was sports, another was fitness, and one was music.

Wii Music has been an answer to my long life as a struggling musician... The one problem I've never been able to resolve is that while I wish I was good enough to perform for people, no matter how much I practiced I never felt my performance was good enough.

Kids are learning more about the fundamentals of music then they realize... When it comes time to learn to read music and play a real instrument, Wii Music might make them more interested in taking on the challenge and sticking with it long-term.

That's interesting, but we think we read that interview at E3 and 1,034 times after that. (Hey, he's a walking press release!) It's not that these answers are simply stock answers, but rather, softball answers from softball questions. Granted, the average Wii Music consumer probably does not read every Miyamoto interview. The average Wii Music consumer may not even know who Shigeru Miyamoto is — so these innocuous blank replies from Miyamoto might be Wii Music marketing strategy. (Note: The game failed to crack the US top ten in its first 11 days on sale.)

Too few have challenged him on his claim that Wii Music is teaching the fundamentals of music or addressing confidence issues. If kids want to learn music, they should start with a kazoo or rhythm sticks or, hell, a piano. People want to perform, but can't play an instrument. So the answer is swinging a Wii Remote? Being in one's living room swinging a consumer electronics product does not overcome the inability to play music. Being in one's living room, practicing a musical instrument does. Learning musical instruments is hard. Consumers, and Miyamoto, it seems prefer shortcuts and instant gratification. Good thing Wii Music offers just that.

This could all just be us missing something entirely. (Yes, blame us.) Then again, it very well could be the symptom of something larger. Remember when Miyamoto said that Wii Music's development was relatively easy and didn't challenge him?

Videogame guru tunes into interactive music [Reuters] [Pic]