A Tree Falling in the Forest

The United States Supreme Court will hear a case to determine the constitutionality of a law banning the sale of violent video games to minors. Arguments surround a California law (I wrote about in depth here ) - which was signed into law and found to be unconstitutional before it went into effect. This will be the highest court to determine whether video games are afforded the free speech protections of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution - and it is very, very important to our industry. Free speech sounds like it addresses the things we say, but it protects everything from strippers to protest marches- just about anything to bring a tear to each American's eye. Thanks to the great work of The ESA, every time the question was raised in the past, the court's found the legislation to be unconstitutional, but the highest courts ruling on the issue were at the district court level. This means the decisions are not binding nationally and may be over turne...

Here is an excerpt from a Wired profile about Jordan Mechner - full disclosure, Jordan is a client - and he talks about when game making was fun and the results showed in the product. “I was right out of college, spending a summer at home,” Mechner says. “I had an Apple II, so I took my brother out into the parking lot of our old high school and made him run, jump and climb, and that video was the basis for the game.” The date was Oct. 20, 1985. We know this because the 21-year-old Mechner kept an astonishingly comprehensive journal, which he has since posted online. While he was still an undergraduate at Yale, Mechner was already earning royalties off a best-selling action game that he had created, called Karateka. He wanted his next game to have the same essential story elements — a youthful hero, a princess in danger, an evil lord — but on a grander scale, like a “Disney movie,” as he wrote at the time. Nearly four years later, the original Prince of Persia game was released for t...

Wanna play Crysis in all it's glory but don't have your Alienware machine with you? Otoy has it running - and just about anything else without building a ported version - on any device. Build once, play anywhere. No more neutered versions of games. No more porting or rebuilding expense. No more concern about the market value of the port to the additional device. This is great news, because before iPad, it was limited to your phone, and that is way to small to enjoy the game: There is also more older stuff here, but it does not involve an iPad, just stuff to make you scratch your head:

Some time last year Joseph Olin asked me to speak on a panel at SMU's Guild Hall Game Business Law Summit. I do not do a lot of speaking any more because it stopped being fun when things I said started to be parsed and posted out of context. I can cause enough damage to myself among the people in the room, so there is really no need to create a forum for the spread out of context hyperbole to a bunch of strangers. But the date for the conference was so far away and Guild Hall does good work and I probably could not have been accepted to SMU Law School had I applied, so I accepted. Much to my chagrin, as the date approached I saw the list of speakers and found I was not a speaker, but a moderator. This meant I could not just show up and speak, I had to prepare. Then I saw I was moderating Paul Raines and Christian Svensson. Two very smart guys who could each cause serious damage to my career if I pissed them off - not unlikely. It was as if Joseph had suggested this comp...

I started writing this post almost exactly two years ago and then I never hit the post button. I guess writing was enough to get it out of my system. But I am once again watching a situation where a blogger reported something with no support, no access to facts, no grasp of facts and only a fleeting, tangential connection to the plane of reality we all inhabit, and it is being reported as fact. Needless to say, it pissed me off all over again. Fortunately, except for the updated parts in the middle, I already had a bunch of words written down. A couple of years ago John Stewart famously attacked Tucker Carlson on Crossfire. Stewart's satirizes the news, CNN purports to be journalist. Stewart tells you not to trust what he is saying. He is not reporting or being objective. CNN and Tucker Carlson on the other hand, say they are news. He called them on it. It's time to do the same thing with bloggers, and I'll give it a shot. My blog is kind of like The Daily Show -...

Sony’s new video is great, but the silly rabbits over there still think the Natal is for games. While the game world continues to try to figure out how to turn us all into Marcel Marceau in front of our 360s, linear content creators are recognizing the real value. Natal is not an attack on the other game consoles. It is an attack on the remote control. The natural input to drive your television experience is just one more reason my wife will be willing to use the Xbox, and maybe even more than me. I know I said it a lot before , but the 360 is cable and every move Microsoft makes moves them one step closer. This is why the smarter agents in Hollywood are pitching content to Microsoft. This may be a surprise to those who view the Xbox 360 as just a game console or the three people who heard of the Zune. It could also be viewed as a step back to those who pitched content to MSN and other Microsoft incarnations in dot com days, but they better take another look if they want their c...

Ten years ago I sat in an outdoor booth overlooking the garden of the Bel Air Hotel eating breakfast with Charles Cornwall. Charles grew up in South Africa and our Eidos conversation reminded him of a story he often heard as a child. Parents would bring home a baby lion cub and give it to their child as a pet. The lion would act as part of the family and play with the children purring like a kitten. Then, inevitably, one day the lion would lash out and rip the child's arm off. The action would send the family into shock. The lion, on the other hand, would just look at them and say "What do you want from me? I’m a fucking lion?" Since every gamer writer, blogger and twiterererer on and off the web - not to mention the forums - are covering every portion of it, I didn't think there was much reason to wake from my four month blog hibernation to write about Infinity Ward and Activision. But then I got a call from an analyst who started asking questions and having ...