Long Tail Gamer

So here's a reason to follow me on Twitter: That's where I give stuff away.  Case in point, here are the winners of the "rename Divine Divinity to something equally silly and alliterative" contest!  ON TWITTER!

• KeenanW won with "Omnipotent Impotence," because God apparently requires you to level up before enacting His celestial will.  WTF?  Like, did the archangel Uriel ever totally biff his perception rolls to spot the lamb's blood on the doors during Passover?  "OOPS, HAHA REZ PLZ"
• TheOfficeTroll won with "Sacrosanct Sacrament," because syllables have to count for something too, and the "sacr-" prefix doesn't get as much mileage as it should these days.
• CaptainFitz won with "Endocrine Endocrinity," for reasons I cannot fully articulate.
• Weclock won with "Devastating Demons," because he efficiently describes not only what you do in the game, but also what you face.
  

Thanks for playing, everyone!  And if you're looking to pick up Divine Divinity yourself -- which is a wonderful game, and everyone should -- you could do a lot worse than to get it through this link to GOG.com.

I don't know much about art, but I know what I like. Right now, I like this collection of World War II Soviet paintings.  (Thanks for turning me onto that, BoingBoing!)  Browsing this gallery, I found myself reflecting on the emotional power of these brilliant pieces:  Moving to the New Position and Fire of the Guard Artillery.

And being a gamer, I naturally thought to myself, "I'd love to play in a world that looked like this."

On the latest Game-Central podcast, we had a story out of England which revisits the old controversey: does playing video games make you a murderer? 

Me, I doubt it.  So I wrote about why.   Here's an excerpt, and you can read the rest here.

The controversy between video games and real life violence, however, is a serious business and requires careful scrutiny. A young woman was, after all, brutally assaulted. The assailant enjoyed Starcraft, a popular video game. The connections are too obvious and deadly to be ignored.

Or is that line of reasoning, perhaps, total bullshit?

Every couple of years, someone tries to draw an inescapable cultural connection between the games we play and the horrors we visit on each other. From the correlation between Doom and the Columbine Massacre, to the notion that Pac-Man makes kids obese, to the dreaded Monopoly-playing property flippers of the contemporary Great Depression: it seems like gaming in any form presents a scapegoat for people who how found ways to capitalize on the idea that "THE GAMES MADE THEM DO IT."

This weekend marks about a million good things happening all at once.  But if I were to pick just one -- just one  -- that didn't involve me buying a house, it would be recording a spectacular podcast with the good fellows at Game-Central.org.  And it's already edited for your listening pleasure!  Holy cow!

Chris, Keenan, and Samy welcomed me to the show, and before I could say "ouch," we were eyeball-deep into video game discussion.  From NVIDIA's eyebrow-raising claim of having saved PC gaming to a retrospective of the view from a Commodore 64, we covered a large stretch of ground.

Go give it a listen, won't you?

If you're not on the #gog IRC channel on IRC.Quakenet.org, then you're missing exchanges like this one:

<+Keph> does anyone mind if I brag a bit about something that's way off into the future?
<+LongTail> Your spectacular death?
<+LongTail> That's not so far off, actually
<+Keph> no, not tha--wait, what?
<+LongTail> I'M NOT A TIME TRAVELER, THOUGH.

<+Keph> anyway, there's a good chance my bot will receive a peer-reviewed, published article in, I guess, one year's time
<+LongTail> Excellent!  it will make a fitting tribute.
<+Keph> indeed
<+LongTail> By tribute, I mean memorial.

<+Keph> speaking of my bot, when I get my current projects over with, I'm putting it on the internets
<+LongTail> AH!  (Takes notes)
<+LongTail> This will make an outstanding avenue of research for my thesis: How the Internet Nearly Destroyed Mankind in the Early 21st Century
<+Keph> just wait until I implement some genetic algorithms up in dis bitch in phase two!

<+LongTail> How would one go about referencing your paper using the Neo-Luna Manual of Style citation format?
<+LongTail> I mean, are you a third generation clone, which gene-batches did your genetic augmentation come from, etc?
<+Keph> the... what?
<+LongTail> The NLMS citation style is as complete as possible when it comes to documenting the origin of ideas.
<+LongTail> Do you have any neurological cyber-enhancements?  Where does your off-site datastore reside?
<+Keph> I use a distributed netw-- HEY WAIT A MINUTE
<+LongTail> <-- NOT A TIME TRAVELER.

... And for playing along and keeping me entertained, Keph just won himself a Good Old Games download code.