Game talk

It is always sad to see an MMO have to close its doors. It’s now been announced officially that Sept 1st will be the last day that Auto Assault sees service.

There are further details here, from an interview with NCSoft.

Official Linden Blog » Blog Archive French Court Rules in Favor of Linden Lab «

Linden Lab has filed a response, and The Forge has an analysis.

And so does Prokofy Neva.

Am I going to need to revamp the blog categories to add “legal,” “RMT,” and other such tags? Sigh.

I did an interview with Dan Roy as part of his thesis work and it is posted now over at Cross Gamer. Dan recently did a panel on cross-platform MMOs (especially mobile) at GDC last year, so there’s a bunch of stuff related to ideas on that front.

This article at Wired is an amazing story. However, I am struck by how much attention is paid to violent videogames — by the writer, by the accused, by the courts who presumably discuss the briefs — when it seems pretty clear that everyone in the story is a deeply screwed up person to begin with.

Does “geek discrimination” exist? Sure, and I am sure that in the courts, the issue of whether Reiser played violent games with his 6 year old was a factor. But surely somewhere along the line the drugs, self-mutilation, adultery, and murders by the lover deserve a bit more weight in the deliberations? Yikes.

Society really needs to stop seeing interest in violent videogames as a motive cause, and instead start seeing extreme fascination with violence in general as a warning flag. I read this article the same day I first browsed an issue of Entertainment Weekly with the headline emblazoned on the cover “Top 25 Action Movies Of All Time!!” — Kill Bill, Die Hard, etc etc.

I am sure Reiser saw Kill Bill. It was a geek thing to do. I bet nobody in this case filed court papers with the title of a movie in them.