SSSSSSlllllloooooowwwww month... not much happening, so I'll just brush over some of the basics. Besides, I feel a need to write, and I'm not quite ready for another editorial at the moment (which will likely be a comparison of the MPAA and ESRB, as one of the commenters on my last fire bomb suggested).

Headcrabs:

About a month and a half ago, one of our children's teachers (who's also a family friend, and absolutely adores our two younger children) gave her a very unusual birthday gift:

(That's not a picture of the actual one, by the way...)

Her name is Ariel. She's about 3 inches long, and eats coconut and drinks sea water. She's not very cuddly (I've already been pinched several times), prefers a warm humid environment, and likes to change shells every few days.

I've been teasing the kids by calling them "headcrabs," by the way... the reaction is too funny to describe.

Kidding aside: easiest pet ever. So easy, we got another one to keep Ariel company.

Guild Wars

I've beaten 3 of the campaigns now (Prophecies and Factions with my ranger, Nightfall with my paragon) and am working on Eye of the North off and on. One of the biggest reasons it has taken this long is because I've been trying to help several people through stickier parts of the campaigns (which has thrown off any time-table I may have had) and because my natural instinct to tinker has compelled me to fill 5 of my 8 character slots with experiments (so far, I've deleted an assassin and necromancer: one because can rein myself in during combat, the other because it's too creepy...).

Rating the ****s by how comfortable I am with them, I get:

1. Ranger (20+ years of playing them in D&D and other games... of course I'm comfortable! )
2. Paragon (As close to a ranger as you get without being one)
3. Warrior (Turn off brain, swing sword...)
4. Ritualist (Spirit artillery for the win)
5. Elementalist (Who doesn't like a big "boom" now and then?)
6. Dervish (Would be better if micro-managing enchantments wasn't so annoying)
7. Monk (Being blamed for letting the assassin die is never fun)
8. Necromancer (I've watched Dawn of the Dead too many times for this to be fun to play)
9. Mesmer (...okay, I haven't played one yet... but the ****doesn't appeal to me)
10. Assassin (Too many Naruto clones have just ruined the **** "more glass than cannon" as one of my guild mates put it)

I'd also like to give a shout-out to the Eagle Talons guild for being extremely helpful to a newcomer. I may have joined by accident, but it was a happy accident.

The new avatar is my warrior. His name is Miyamoto Yakamo (Five Rings references there), and no... he's not pretty. He's functional, though.

Musically Inclined

I picked up the newest Iced Earth CD (awesome!!! 4 stars!!!), the newest DragonForce CD (jury's still out, but it doesn't sound much different from Inhuman Rampage), and the Megadeth boxed set (by happy accident, I bought it on a day when used CDs were selling for 40% off, meaning I got it for a very steep discount ).

I also found a cheap copy of Guitar Hero: Rocks the 80's, and I'm very glad I didn't pay full price on release: it's the worst of the bunch for several reasons:

Poor covers: The guitar solo for "Metal Health" was totally deleted, for example;

Incorrectly-credited covers: "Radar Love" was not made famous by White Lion {???} and "Ballroom Blitz" was not made famous by Krokus;

And the difficulty assignments for songs is baffling: Winger's "Seventeen" more difficult than Dio's "Holy Diver???" (Winger's inclusion makes the whole collection suspect, to be honest.)

When there's only 2 songs you want to play over again (Extreme's "Play With Me" and Anthrax's "Caught in a Mosh") $50 seems like a complete rip-off. Hell, the $10 I paid seems pretty steep at the moment.

News that "Peace Sells" will be on Rock Band 2 has put it on my radar, by the way. It also makes the list of games Megadeth has appeared on or been associated with truly impressive...

Duke Nukem, Guitar Hero 1 & 2, one of the NHL games, Gears of War, True Crime: Streets of LA,GTA Vice City (I think)... a few others I've probably missed...

SO...

I'm going to start researching the next Soapbox now (with increased scrutiny, I need to increase my standards... *sigh*... ). Take care of yourselves, and hope that October is a little more lively than September was.

It has been one of those weeks that makes a person want to find a nice, solid brick wall and slam their head against it. Repeatedly.

When I wrote the last blog, I figured I would have plenty of opportunity to respond, and keep up with the responses. Unfortunately, all Hell broke loose, and I'm just now beginning to rein it in.

First, the video card in our main PC died a smoky, violent death. It wasn't anywhere near a high-end card to begin with (a 128MB GeForce 6200), and the fact that it had a heat sink with no fan made me somewhat leery of it. It held together for a year and a half, though, so I didn't give it a second thought.

That is, until it imploded on me last Thursday. There was a "pop!" and a smell of fried silicon (very acrid, very unmistakable) and everything went black on-screen.

I replaced it right away (BestBuy had only one AGP card in stock: a 512MB GeForce 7300) but configuration issues hung me up for several days. I would think that the drivers would work without having to reinstall them: Forceware drivers work across all the GeForce cards, so I just plugged and played... and things kept going wrong. Once I finally did the uninstall/reinstall waltz, everything worked perfectly and I was safe.

At least, on the graphics front, I was safe.

Sometime in the midst of the video card shuffle, the internet connection went south on me. I would be surfing, or playing Guild Wars, and it would just die off with no warning. I tried everything to get it back to normal (which, for a non-networking person, isn't much), but it's still somewhat unstable. If I actually manage to hold it long enough to post this blog, it'll be a miracle.

When I got it steady enough to check mail and minor surfing, the family took over. Days without access to the computer add up: I couldn't get anywhere near the PC or my laptop. When I did, it would be for about a half-hour or so, and the connection would cut out. There's no way to respond to 100+ people in 30 minutes, and no way at all to give them justice. Later this week, when I get an hour or so, I'll sit down w/ a piece of paper and a pencil, and hit the broader points.

One serious upside: games that didn't work well with the old card now run smoothly at medium-to-high settings. I went back to Prey, Doom 3, and the Half-Life 2 episodes to really push the card as hard as I could and see where the limits are (which are pretty far, really). I even picked up F.E.A.R. (which I played the demo of a while back) and plyed a bit of that (so far... not too impressed; when I finish it, I'll review it, and possibly write a blog comparing it to Doom 3).

And now... I'll click the "Submit" button, and see if I lost connection yet again. Enjoy your week, amigos.

Try this: type in "violence in video games" in Google (or any other search engine) and check the results. If you get the same ones as I did, you'll see over 2 miilion hits that, when paged through, reference studies into their effects (many of them conflicting), defenses of the games, legislation targeting violent video games ("to protect the children"), counter-suits attempting to strike down said legislation... you get the point.

Violence has become a favored target of anti-game activists, who claim it desensitizes children to real violence, corrupts young minds, leads to heinous crimes, teaches kids to kill...the list goes on.

Nowhere in that list (and trust me: I looked for a long time for a hit... then again, this position piece may sway that result ) does anyone ask a simple, but vital, question:

Why do games have violent content at all?

It would childishly easy to end the controversy, and remove a big target from game developers', publishers', and retailers' backs if violent content were eliminated henceforth from all future projects, making them 100% family friendly. No blood, no foul. Right?

Or... we could look at what violence is used for in the games we have today, and understand why many games (almost 8000 according to the ESRB) contain violence. It makes for a more difficult path... but a much more rewarding one, considering the alternatives.

So why do many games contain viloence?

Violence sells. It's the least defensible reason, but no less valid. The biggest selling games of the year thus far (Grand Theft Auto IV, for example) contain violence. If more copies of family-themed games sold, more of those games would be made.

It's a great motivator. Shooting at enemies is easy. Shooting at enemies that shoot back takes skill. Rather than taking bullets over and over again with no visible result, the conflict will force you to develop skills to counteract the adversaries in a game.

It gives a game a sense of realism. One of the most important objectives of any story-teller is to give the reader, the viewer, the participant in a fictional media is"suspension of disbelief." If the audience stops questioning how realistic the story/movie/game/etc. is, then the teller has done his job.

In this sense,violence is tool to achieve this objective, in much the same way voice acting, sound effects, or real-time physics are tools. If I fire a gun at an enemy in Half-Life 2, I expect him to bleed; in fact, I expect to have that gun to fire at it in the first place.

It gives a player a "lesser" alternative to peaceful resolution of a problem. Remember "Deus Ex?" It's a first-person shooter (which usually rings the "violent content" bells in player's heads), but it can actually be beaten without killing a single person. It takes a lot of patience, concentration, dedication, and time to achieve. If you don't have a lot of any of these things, there's a much less satisfying (and somewhat less rewarding) alternative, which involves a lot of violence.

Another example: in Knights of the Old Republic, there's a puzzle that involves answering questions from a Sith-programmed computer. Answer like a Jedi, and you are ambushed by killer robots. Answer like a Sith, and you unlock the puzzle... but take a few Dark Side points. Since part of being a Jedi is knowing when not to fight, it makes sense (to me, at least) to "lie" a little bit now, and work those points off later... avoiding the "lesser" choice of provoking a fight... and getting innocent people hurt (a definite Jedi no-no).

Violence can be used to deliver a message. Several months back, I wrote a blog about the pro-peace messages that can be found in games about war. Without depicting the consequences of warfare (such as bloodshed and death), the impact of the message is dulled, and can be easily lost.

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Naturally, I expect that many will disagree with the necessity of violence in any game. I'll try to address some of the ones I can anticipate:

Not all games need to be violent to sell. This is true. However, games like Halo 3 or GTA IV do sell better, and they do have violent content.

Violent games are bad for kids. As a parent, I feel this point is moot. I have plenty of tools at my disposal (ESRB ratings, for example) and my own playing experience to guide me in helping my kids play games I feel comfortable with them playing. Since the same tools are available for every parent, there's no reason short of lazy parenting or willful ignorance that a game meant for adults should fall into a child's hands.

There's too much violence in today's games. This is too subjective to address. What might be "too intense" for one person may be too tame for another... or just right for a third player. If you feel it's too violent, just stop playing; don't preach about it.

Finally, not every game needs violence to be good. This is also true... and also subjective. While some players may enjoy a Mario game (picture Mario running around hacking up Koopas and Goombas with an axe or chainsaw... and when you stop laughing at the absurdity, read on), others may enjoy something grittier or more mature. Neither is "right" or "wrong" in their choice of pastimes.

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Now it's your turn to sound off. Do you agree? Disagree? Regardless of which, give me your reasons why you agree, or disagree. Your opinions are important, and discussion could shed light on areas of this debate that have yet to be explored.

Finally: don't confine your discussions to just GameSpot. Spread the word; spread the knowledge. Ignorance drives the anti-gaming debate: the less of it there is, the better.