In honor of Valentine's Day, this week's theme is Love. Much love for Gamespot, The Online Sun and Spong.com for news this week.
Love Doesn't Come Cheap
A recent release from the Entertainment Software Association quantifies America's love for games. Though politicians and media outlets focus on the popularity of violent video games, only five of the nearly 50 videogames selling more than 500,000 copies last year were rated Mature. In 2003, Teen-rated games claimed 30.5 percent of the total game market and Mature-rated games just 11.9 percent, down from 13.2 percent the year before. Console games sold for a combined $5.8 billion in the U.S. in 2003, up $300 million from 2002, but computer game sales dropped $200 million to $1.2 billion. On consoles, action games sold more than any other genre with 27.1 percent and strategy games were computer best-sellers, also with 27.1 percent.
Marvel Versus Madden?
Electronic Arts and Marvel Enterprises are feeling the corporate love. The EA development studio in British Columbia has already started work on an original series of fighting games pitting Marvel superheroes against all-new EA characters. Marvel has exclusive rights to market the EA characters worldwide in many media formats, including comic books. (Spong)
Not Mardi Gras, but Close Enough
Gamers still sore over the Tomb Raider Nude Code may delight in the first game from Top Heavy Studios, started by Jeff Spangenberg, founder of Metroid Prime developers Retro Studios. The Guy Game is a You Don't Know Jack-style trivia contest, but replete with live-action video of buxom babes baring their breasts. In addition to multiple-choice questions, the popular drinking game "A**hole" intersperses rounds of four-player action (pun intended). The developers are currently looking for a publisher and hope to release the game for PC and at least one console this Spring.
No word on a cameo by Samus Aran. (Gamespot)
Home Runs in a Cricket-playing Country
Calling all pornographic voyeurs and control freaks. Gamers seeking an X-rated Sims need look no further than Singles: Flirt Up Your Life. The Online Sun recently broke news of the game from German developers Rotobee and distributed in Britain by Koch Media. Gameplay revolves around the apartment life of two characters, male or female, hetero- or homosexual, as players perform daily chores like taking out the trash and keeping the living room clean. If the apartment is not maintained, the characters' love lives hit the rocks. The game hardly hesitates to display full frontal nudity, and the recorded soundtrack includes the "moans and groans" of intercourse.
Singles is looking at an almost guaranteed 18-rating from the British Board of Film Classification. The Board works closely with the European Leisure Software Publishers Association to limit sales of explicit material to minors.
For the Gamer Who Has Everything
Gamers tired of roses and candy will awaken deep, romantic passions when gifted Rules of Play: Fundamental Game Design, available now from MIT Press.
Granted, most gift-givers don't link textbooks and true love, but this gift would stir the amorous desires of even the least romantic gamer. From videogames to board games to social games (think Mafia), Rules of Play is jam-packed with social and academic analysis of games and game culture.
The book is divided into three sections, each a separate perspective for interpreting games. The Rules section covers games from an engineering perspective with articulate definitions of the mathematical and systemic properties of games. Play covers the psychological and narrative perspective by analyzing the pleasurable, meaningful and simulative aspects of gameplay. The sociological perspective is examined in Culture, the final unit of the book. Culture covers games and their impact as constructs both mirroring and dictating rhetoric, resistance and environment. Rules of Play taps into a bevy of benchmark games and entertaining design anecdotes for practical examples of good and bad game design, as well as a handful of original, commissioned games designed by contemporary industry leaders.
The authors, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, are game designers themselves and have taught at universities including MIT, NYU and the Rhode Island School of Design.
Rules of Play establishes a practical, well-justified and cogent vocabulary for the dynamic and productive dialogue of game design. A great gift for any time of year.
Four out of five stars.
Send the Gamer a valentine at Gamer@cavalierdaily.com
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