Let’s Take a Trip Down Memory Lane With Violent Video Games

Posted by | June 29, 2011

The recent Supreme Court ruling that video games actually do enjoy free speech protections like every other form of expression (except that one, for some reason) has led to rather a bit of wailing and gnashing of teeth from the Think Of The Children crowd. This is good, because if those people are rending their garments, it means we’re advancing as a culture.

In any case, CNN decided to go whoring for gamer traffic with a top ten list of violent video games that set off the kind of moral panics that led to the Supremes dropping the hammer. Gavel, whatever.

CNN has the story.

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A book you should read: Masters of Doom by David Kushner

Posted by | September 27, 2010

Masters_of_doom-Book_cover John D. Carmack and John Romero—the two Johns who changed the landscape of videogames forever. Between id Software and Ion Storm we’ve seen much of the best early innovation of the FPS genre from the minds of great workers. And here’s the book to read about the evolution of our beloved gameplay.

We haven’t had much time to digest the pages, so we’ll defer to the Wikipedia entry to entertain and delight,

Much of the book concentrates on this dynamic. While the two men initially very much complement each other, eventually they come into conflict, leading Romero to be fired from the company. Carmack, the skilled creator of the complicated and fast game engines the company’s

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Video Gamers Get Better – In Their Dreams

Posted by | October 31, 2009

Dreaming and learning may be part of the same process, a new study from the Harvard Medical School suggests. In the study, volunteers played the rightly hallowed FPS, DOOM, and then answered questions about their dreams. Often, elements from DOOM would turn up in their dreams, like shotguns, blood, and demons.

“It really looks like if you’re not dreaming about it, you’re not getting better,” says Robert Stickgold, one of the researchers in the study.

Read more at ABC News.

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