Play by Play
Sometimes winter sucks. It’s a good thing video games generally don’t. Find out what’s new and exciting in their world…
Child’s Play Good for the Mood
It’s not much fun being sick and stuck in a hospital, so Child’s Play is trying to make hospital stays a little more bearable.
The Seattle-based registered charity (www.childsplaycharity.org) collects and distributes books, toys, DVDs, and mostly, video games to children’s hospitals across North America, Australia, Egypt and Great Britain. They ended 2006 just slightly shy of an ambitious $1 million goal, nearly half of which came in December alone, and with glowing praise from The New York Times.
It’s a far cry from the negative attention the mainstream media usually showers on gamers. But although positive public relations does help the industry, Child’s Play founders Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins (better known as Gabe and Tycho of the popular gaming comics website Penny-Arcade.com) told the Times, "Frankly, it’s not something we think about anymore. We’re fathers now, and that is our motivation."
Casting Halo on Soliders
It may seem odd to blow off war zone steam by picking up a pixilated pistol, but who better to test the highly anticipated first-person shooter Halo 3 than US soldiers stationed in Iraq.
Over several days during the Christmas break, Halo developers Bungie set up a 24-7 army base computer room filled with unfinished copies of the upcoming next-gen conclusion to one of gaming’s most popular trilogies.
A more public test of the multiplayer demo will happen later this spring. Last month, over 140,000 eager gamers signed up for a lottery slot and for specially marked copies of the PC game Crackdown, due out in February.
Though no release date has been announced, expect the game to emerge before next Christmas as it tries to reclaim its crown from 2006’s big hit Gears of War.
Forbidden Farming
The buying and selling of virtual goods from massively multiplayer online role-playing games has grown into a surprisingly huge billion-dollar industry. Much of this economic activity is based out of South Korea, where some gamers work in virtual sweatshops as "gold farmers". These "farmers" collect as much faux-currency as possible to then sell to players with more real-world money than online time.
But the Korean government hasn’t been getting its cut of what is believed to be to be a $600,000 a year market, so they’ve proposed a bill banning the sale and exchange of virtual currency — though you can still trade that level 28 Elvish sword for some cool mithril armor or whatever.
But this crackdown doesn’t extend to game censorship, where the government recently lifted a ban on games like Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell Chaos Theory and Mercenaries that depict military action against North Korea.
