One of the things I like about Google News is that I can register topics which I’m interested in and get personalized news related to these topics delivered to my inbox each day. I enjoy watching the trends in reporting and comparing perceived importance of “threats” as reported in the news. For instance, it’s always interesting (in a depressing sort of way) to see how news related to celebrities always gets more coverage than humanitarian disasters. Brad & Angelina’s child birthing process is apparently more important than say, massacres of civilians in Iraq.

A topic I obviously enjoy is the current demonization of video games by certain political and public figures in the US. For instance:

900 articles related to “video game violence”
100 of those contain “thompson”
100 of them contain “clinton”

That means that 1 in 9 of the articles related to game violence owes part of their existence to anti-game campaigns being run Jack Thompson and Hillary Clinton. And NONE of these articles talk about any link to real world violence being committed as a result of video games. They talk about video games being a source of evil and how video games corrupt the youth. But nowhere do I read about these supposedly corrupt youth actually causing any violence.

I already know that video game violence is an invented issue which is being used by people like Clinton and Thompson to generate awareness for their names, which ultimately translates into power (financial and political). What boggles my mind is that the press continues to report on this non-topic.

Let’s compare a fake issue to a real issue:
2,300 articles related to “football violence”

Domestic Abuse Linked to World Cup

Incidents of women being beaten by their partners in Northern Ireland will rise during the World Cup, a senior officer has warned.

Assistant Chief Constable Duncan McCausland said police had analysed previous international football tournaments and discovered a disturbing trend where the number of reports of domestic violence rises sharply.

Violent World Cup Fans Arrested

More than 300 people have been arrested following the worst violence of the 2006 World Cup so far, when drunken German and Polish fans clashed in the centre of Dortmund.

Here are two articles that make clear a link between World Cup Soccer and real world violence. People are beating their wives and smashing skulls. This stuff is graphic, real-world violence. People are injured, sometimes even killed as a result of this global sporting phenomenon.

How about this one:

American Idol Debate Turns Violent

Cory K. Favreau, 24, of 200A Margaret St. was discussing the television show “American Idol” with his mother, Jan M. Chagnon, on May 24 at about 10:15 p.m., according to Plattsburgh City court record.

At that time, Chagnon told Favreau that a particular contestant, Katharine McPhee, was going to have a successful career despite losing to another contestant, Taylor Hicks.

Favreau allegedly stood up, made a malicious comment to his mother and struck her in the head with a sharpened, cross-shaped object attached to a bicycle chain.

Guy strikes his mother with a bicycle chain? WTF.

Bottom line: people commit violence against one another for any reason, or sometimes for no reason at all. Regulation of media is never going to solve this issue. Not even a Clinton run police state of absolute social control can make violence go away. Competitiveness is often closely associated with violence. From an early age it is taught to us by parents and teachers using tests, sports, and social situations. Rivalry and fear are bred into us. Modern society is the result. Madness and violence are the side effects.
People like Clinton and Thompson, if they were truly interested in making a difference with regards to violence, would set aside their politically motivated attacks on media and focus instead on society’s basic ills.

But then, they too are stuck in the cycle of competition, playing the big game, and trying to win.

I’ve asked this question before, I’ll ask it again: does anyone have proof of an instance where a video game was actually linked to a murder? For that matter, has a court of law ever found any form of entertainment responsible for a violent crime? If you’ve got proof, please send it. Meanwhile, in the real world, people continue to die by unusual means *not* related to video games:

The wurst way to go? – Yahoo! News
FRANKFURT (Reuters) – German police have arrested a man on suspicion of murdering a woman with a sausage.

Ban: German Sausage

It used to be that a blockbuster game could be made by 9 guys working 12+ hours per day for a year. The early DOOM and Quake games were built this way. The budget for these games was in the low millions. Even a few years ago developers could build and market a title for less than US$5mil and compete effectively with other games in the market.

Seems those days are quickly passing. Development costs for Next-Gen HD console and online games have skyrocketed. We are seeing fewer games at increased size (budgets), more ship dates, and decreased time to market. Typical development budgets are now averaging US$20mil with marketing budgets to match, bringing the total cost to retail for many new games to something around US$40mil!

In the midst of all this massive growth publishers are having a hard time hiring and retaining the armies of people required to build these products. Big games require big development teams. And teams, like armies are a burden when there is no war to fight or product to build. Companies like EA have learned the hard way that they can’t hire someone for a 40 hour week and expect to work them for 90 hours a week. Something’s got to give.

More and more publishers are looking to outside production houses to solve their labor shortage issues. Art outsourcing revenue is set to reach $1.1 billion by the end of 2006 and will grow to $2.5 billion by 2010. These staggering numbers represent close to 40 percent of the total game development spend. And the majority of this work is heading to China and India.

People often ask me why I’m in China. The simplest answer is that this is the best place to build armies. In a country of more than 1.3 billion people (nearly 20% of the world’s population) it isn’t difficult to build factories on scales of tens of thousands of workers. The factory that created the Alice toys, for instance, employed something like five thousand people to assemble, paint, and package each individual toy*. The human assembly line is still more cost effective than automation, at least in places like China.

When looking at where game and film production are going in the US and around the world it is clear that only a factory approach to art asset production will satisfy exponentially increasing demand from the market.** To that end I’ve been working with a collection of industry leaders in China to build the world’s biggest and best art outsourcing factory.

We’re in the early stages now, recruiting our generals and captains. Right now we’re particularly interested in senior game modelers and texture artists willing to live and work in Shanghai. If you’re interesting helping us to build something truly great, then please drop a line:

HR (at) VYKARIAN (dot) COM

After posting, Ken Wong commented on the following:
*The way this is written it implies each toy had 5000 people working on it. Actually, yes. And after each toy was made, those 5000 people were shot and put in the dirt. That’s China for you.

**Factory does not and should not imply low quality or slave labor. Our first and foremost goal is to create HIGH QUALITY. The issue here isn’t cost, it’s scale.

While politicians like Sen. Clinton attack entertainment, mostly video games, for causing all of society’s ills it seems we’re allowing other, more insidious evils to run rampant throughout the world. It is my belief that these things are destroying the moral fabric of our world and must be banned from existence if we expect to live long enough to eventually die of natural causes.

Case in point: Woman Attacks Dog Breeder With Chihuahua

A woman angry that her new puppy had died pushed her way into a dog breeder’s home and repeatedly hit her on the head with the dead Chihuahua, authorities said.

Here’s a clear case of a dead chihuahua causing crime and violence. Not even in GTA3 do developers stoop so low as to allow the player to beat other characters with a dead dog.

Ban: Dead Chihuahuas.

In celebration of 6-6-6 day I thought I’d make mention of several new apocolyptic Bad Day LA videos which can be downloaded here.

The one titled “Traffic” shows the cataclysmic opening scene from the game. “Subway” and “Hospital” are also pre-rendered cinematics from later in the game. These videos serve to tie together the action between the levels and generally set up the next disaster the player will encounter.

I don’t know who named these files. I would have named them “terrorist attack”, “train wreck”, and “meteor storm”. Not sure how compelled people will be to watch something called “hospital”. Snore. Anyway, boring names aside, the videos are fun to watch.

PS, here in Hong Kong we already lived through 6-6-6 day. It was pretty uneventful, although there were scattered reports of Apocolypse Ponies eating Chinese villagers.