Latest column: “Grand Theft Childhood”

My latest weekly column is up, and I finally managed to run my piece on Grand Theft Childhood. I actually interviewed the authors about a month ago but a combination of a busy news cycle and writer’s block stymied my efforts to get this piece out earlier.

Some people get writer’s block when they don’t have anything to say. I get it when I have too much to say. This book is so interesting and well-written that it’s almost impossible to sum up in a 600-word article. Almost every page has something interesting. On top of that, I spoke to the authors for more than an hour, giving me even more material to work with.

So I’m a bit frustrated with the piece I produced, mainly because it had to leave so much out. There is also so much rich social and political context to this debate that I was only able to touch on briefly. I do urge anyone curious about video games and kids to pick up a copy. It’s a fascinating, informed and thoughtful look at the issue.

Read on, or hit the link:

By Scott Hillis

SAN FRANCISCO, May 8 (Reuters Life!) – Playing video games does not turn children into deranged, blood-thirsty super-killers, according to a new book by a pair of Harvard researchers.

Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl Olson, a husband-and-wife team at Harvard Medical School, detail their views in “Grand Theft Childhood: The Surprising Truth About Violent Video Games and What Parents Can Do”, which came out last month and promises to reshape the debate on the effects of video games on kids.

“What I hope people realize is that there is no data to support the simple-minded concerns that video games cause violence,” Kutner told Reuters.

The week in review

Wow. What a busy week. I’m going to just do sort of a link dump here, with additional comment exclusive to you Command-K subscribers. Premium stuff, and worth every penny you pay for it. This should also mark the resumption of regular blogging, now that I have a couple days to breathe and collect my thoughts.

There is this little companythat makes these cute little digital music players. And computers. And something called the iPhone. Everyone was wondering how they had held up amid the worsening economy. Pretty well, as it turns out.

Oh, and in the meantime, they boughta microchip design firm. That sort of threw everyone for a loop. The initial reaction was along the lines of “WTF does Apple want with a semi design shop?” Some of the speculation was that P.A. Semi’s low-power microprocessors could be modified for the iPhone or iPod. As it happens, I was briefed by these guys more than two years ago in my former life as semiconductor beat reporter. Ironically, their chips are based on IBM’s Power architecture, which Apple dumped from the Macs a while back in favor of Intel’s x86 chips. P.A. Semi’s products are aimed at hi-po computing: servers and supercomputers and the like. Not too likely that those will end up in an iPhone any time soon. But apparently, Apple does employ a number of chip designers who work with partners to tweak features to meet certain capabilities Apple’s product engineers have in mind. Still, it’s a curious play since if they wanted a bunch of chip designers, why not just hire them from the job market. Why pay a couple million per headcount to buy a whole company?

As if Apple wasn’t enough to handle, there’s a little game coming out next week that might just be, oh, only the biggest single entertainment property of the year. The Halo 3 launch last year opened the eyes of many reporters and editors to how big A-list video-game properties can be. Not only is Grand Theft Auto IV big business, it’s a game that has as much cultural relevance as The Matrix or Harry Potter.

My main preview story of the game is posted below, but before I get to that, I want to highlight two other pieces.

First is my Gameworld column on Sony’s Gran Turismo 5 Prologue. It’s a gorgeously realistic driving title, but only a fraction of what is promised when the full game comes out next year. Racing fans will love it, but I’m sure many consumers will see the $40 price tag as too high. 

What really interested me about my interview with Taku Imasaki, the U.S. producer on the game, was the vision that the title would become a platform for all things automotive: a driving game at the core, but augmented with videos of races and information about cars. 

Sony plans to add more features and pipe a steady stream of video content into “Prologue” in hopes that gamers’ interest will be redlining by the time the full game is released.

“Our goal is to become another medium for car companies, like magazines and TVs. We’re the perfect game for that and ideally we could become the MySpace or Facebook for auto enthusiasts,” Imasaki said.

Along with Rock Band and possibly Guitar Hero, it’s an example of how these connected consoles with gobs of processing power and storage are enabling games to become destinations/portals/aggregators for certain topics. Rock Band and GH do it for music, GT5 is doing it for cars. I’m sure there are other areas where it makes sense. Sports comes to mind. Take Madden football as an example. They already have a scrolling sports news ticker in Madden, why not buff that up to include highlights of the week’s games, interviews with athletes, and tutorials that show you how to use the video game to enhance your appreciation of the actual sport (I would love, for example, some breakdown of defensive schemes, which I only dimly understand).

The second piece I’ll highlight is an analysis of GTA4. Everybody knows this game is going to sell a buttload. The only question is it going to be serious buttload or just a regular buttload? Estimates from several Wall Street analysts range from 9 million to 12.5 million units by the end of this year, with most looking at about 10 million units. At that scale, analyzing the game’s sales is a little like speculating on how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Let’s just call it “a lot” and leave it at that.

What I found more interesting was the question of what effect the game will have on console sales, and which console stands to benefit more, the Xbox 360 or the PlayStation 3? My expectation was that most people would say the Xbox 360. After all, Microsoft having locked in the exclusive downloadable content for later this year, combined with the superior implementation of online capabilities in Xbox Live, makes a pretty compelling argument for the machine.

It turns out that most people, from Wall Street analysts to industry observers who know far more about this stuff than me, figure the PS3 will get the biggest hardware sales boost. It basically boils down to two reasons: the hardcore gamers who dig GTA4probably already have an Xbox; those who aren’t hardcore gamers but love the GTA series probably got into it on the PlayStation 2, and are likely to stay loyal to Sony.

If you’ve made it this far, bless you. Hopefully it’s been worth it. I’ll leave you with my preview of Grand Theft Auto IV. Hit the link or go below the fold for the whole thing. It was a fun story to research and write.

By Scott Hillis

SAN FRANCISCO, April 25 (Reuters) – Beatings, carjackings, drive-by shootings, drunk driving and hookers. For video game fans, it can only mean one thing: “Grand Theft Auto 4″ is here, arrving with all the subtlety of a shotgun blast.

The latest chapter in the wildly popular and controversial criminal action franchise from Take-Two Interactive Software Inc is poised to be the biggest entertainment product of the year, with expected first-week sales of up to $400 million — dwarfing Hollywood’s biggest box-office openings.

The handiwork of Take-Two’s Rockstar game studio headed by British brothers Sam and Dan Houser, “Grand Theft Auto 4,” which will be launched next Tuesday, promises to crank up the thuggish drama that made previous installments the equivalent of “The Godfather” for Generation PlayStation.

“We also felt over the last few years there hadn’t been a great standout gangster movie. Maybe we could do something ourselves that would live alongside that stuff,” Rockstar’s Dan Houser told Variety magazine in a recent interview.

Latest column: Ben Heck

Here’s my Gameworld column that ran today. It’s about one Mr. Benjamin Heckendorn, known to many gamers simply as Ben Heck. He takes gaming consoles — old or new — and does things to them that are downright, well, unnatural. Unnatural, and very, very cool.

He’s been on my radar for a few years now. Every few months, one of the gaming or tech blogs would link to his latest project. Finally I said wait a minute, I don’t think any mainstream media outlet has written about this guy yet, who is essentially a one-man Pimp My Ride for game consoles. For the record, he was an incredibly nice dude, totally keen to talk, quick with a witty remark, and full of interesting ideas.

For a while this morning the story was the most-recommended article on Yahoo News (it’s currently No. 6) and even got a little love from BoingBoing.

Read on or hit the link to learn more about this remarkable modder:

By Scott Hillis

SAN FRANCISCO, March 27 (Reuters) – If you ever thought it would be cool to have an Xbox laptop, or wished those old Atari games in your attic could be reborn on a retro handheld device, you might want to talk to Benjamin Heckendorn.

Better known as Ben Heck, the 32-year-old Wisconsin native has attained legendary status among “modders”, hobbyists who tinker with video-game hardware to make it do things the original designers never intended.

Technology Web sites enthusiastically track Heckendorn’s latest projects, which are marked by workmanship that makes the finished products look they rolled off a factory line instead of a basement workbench.

“That’s the American way, right? Start in your basement, garage, or whatever. You’re supposed to get out of it someday, but I still have to listen to my clothes drier sometimes,” Heckendorn said in an interview.

Latest column: “Frontlines: Fuel of War”

Here is my latest Gameworld column. This one feels a bit different because it’s about a game that is expected to do only moderately well. But it’s one of those titles that becomes more interesting the more you learn about it, or the more you play it.

First, the cool backstory. In 2002, Electronic Arts released Battlefield 1942, a World War II-era multiplayer shooter for the PC. It was wildly successful because it allowed for huge battles involving up to 64 players fighting at a time. Not only that, but it gave players the option of picking a “class” such as medic, engineer, etc. Each class had special abilities that were needed for a team to be successful. Moreover, BF1942let players drive tanks and fly airplanes. It was a radical shift away from the run-and-gun deathmatch, every-man-for-himself style that had been standard fare for multiplayer shooters. Instead, the game encouraged teams to work together and utilize a range of skills in order to win.

One other thing the game allowed was for people to create modified versions, or “mods”. One group of guys spent weekends and evenings fooling around and retooling BF1942 with modern weapons and set in the Middle East. The game basically still played the same but instead of Browning machine guns and B-17 bombers, players were handling M-16s and AC-130 gunships.

This “Desert Combat” mod proved wildly popular, a fact not lost on Digital Illusions CE, the studio behind the original game. They worked with the Desert Combat guys, by then organized as Trauma Studios, on the next Battlefield game, Battlefield 2, which not surprisingly was set in the modern era in fictional Middle East locales. Soon, DICE, which was partly owned by EA, bought Trauma. But the match was short-lived and DICE ended up shutting down Trauma in 2005. The fellow I interviewed for my piece said the issue was that they wanted the Trauma team to move to Sweden, where DICE was located.

Whatever the reason, the former Trauma guys didn’t have to wait long for their next gig. Within months, they were hired by THQ and renamed themselves Kaos Studios. THQ was and is a company known mainly for its licensed games based on properties like WWE, Nickelodeon shows, and Pixar movies. It has been trying, with mixed success, to come up with more original games and the evergreen popularity of shooters probably seemed like a safe bet.

Two years later, Frontlines: Fuel of War is out. My impression, having played the multiplayer for a few hours this week, is that it’s the closest thing yet to Battlefield 2 on a console. The weapons variety is good and the soldier classes are varied enough that it’s a different experience playing with each one. My favorite trick is play as the drone expert and fly remote controlled drones to take out unsuspecting enemies. I was surprised, however, at how quickly the opposing team could spot my drone and take it down.

Read on or click through to Reuters to get the details:

Frontlines aims to break out of shooter pack

By Scott Hillis

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – At first blush, THQ’s Frontlines: Fuel of Warseems like just another entrant in a recent string of military-themed shooter video games. But a few tricks could set it apart enough to turn it into a sorely needed success for THQ, which struggled last year with lackluster reviews and poor sales.

The game is set in 2024, and a “peak oil” energy crisis has sparked a global war over resources with Russia and China in one corner and the United States and Europe in the other.

“We started researching it and we were blown away by how real these theories could be and how dependent our modern society is on that affordable, cheap oil,” David Votypka, the game’s design director, said in an interview.

The single-player portion of the game drops the player in a combat zone with a constantly updated list of missions. Where many games, like last year’s hit Call of Duty 4, have players follow a set path, Frontlines chose an “open-world” model.