Link Banana

A very interesting daily chart from The Economist. The basic analysis:

Those [children of international parents] craving an unhealthy diet should make for America, where more than half of the expat parents said that their children had eaten more junk food since relocating. Keen gamers should consider China and Canada, whereas telly addicts should nag their parents to move to the United Arab Emirates or India.

Luke O’Brien has an interesting piece about the philosophies advanced (or not) by the video games of Wil Wright. I admit I’d never much thought about it, but SimCity, The Sims, and Spore can all be read to have very serious real-world philosophical messages. Of The Sims, for example:

“The constraints of consumer capitalism are built into the game’s logic,” wrote Ann McGuire, an Australian academic, echoing earlier complaints about the hypercapitalist SimCity. “The Sims distils and intensifies, through its underlying code, key ideological aspects of late capitalism: self, other, and time are all quantified and commodified. What the player is doing is shopping effectively in order to manage a life in the world.”

Andy Baio points out that Garry Kasparov was recently “griefed,” while giving a speech, by a flying phallus. A similar event occured in the alternate reality of Second Life a few years ago.

Speaking of the difference between the real and fake: a fascinating Flickr gallery comparing GTA IV’s Liberty City against real New York City sights.

(via Fimoculous)

I feel it would be a mistake not to mention this snippet from Chris Baker’s excellent psuedo-review of GTA IV. I wonder if it will give any anti-video game crusaders pause. He seems to doubt it will.

The game’s improved characterizations give far greater weight to the act of killing. Grand Theft Auto was never the most violent game going. In the sci-fi shooter Gears of War, you can chain saw enemy aliens until fountains of blood seem to splatter onto the inside of your monitor. But since the game’s world is firmly entrenched in the clichés of 1980s blockbusters like Aliens, you feel some distance from it all. There’s no such distance in GTA IV, where the physics of death feel shockingly real—bodies can’t be blown apart or torn to pieces, but they react convincingly to explosions and severe impacts. Each death is a decision. At one pivotal moment, Bellic has to choose between killing two people—one a total jerk who could help advance his career, and one a good friend who can’t do much for him. There’s no right or wrong decision here—well, actually, there are two wrong decisions—and players will struggle to make the choice. No cheat code or online FAQ can help you here.

I feel like I’m becoming a purveyor of junk stastics… in any case, this made me laugh.

The results of the unscientific poll showed that respondents were almost equally disturbed by the idea of a “graphically severed human head” as they were by “two men kissing” in a video game. Respondents were actually far more offended by a man and a woman having sex, which received 37% of the vote, while dropping the F-bomb only received 10%.

This all seems rather sensible, if odd. Slashdot’s summary:

Namco Bandai is shuttering between 50 and 60 arcades in Japan and blaming the success of the Wii for the closures. “A lot of the types of games that people played at an arcade can now be done at home,” said company spokesman Yuji Machida. To be fair they also blame the high cost of gasoline as well.