Unmarried College Students May Have Poor Relationships

Seriously, I don’t know what else to say about this study.  GamePolitics has a sharp post up about the research, published by BYU professors who themselves admit that the results aren’t particularly conclusive of any course of action.  The authors indicate (the study itself is paywalled) the following:

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The President should play videogames

Kotaku links to a Leno sketch which reveals a supposed portrait of George W Bush holding an XBox 360 controller (which is obviously fake).  While it’s sort of funny to think that perhaps all of our country’s problems are due to a President who just played videogames all the time, I wouldn’t mind if our President, and for that matter, any of our political leaders, actually played SOME video games.  There are a few reasons for this:

1. Videogames are becoming an increasingly bigger industry, estimated to exceed $57 Billion in revenue worldwide this year, a 35% increase from 2007 despite the worst financial crisis since the great depression hitting.  It seems like our political leaders should have some understanding of this increasingly important industry.
2. Relating to this, playing videogames is a relatively cheap form of entertainment which is easily done at home, something extremely relevant as people stay in their homes more often during the financial crisis.
3. The more our leaders understand video games, the less they’ll demonize them, and the less they’ll be used as a scapegoat rather than focusing on our real problems.

Barack Obama has mentioned before that his daughters have a Wii.  I realize that he is going to be the leader of the free world in a little under a month with far more important things to think about and work on, but I hope even then he has a little bit of time to play it with them sometimes.  Even Presidents need a break once in awhile and if he is able to use even just a tiny fraction of his extremely minimal free time to do something millions of people worldwide also do with their own free time every day, I’ll take it.

All your base are belong to Obama *Update*

He has his own TV channel.  He’s bought 30 minutes of primetime on at least two major networks.  And now, he’s invaded… our games?  This is very likely a photoshop, but I’ll load up Burnout tomorrow to see if I find anything like this.  Still, whatever your political preference, I thought this was funny.  If this is real, I suppose this does target a demographic that’s historically been an Obama strength, and I guess he really is leaving no stone unturned.

*UPDATE* - It turns out that this is NOT a photoshop.  Very interesting.

And Now For Something Completely Different

Today’s list of frontpage GamePolitics stories not actually about politics (8:46pm CST):

• New Site Chronicles Struggle with MMO Addiction
• Bethesda: No Nasty DRM for Fallout 3
• Be Old, Play Games, Get Cheaper Car Insurance
• Destructoid Editor Singing Like a Bird… For 24 Hours
• Warhammer Online’s Gold-Seller Hate Makes No Sense, Writer Argues
• Star Wars Galaxies Developer Commits Suicide

(A little over 33%.)  I don’t begrudge them the right to write about whatever they want, but let’s not mock the theme, people.

A Kinder, Saner Jack Thompson?

Jack Thompson isn’t exactly popular in the gaming community.  With his crazy, ridiculous rants about Bully’s non-existent “gay sex”, uninformed and callous blathering on how videogames caused the Virginia Tech shooting, and his baseless, frivolous lawsuits against anyone that may have criticized him, it’s really no mystery as to why he’s so reviled (and there’s really so much more than this too).  So it was a bit surprising to see that, rather than simply riding the idiotic and completely unresearched Mass Effect “sexbox” craze of the last few weeks, he actually defended the game, calling the controversy “contrived” (and we needn’t dwell on the irony here).

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Political WoW

I’m not sure if it’s necessarily a good thing that a senator has enough time to have a level 70 WoW Character, but maybe if more of our own senators actually played some of these games they wouldn’t be so quick to demonize them.