The zealots of the videogame cult are self-identifying. There is a priesthood of core members who call themselves just that. Through various machinations, but most commonly through sheer time, a zealot becomes one of these hardcore evangelists. They prove their credentials by claiming years of experience, or waving brand names and model numbers like holy symbols. The significance of these symbols, like all icons, is only truly meaningful to the converted. For those that stand outside, they represent little apart from expensive hunks of silicon or personal preferences manifested a long time ago. For the initiated, however, these symbols, these claims of belonging not only represent one's status in the club, but one's worth as a person. For the cult, these symbols are truth, external and ideal.

The tenants of the faith are demanding, dichotomic. One must truly be converted, consumed by the brotherhood, and abandon all other measures of value or meaning. One must truly believe that the hunk of plastic and silicon determines your own self-esteem. Your value system becomes the yardstick of trophies and achievements defined by the club. To question the relative importance of the dogma is to become less core, more like the heretics who dare to blaspheme against the holy ludic way.

The fraternity is a bastion, the walls of which must be defended from the constance threat of a heretical insurrection. There is nothing the pagans on the outside wish for more than the absolute destruction of everything held dear by the zealots, or so they believe. Towards anyone who would dare step into holy land, or speak of holy ludus without conversion, the zealot must feel only fear and loathing. The cultist defines his worth by the videogame benchmark, by the traditions passed down from the golden age without question. To allow a heretic to even speak is to doubt one's own worth. So the zealot must fight. To protect the code is to protect oneself.

The one hope of the cultist is a return to that golden age of grace from which videogames have fallen. Some members of the priesthood can, they say, remember the good times, before everything went wrong. Back then, so the stories go, everything was perfect and no one complained. All games were utopias and no one tried to change anything. Only now, since the purity of the videogame has been tainted by the greed of publishers (videogames were not a profit-motivated venture in the golden age) have heretics begun to tamper with the natural order. Only now, lead on by the scent of mainstream dollars, have things begun to change. The exquisite perfection of the natural, original videogame has been diluted--polluted--by heretical ideas.

The crusade is divisive. One is either a zealot or a heretic. The cult cannot tolerate shades or degrees of difference. The cult of the videogame is a sacred refuge, wherein the zealots know they are safe, they are right, absolutely. To allow any other but their own doctrine to exist negates the value of their beliefs. To entertain any other use of videogames but their own is to destroy the special protection they offer. To tolerate other views is to admit that the cult lacks something. For the fanatic, those are impossibilities, aberrations that must be annihilated to preserve the world order.

The order of the world is that videogames belong to the brotherhood, because this is how it has always been. They are the keepers of the sacred secrets. This way is the right way, because this is the way it was in the golden age. The way must not change, the cult cannot allow evolution, or else admit that the past was not ideally, objectively, perfect. To change is to cease to exist. So change must be fought in all things. Mostly from the heretical blasphemous outside, but occasionally from within as well. From time to time, a priest, a member of the inner sanctum will fall to the evils of unorthodoxy. For this, punisment is absolute. The brotherhood closes ranks and casts out this fallen one. Mocking him, they create a new history of his decline, discovering evidence of his wavering faith scattered throughout the past. Though heretics are vile, they are low, base, unable to comprehend the lofty ideals of the doctrine. The betrayers are doubly worse: not only do they chose to abandon the faith, to reject the truth, but they are on the inside, spreading their poison like a cancer.

So the videogame zealot lives a constant nightmare. Their very soul is bound up in their blind, unflinching faith in an unchanging deity. They are besieged on all sides, and constantly threatened with betrayal from within. How exhausting it must be! One cannot but wonder at the cost of this terrible struggle and ask: Why?

Sunday afternoons are for relaxing.

Recently I wrote a post where I defined ‘MMO Syndrome’ as a kind of threat to the pleasure of single-player games. The syndrome comes into effect when the reward schedule and grind start to creep into the gameplay experience at the expense of other kinds of fun. I felt like the way World of Warcraft was structured made it difficult sometimes to enjoy single-player games, like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim or Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. I have been thinking about the article I wrote, and reading the comments it generated, which have shown just how many views there are on the subject. I thought I’d share another one here.

Today is a lazy Sunday afternoon and I’m a little tired from yardwork, and I find that I just can’t be bothered to play any of the games I’ve got at my fingertips. This is the perfect time for an MMO.

I recently picked up a copy of Sins of a Solar Empire. By all accounts its exactly the kind of PC strategy game I really enjoy, so I am really looking forward to playing it. I don’t know how to play it, though. So sitting down this afternoon, I fired it up and went through the first tutorial and got about halfway through the second when I decided I just couldn’t bring myself to learn another game system. Looking at the other games on hand, I am in a little bit of a lull—between games you might say. I’ve finished the majority of Assassin’s Creed, and I’ve simply had my fill of Skyrim. I had the itch to play something, but just can’t find the right thing to scratch with.

Used to be, on a day like today, I’d jump on WoW—I might have already been playing to be honest. MMOs (or at least WoW, in my case) are a great way to while away some time. I remember days spent essentially just hanging out in the game, either working through a few daily quests or a handful of dungeon runs with some friends. Maybe I’d just jump on a lowbie and do some levelling. I’d be chatting as much as I was fighting, though, with the guild and other friends. I’d be enjoying the familiarity of WoW, with the novelty of fresh conversation, and maybe a new item or handful of badges.

World of Warcraft benefits greatly from a phenomenon of ‘same-but-different.’ No, I’m not making that up, check out Salen and Zimmerman Rules of Play. Essentially, the comfort of WoW’s familiar ruleset is coupled with the variety that it generates, even the minute level of difference, to keep my attention. There’s a pleasure to be found in the manipulation of a relatively complex system of rules with which the player is deeply familiar. There is a sense of mastery, and therefore comfort. I can’t exactly ignore the game, but I don’t need to concentrate nearly as hard as is required for learning a new set of game rules, like the focus Sins of a Solar Empire would require today.

I already know the patterns the game will throw at me, and I know all my character’s abilities like second nature. I just have to pay attention enough to decide where to go, then keep an eye out for familiar dangers. When I see one of the attacks I’m already expecting, I’m well-prepared to deal with the issue. It’s also fair to say that, for the most part, most end-game players will be over-powered enough for everything other than raiding that even if a mistake is made, it isn’t really that big a problem. I even used to watch TV while playing—can’t do that very well when learning a new game.

Despite the many reasons that playing WoW at the end-game stage (when not doing a high end raid) is fairly predictable, almost rote (but not quite) there is still a progressive element to it that makes it “worth your time.” So maybe I’m not acquiring that next piece of my tier set, but I’m grinding up some faction reputation to get a new mount. Or I’m acquiring badges (or Justice/Valor type points) that I can use to buy a piece for my other spec. WoW has an amazingly thorough capacity to translate gameplay time into some kind of palpable residue. Even the most abstract become numbers like experience points and faction reputation, and are all on your record. So, by the end of the play session, there is something you can point at and say “This is what I just did,” and feel some sense of accomplishment.

So that sense of virtually infinite progression coupled with the minute variety of a familiar rule set creates a very pleasurable experience indeed. I can have the best of both worlds. On the one hand, I can be playing a game I am so deeply familiar with that I don’t have to marshal all my learning faculties. Yet on the other, I can enjoy the feeling that I am making (new) progress which somehow validates the time spent in a way that replaying a different game would not. Even replaying the same dungeon in WoW is same-but-different because you’ll never know for sure exactly how the boss fights will go, or what will drop. The social angle is hard to quantify, but is just as important. Sometimes sitting around in Ironforge chit-chatting is enough for an hour or two. Other times, a party will smash through half a dozen heroics and feel a badass camaraderie that really can’t be compared to many other game experiences.

If one reads between the lines in the paragraph above, a fairly deep criticism of World of Warcraft can be found. The pleasure is rote, requiring fairly little cognitive focus. The progress is illusionary and arbitrary, constantly being generated by Blizzard for us to grind through. It’s a little like watching a sitcom on TV: there’s no real meat to it, no real reason for it. But that’s ok. It feels good on a lazy Sunday afternoon, when you’ve already done the yardwork.

P.S. This blog isn't dead, I've juts been having a run of good luck with freelancing gigs, so the writing energy that would go into posts here has been going to paid work instead. I'm sure you all understand!

With every day that ends...

The Australian videogame industry is suffering right now, in a bad way. Though the small, more agile teams and the two juggernauts of iOS games Halfbrick and Firemint are going gangbusters, the larger-scale, higher budget sector has been all but obliterated over the past four or five years. Following this, there is a perceived 'brain drain' (how often we hear that with regard to the Australian workforce...) or an 'exodus' of talent moving overseas, particularly to Canada. Why are the pastures so much greener in the snow-covered gardens of our northern Commonwealth brothers? What has happened to the local industry to cause such a drought? How can we pick up the pieces and carry on?

I've been talking to a lot of people about this, and I have some thoughts. 

Firstly, I think its important to recognise that we have the talent here in Australia. There are dozens of designers, programmers, artists etc who have worked in the A-grade industry environment for a number of years, and a whole lot of them are out of work. We have even more graduates of an increasing number of videogame related tertiary qualifications from both private and public universities or colleges. Local talent is not a problem. If (and when) we do lose some overseas, we are very well-placed to produce more.

Further, our talent is being nurtured by this new wave of videogame degrees. I am responsible for one of them! Increasingly, the academy is working on enhancing the education these graduates receive. Rather than simply a programming degree working in UDK one semester, we are incorporating the critical artistic skills that differentiate an Arts/Humanities graduate from a TAFE tradesman. Our talent will have more going for them than the ability to follow instructions and program what their creative leads tell them to. Our talent will be the creative leads. They won't just know how to create videogames, but why it's worth doing so.

The international developers know some of this. According to Anthony Redden, formerly of THQ Studio Australia, after the exposure the closure of his studio received in the media, international recruiters were contacting him with job opportunities. These overseas studios actually want the kind of talent we have here in Australia. Further, some of the talent is obviously willing to move, internationally, to wherever the work is. To me, that means there is an opportunity to import talent if we need to--Canada is doing it, why shouldn't Australia?

The question becomes how do we manage to keep the work here in Australia. To understand this problem it's worth taking a moment to note where the work came from in the first place, to know why it all dried up so suddenly. Several of studios that have closed recently: Blue Tongue and THQ Studio Australia, Pandemic and Visceral Games, Team Bondi, Krome and now KMM, relied significantly on foreign investment. Blue Tongue and THQ Australia were subsidiaries of THQ, Pandemic and Visceral Games both belonged to EA, and Team Bondi, well... they worked with Rockstar and fell apart for their own special reasons. The executives at Team Bondi were former Team Soho Studio employees, so foreign in a different way.

The relationship a lot of Australian game development work had to the publishers was essentially outsourcing. Many of the games developed by these studios, while big enough to often be casually classified as 'AAA' (whatever that means...) were not of the same ilk as the work being done by the other studios these same publishers own in other countries. The Ubisoft studios in Montreal, for example, or Rockstar North were not making licenced games such as Nicktoons: Attack of the Toybots (Blue Tongue), The Last Airbender (THQ Studio Australia). Nor are those other studios tasked with sequels like De Blob 2 (Blue Tongue) or Star Wars game after Star Wars game (Pandemic and Krome). So many Star Wars games...

This isn't to cast dispersion on the work that was done by those studios, but as a bit of a reality-check. These studios weren't valued for their original creations, they were used by the larger companies that owned them to produce the middle-range film tie-ins and other licenced material. We were a high-quality outsource location, not a producer of original, unique content. Consider Pandemic, who produced the Saboteur--an original IP and a game I really quite liked--who were promptly shut down after its release. My goals with the work I do at the university is to equip my graduates with skills that enable them to do much more than follow a brief handed down from the licence lawyers at International Publisher Headquarters via email. I want my students to be the creators of art, not the factory workers of the videogame industry. I really hope I'm not the only one in Australia who wants this.

The question is, if Australia is a world-class country full of the talent that international corporations are willing to invest in, willing to recruit into their closer-to-home studios, why are we acting like an outsource location? Why aren't we, as Australians, creating our own original content and keeping control over our IP and our industry? Why are practically all the major studios (including Firemint now) owned and operated by overseas publishers/developers?

Obviously the game development scene in Australia needs a bit of a boost if it is to continue. I am not a proponent of the "let's just all make iPhone games forever!" attitude. Those kinds of games already don't need the kind of help I'm talking about, and they do not have the kind of potential I will describe below. They lay a great foundation for where we need to go from here: the kind of game you pay $30-40AU for on Steam, right up to genuine AAA games. Personally, I like the big-budget, richly immersive games that take me to another place and time, cast me in an exotic role, and tell me a new story. I am really tired of tapping cartoons on my iPhone. I like the games that give me a little something to think about other than how to knock down the next pile of sticks and ice blocks. There is no reason these can't be made in Australia. Videogames are not a physical resource that has to be mined from the ground. They can come from anywhere.

These kinds of games require an investment framework that allows them to work for a number of months or years towards a large-scale, higher-risk release. Yes, there is risk. This is why the international investment has dried up: the cost of doing business in Australia no longer outweighs the risk associated with larger development projects--even projects assured of some degree of success because of their licences. As the global economy has struggled over the past few years, the Australian dollar has become increasingly valuable, so the cost to foreign companies rises. If the invesetor was Australian, however, they might not run for the hills the moment our currency reaches parity with the US dollar. Its a tragic situation when, as our economy actually shows some strength and resilience, this particular sector all but collapses because the whole paradigm relies on the weakness of the dollar through the late 90s.

So, yes, there is a lot of room for governmental incentives of the sort Canada offer to court the big players back to Australia. But there is even more room for better incentives to encourage Australian investors to set up an end-to-end development and distribution industry locally that does not rely on international investment. International sales? Absolutely, go for it. But we shouldn't be waiting around asking for permission from the big American publishers to make our own products. We shouldn't consider ourselves lucky for being able to work on something that Rockstar North or Ubisoft or THQ Montreal don't want to because they are too busy with Grand Theft Auto 5, FarCry 3 or Warhammer games.

That image at the top of this post is of a sunset, and is one of the saddest pictures I think I've ever seen. But, even if this is an end of an era, we have the opportunity to start a new one. Its a lot of hard work, believe me, I know. There weren't any game design or studies units at Macquarie University when I got here, there certainly weren't any degrees or majors in the area. There are now. This stuff can be done. It will be done, so long as we don't give up. We could flip that image of sunset around so the game development industry is looking into dawn instead.

As a sort of 'relaxing' side project, I've been re-learning Blender modelling. Its a nice break from the words, but still creative/productive. So I thought I'd share some of my other work here - its my website right?! Anyway I am by no means experienced with this software, and I'm even worse with Photoshop, so my textures are demonstrative at best. I will probably update this post with a couple more snapshots of my models, unless I come up with something I'm actually proud of.

Anyway if there are any other modellers or Photoshop artists who read this, I'd be happy to chat about this aspect of videogames as well. I intend to at least get the hang of a workflow between Blender and Unity3D. Whether or not I end up being very good at it is beside the point!

Metal Barrels with a bodgey texture.

Crafted a tire. Not sure where the bumps on the inside edge are from.

Also, FarCry 3!! Looking forward to that.

So I actually got two articles out of Age of Empires: Online. The second one is now available for your reading pleasure in issue #196 of PC PowerPlay. So that's also my first magazine publication, congrats to me! (Self-congratulation on one's own blog: 30 Narcissist achievement points!)

The article is one of the new 'Perspectives' column that PCPP are attaching to some of their reviews that David Wildgoose describes as 'criticism.' In this case, I'm examining the nature of AOEO's art style. Its an interesting issue given that the art style of computer games is so often relegated to 'graphics' and measured in objective terms like number of polygons and draw distance. Here's the first paragraph:

In art forms other than videogames, the pursuit of high visual fidelity or verisimilitude is but one style of art amongst myriad others. In videogames, this pursuit of a visual realism is the de facto standard, and anything deviating from that is ‘artsy’ and somehow on the fringe. Even this discussion, which highlights the artistic style of Age of Empires: Online as an interesting factor worth exploring in particular, can easily be seen as positioning the ‘normal’ way of making games look realistic at the centre.

Now go and buy a copy of the magazine so I can continue writing these things!

In case anyone has noticed the long gap between posts here, there are reasons, good ones I promise! I've been extra busy with my actual thesis and organising the GAME event at Macquarie, but I've also been writing some freelance work for other outlets. The first is now available at GameSpy!

Free-to-play, social, online -- these three terms have, for me, defined a slew of insipid, frustrating experiences that resemble reinstalling Windows or downloading a series of patches as much as anything I'd call a "game." The core mechanic is of setting a series of timers, then waiting. And waiting. The end result of waiting is the ability to set yet more timers. For me, not only were the wait times interminable, but the payoff never came. I began to wonder, though, about what the play experience would be like if I actually paid some money for these games. I realized that comparing the experience of a game I've paid for upfront to one I was playing for free was a terribly unfair contest.

Check out the full article here.

Siding with the perceived 'little guy' in this situation is all too easy, especially since I really like the content Extra Credits produce. Yet I feel for the Escapist in this situation too, as a representative of a huge slew of online publishers that I'm learning a bit more about lately. Paying creative producers like the EC team is an absolute necessity, I have no doubt about this. But where does that money come from? The standard set all those years ago is that content on the internet should be free, so the money doesn't come directly from the consumers, that's for sure. The alternative, up to now, has been to rely on advertising revenue. Is it working? Well I'm not privy to the accounts of enough websites to know for sure, but from what I do know, online games sites aren't all rolling in cash.

So I ask again, all the same questions that are in the article, one of the first I wrote for this blog. Where to now? 

Ads, AdBlocker, and Sustaining Content Providers

Recently Ars Technica presented 'their side' of the story regarding free websites and ads. Of course, we all know that creating and hosting a website costs money, and most of us know that money doesn't grow on trees. Advertising on the website can generate a significant amount of revenue for a high-traffic site like Ars, but when those ads are not viewed, they won't.

There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won't hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a per view basis.

I must admit, I was one of those people who thought something along those lines, if I really thought about it at all. The problem is almost as old as the internet itself: how do we get people to exchange money for content in an environment where end users have been trained to expect everything for free? Andrew Zolli over at Newsweek has some ideas on the matter and some speculation.

What I see is not so much a lack of willingness to pay for things, as Zolli points out. We--people like myself who are the second wave of the early adopters--are coming of age. We are online almost constantly. We may never have purchased a newspaper for ourselves (and if we have it was probably for a plane flight where we can't be online). But the important bit is that we're growing up and we actually are starting to have the money to buy things. Back when I first started surfing, I didn't, so I couldn't have paid for things I wanted, now I can.

What is holding us back, I think, from paying for online content is just how fiddly it would be. Imagine having to register your credit card with every news site or blog you visit. Firstly, many people wouldn't want to do that for safety's sake. But forget that for a moment, think instead of having to go through the form that would have to pop up between the link on your friend's Facebook page, and the content of the article you want to read. Wouldn't happen. But would you kick in $0.05 to read the article if it just ticked over in an account you maintained with your PayPal information? I think some people would.

If we can add a widget to Firefox that allows us to add links to Facebook, Digg or whatever else we use, surely there is a way to click one button to authorize a tiny exchange of cash directly to the publisher. The key is to create trusted links between the content provider and the plugin we use for our browser, which enables us to authorise the transaction without having to type long numbers, fill in forms, or really break the flow of link-to-story at all.

I name PayPal because its the one transaction system I know of that's large and trusted enough to support this kind of thing, but there could be others. The service should allocate a set amount of funds for this kind of thing, and warn you when you are approaching your 'cap' so you don't suddenly realise that you have spent $500 browsing through Gamasutra and didn't realise you were paying for every pageview. Alternative options would be a few dollars for unlimited access a month (pretty standard subscription). Pop $5 into your account, surf away at some reasonably small fee per story, and keep an eye on your balance in the plug-in's toolbar. Think of it like the E-tag systems modern toll roads use. Get a tag, drive through and it debits your account. Top up the account every so often, and off you go.

Overall, the system has to be EASY. iTunes and Steam prove that people are willing to pay (in significant numbers) for content that is available to be pirated illegally, why not for other kinds of content? The trick is, as especially iTunes demonstrates, make it easy.

Questions for further thought: How much would one user's read of the story be worth? How much are sites pulling in via the ads? Would the paid version eliminate the ads (keeping in mind there are ads on cable TV)? What about printing, or re-reading the same article?

In this staggaring tome, Breivik articulates an astonishingly meticulous historical account of the development of a 'cultural Marxism' whereby the natural order of white, male, Christian hegemony in Europe is undermined by multiculturalism and specifically collaboration with Islamic, Arabic states. The first 280 odd pages are the historical background in which Breivik describes the development of economic Marxism into a more insidious cultural Marxism that progresses through academia in the Frankfurt School, various forms of critical theory and sociology. Specifically, Breivik's concern is this new culture of egalitarian 'political correctness' is causing historical revision in order to allow Muslims to invade Europe. For this to occur, the unwitting population of Europe has been duped by various ideologies that allow for no disagreement, feminism, multiculturalism, religious tolerance etc. The second book, around 500 pages, extends this documentation into the modern era. He traces social and political transformations across the entire history of Islam, exploring the "Eurabia" doctrine, the formation of a Palestinian state, reasons that the Europeon Union and United Nations are actually detrimental to European countries, linking feminism to the perceived Islamic invasion, the dangers of global capitalism, the roots of "Muslim hatred" and the history of jihad, and various examples of European countries' preference of Islamic issues at the expense of "native" concerns. 

In the third book, Breivik's plan of action comes together as he reveals the significance of his manifesto's title. 2083, he claims, is the target year for the completion of his conservative revolution, led by self-appointed Justicar Knights such as himself. In this book he outlines in quasi-legal terminology the treason committed by cultural Marxists who have allowed European culture to be eroded by a tide of Muslim immigrants and Islamic sympathy. Thus, he justifies violent attacks against any and all targets deemed to be treacherous towards "old laws and traditions." The "feminsiation of political parties and individuals by indirect/direct coercion," as one of his headings reads, must be cut off at the source: human beings who should rather be killed than spoken to. He outlines a series of demands, and reprints a right-wing declaration of European independence. He demands that: all Muslims living in Europe must convert to Christianity, change their names, speak only a European language, all mosques and Arabic or Islamic art or architecture be destroyed, no (formerly) Muslim couples should be allowed to have more than 2 children, all communication to other Muslims be prohibited, and that travel to Islamic countries is prohibited. Failing this assimilation, all Muslims will be deported from European countries.

Following this, Breivik outlines specific guidelines for establishing a "cell" of Justicar Knights, or alternately methods for working alone, to plan for and carry out armed strikes. He explains that the use of terror in order to wake up the masses, people "who do not want (or think they do not want) our help." He says that, operating as a Justicar Knight, defender of Christendom, "you are jury, judge and executioner on behalf of all Europeans." He calculates the number of victims that would be appropriate: "we should under normal (optimal) circumstances not exceed approx. 45,000 dead and 1 million wounded in Western Europe." This number is justified by a comparison to the Christian, European deaths that these cultural Marxists "have on their conscience." According to Breivik:

[T]hese regimes we are fighting have and are still committing genocide against the indigenous peoples of Europe by exposing them to more than 25 million Muslims. They have indirectly killed more than 15 000 Europeans, raped more than 500 000 European women, robbed and terrorised more than 4,5 million Europeans, fired more than 37 000 cultural conservatives from their jobs and incarcerated more than 150 000 brothers and sisters for opposing their policies.

And:

Once you decide to strike, it is better to kill too many than not enough, or you risk reducing the desired ideological impact of the strike. Explain what you have done (in an announcement distributed prior to operation) and make certain that everyone understands that we, the free peoples of Europe, are going to strike again and again. Do not apologise, make excuses or express regret for you are acting in self-defence or in a preemptive manner. In many ways, morality has lost its meaning in our struggle. The question of good and evil is reduced to one simple choice. For every free patriotic European, only one choice remains: Survive or perish. Some innocent will die in our operations as they are simply at the wrong place at the wrong time. Get used the idea. The needs of the many will always surpass the needs of the few.

Now, I have debated whether or not I should air any of these views here on my own blog. I find repeating these words distasteful, nauseating even, and deeply disturbing. I find is implacable rationalisation deeply troubling, because his presentation of the history of multiculturalism is intriguing, and yet is used as a justification of the slaughter of up to 45,000 left-leaning people, and however many innocents get caught up in the struggle. His hypocrisy and blindness is staggering, especially in contrast to the meticulousness of his research.

Yet I feel that reproducing a summary of this manifesto is important to give some access to what Breivik is actually talking about to those who do not have the time or inclination to read through it even as briefly as I have. In the news media we are hearing far more about the use of videogames in relation to committing acts of terror than on the meticulous documentation of the history of critical theory and cultural studies in academia. Instead we hear ideologues like Jim Wallace of the Australian Christian Lobby actually saying that it is "these people" such as Seamus Byrne who are distracting the dialog from the real fact that Breivik was obviously led to this atrocity by videogames, rather than the overwhelming and obvious fact that videogames had absolutely nothing to do with his motivations whatsoever. The fury I feel at hearing the words of Wallace on Channel 7's Sunrise this morning, labeling Byrne's focus on the religious and political motivations as a 'cheap attempt to distract this from the real issue' almost cannot be put into words. The only cheapness is that anyone, anywhere, thought the talking point of this atrocity was the fact that Breivik mentions videogames as a convenient cover story to mask his actual planning and orchestration of his attacks.

The most obvious red herring is simply counting the dates out: Breivik claims to have been working on this manifesto (and one would surmise, his plans for the strike in Oslo) for 9 years. That is well before the release of any of the Call of Duty titles that Jim Wallace so loves to parade in front of incredulous Christian parents, particularly Modern Warfare 2. But that is a stupid point to quibble with. Breivik was probably playing games, like the rest of his generation, in 2001 as well. The more, far more, astonishingly more, obvious motivations for his actions come from political theory, ideology and religious fanaticism. Not from videogames. He used videogames as a tool for masking his operations, not as inspiration for his actions.

In fact, it is the Bible Breivik turns to to justify the violence of his plan.

If you are operating under a full surrender with God the Father, and walking in all of God's ways and staying out of any serious sins and transgressions against Him - then the next thing you will need to fully realise is that God will now anoint you with His power if you are forced to go into battle with your enemy.

The Bible tells us that we are now all good soldiers of Jesus Christ. Whether we want to face up to it or not, we are all living in a war zone as a result of the curse of Adam and Eve that is still in full operation on this earth. Anyone of us at anytime can come under human or demonic attack. The daily news will prove that to you without any shadow of a doubt.

Each Christian must now make their own personal decision on all of this. You can either choose to learn how to rise up in the power of your Lord and Saviour and learn how to become a true warrior in the Lord, or you can continue to keep your head in the sand and oppressor after oppressor keep beating you down. The choice is yours.

The following verses will show you that God can anoint you with His power to defeat any enemy that may come your way - but you first have to be willing to step into that anointing, and then be willing to take your enemy head on before God will release His anointing through you to be able to defeat that enemy.

Again, study these verses very carefully - as they will show you the incredible supernatural power that God can channel through you if you would be willing to step into and walk with His anointing.

No weapon formed against you shall prosper, and every tongue which rises against you in judgment you shall condemn. This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, and their righteousness is from me," says the Lord. (Isaiah 54:17)

"... but the people who know their God shall be strong, and carry out great exploits." (Daniel 11:32)

"For the kingdom of God is not in word but in power." (1 Corinthians 4:20)

"Truly the signs of an apostle were accomplished among you with all perseverance, in signs and wonders and mighty deeds." (2 Corinthians 12:12)

Blessed be the Lord my Rock, who trains my hands for war, and my fingers for battle - my lovingkindness and my fortress, my high tower and my deliverer, my shield and the One in whom I take refuge, who subdues my people under me." (Psalm 144:1)

"It is God who arms me with strength, and makes my way perfect. He makes my feet like the feet of deer, and sets me on high places. He teaches my hands to make war, so that my arms can bend a bow of bronze ... I have pursued my enemies and overtaken them; neither did I turn back again till they were destroyed. I have wounded them, so that they were not able to rise; they have fallen under my feet. For You have armed me with strength for the battle; You have subdued under me those who rose up against me." (Psalm 18:32,37)

God can anoint you with His supernatural power to defeat any enemy that may come your way - but only if you are willing to step into it and not be afraid to directly engage with whatever storm cloud is getting ready to come your way.

Notice the first verse tells you that you can have God's power and authority to trample over "all" the power of the enemy - not just against some or part of his power. This means you can have God's anointing and power operating in you to come out completely victorious against any enemy that may attempt to come against you.

Though I know he won't read this, I call Jim Wallace's attention to these paragraphs (and the other ten pages of Biblical justifications of violence). This is a literal, direct interpretation of scripture. How can any Christian not see that this man, in his own way at least, was influenced in part by these passages? He directly says: "In other words, it was perfectly OK to kill a thief breaking into your house. That's the ultimate expression of self-defence. It doesn't matter whether the thief is threatening your life or not. You have the right to protect your home, your family and your property, the Bible says." The Bible gives him permission to kill people.

I do not wish to argue about the validity of his interpretations, I am no theologian and will simply plea ignorance should anyone really push me on this stuff. But my understanding of the Bible isn't the point, Breivik's understanding and use of the Bible as a rationalisation of his actions, and as a guiding light in his principles is. Breivik clearly believes the word of the Scripture here, and nothing Wallace or any fundamentalist or even moderate Christian can say will convince me otherwise. Obviously not all Christians interpret the Bible this way, but this one did. In the same way that not all videogamers interpret videogames as scripts for real-life behaviours, some might.

This is why I have some trouble with the counter-argument that many of us put forward in defense of videogames in particular, but media in general, when these sorts of things happen. We cry that media have no power to make people act, that violent media don't make children violent, etc etc. Yet, media do have power, and we all believe this, or I wouldn't be writing this any more than you'd be reading it. We wouldn't use instruction manuals, textbooks, or Bibles. Breivik certainly believes media have power, as he wrote a 1500 page manifesto with the sole purpose of convincing his readers to change their beliefs! Media absolutely have a power, as Marshall McLuhan said, they set a trap, to lure a spectator in and cause an effect on them. There is no question about this. The debate is over free will. Do media have the ability to usurp our will, our ability to decide, to reason and make judgments? Jim Wallace thinks so. He seems to believe that there are vulnerable (to use Michael Atkinson's term) people in the world for whom certain media are prescriptive, they are unable to recognise the difference between fiction and reality. He accepts this, and instead of finding those people, helping them, guiding them towards rationality and decision-making, he would rather remove all potential risky material from society. Just in case, he says, one of these poor vulnerable souls should chance upon Grand Theft Auto or Modern Warfare and take it seriously.

So in Wallace's ideal society, he would leave these vulnerable people to their own devices, safe from the potentially harmful effects of GTA and CoD, and allowed to obsess over the much more wholesome Bible. The problem with this is Wallace's own claims about Breivik lead us to believe he was indeed one of these vulnerable individuals, unable to make rational judgments, to distinguish fact from fiction, to 'obsess' over videogames. Yet it wasn't over videogames that Breivik was obsessed. He was quite rational about his use of World of Warcraft, saying he would use it as a cover while he was actually doing other things, specifically not playing the game. Instead, Breivik was obsessed with the Bible. With the writings of Fjordman, Bat Ye'or, and the other conservatives he cites throughout 2083. He was obsessed with Marxism, critical theory, military and religious history, not videogames. Its actually easier to connect Breivik's ideology with Wallace's own than with World of Warcraft or Modern Warfare. According to his Twitter earlier this year, Wallace's ideal imagined Australian diggers didn't fight for gay marriage or an Islamic Australia, much like Breivik is literally fighting to restore white patriarchy and Christianity to Europe. Spin that, Wallace.

So all around this is good news, though apparently South Australia consider a ten year old and 17 year old to be the same thing, such that any game rated MA15+ will be rebadged with the R18+ stickers before being sold. Bizarre. As someone deep in my Twitter feed said, this only deepens the gulf between ultra-childish and ultra-adults only. Its a deep conception of games, that they are either entirely juvenile, or entirely pornographic with no middle ground whatsoever.

Still, the most disturbing thing I heard flew a little below the radar, regarding a proposal by Rau to make Facebook an 18+ website... somehow. Of course he didn't go into details, but rather gave anecdotal evidence of a mother who was concerned about the slutty pictures her 13 year old daughter was posting on the site. Having discovered them, the mother found that she could not force Facebook to take them down. So this is why Australia should prevent all children in the country from using the single most widely accessed website in the history of the internet, because one woman is a terrible mother. Not only can she not keep enough of an eye on her own offspring to stop her from taking, then posting the pictures, but she is unable to sit down with her, explain the situation, and have the daughter take the pictures down herself? I'm sorry but I call bullshit.

This is obvious avoidance of parental responsibility. Out of the hundreds of millions of users of Facebook, some percentage are going to get themselves into trouble. That can't mean a government needs try to legislate this fact into non-existence. Rau trotted out the same old "Parents can't be around their kids 24/7 to watch what they do. Gee whiz kids these days are so clever," argument that is so prevalent in these kinds of discussions. But this is not a new thing. Parents have never been able to do this, why are we suddenly making laws about it in the case of new-ish media? I mean, any parent who doesn't realise their kids are a little different at school or in that God-forsaken space between school and home is delusional. Of course the difference in some kids is greater than in others, but there aren't any laws against this. Where and when did today's adults learn to swear or talk about sex and drugs and whatever else? Around the kitchen table? I think not.

At one point, I heard the phrase "Managing the flow of information through the internet." They still don't get it. They don't get the internet and they don't get liberal democracy.

The Saboteur was released in 2009 and represents the swansong for Pandemic Studios, who were closed down shortly after its release. I have to wonder how long prior to the completion of The Saboteur the development team or upper management at EA knew the studio’s fate – a death knell may explain the disappointing lack of polish I experienced playing this game. That disappointment was all the more intense for the raft of great ideas and a wonderful setting chosen for this game.

Full text at Kotaku.com.au