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As I allude in the body of this column, I didn’t intend to write anything about the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary school. In fact I kind of instructed myself not to. What could I say? That I’m sorry, but I still don’t think video games had anything to do with it? Or just that I’m sorry? Nothing at all seemed best.

But in the end I buckled, I guess, though this month’s column  for the International Game Developers Association is less about Sandy Hook than it is about our society and how we react to things. I don’t know what the long-term fallout will be for the games industry; it has weathered such storms in the past. But maybe it can still be a wake-up call, about the medium’s content, and whether it’s all it can (or should) be. Enjoy!

Oh for God’s sake.

Mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway last July, apparently played Modern Warfare to learn (according to his testimony) “how to use rifle sights.”

I’m reminded of a roundtable I once attended on violence in games. California Cassandra Leland Yee had just argued that military games teach kids how to kill. Professor James Paul Gee replied, in a perfect sarcastic deadpan, “the only thing any war game has ever taught me is that I don’t want to be a soldier.”

“Well I did it,” begins a recent post on Blizzard’s World of Warcraft forums. We often discuss here at Tap-Repeatedly how killing, in its many forms, has long been the predominant form of expressing progress in the medium of video games. Today it is such a given to seasoned gamers, most of us would never give pause to even consider what we’re doing. Although the how has evolved — from the hell-spawn in Doom, to …

And lo, Steerpike reappears on the front page of his own website. I’ve been super-busy! Thank heavens for Lewis and Mat and Gregg keeping stuff alive in my absence.

This month’s IGDA Culture Clash column was whipped up in a hurry. I had a whole other one done, but realized it wasn’t really going anywhere. And as it happened I’d just read an article I wanted to comment on. So while I had no intention of discussing the Dead Island trailer, I did. I do. Here.

Special Bonus Content! Just now a good friend of mine wrote a beautifully crafted email to me, reacting to the trailer. I’m including that at the bottom of this, because it’s worthy of discussion. Check it out!

Two things are happening in the United States tomorrow, both of sufficient gravity that watchers from beyond our borders should be at least somewhat interested. First, the mid-term election is going to go badly for the Democrats, which is unfortunate because Democrats are awesome. Second, oral arguments begin in Schwarzenegger vs. the Entertainment Merchants Association at the United States Supreme Court. Up for debate is whether it’s a violation of the First Amendment for a …

Free speech doesn’t mean what it used to here in the United States, but we’ve so far been able to maintain reasonable confidence that at least our choice of entertainment won’t be silenced or penned. Now, however, with Terminator vs. EMA wending its way toward the country’s Supreme Court, everyone who harbors even a smidgen of faithlessness in the process is getting… well, not panicky, but concerned. It is conceivable, despite massive precedent, that videogames will be denied the level of retail protection afforded to most other entertainment media: that the industry will, in essence, be confined high on a shelf behind the counter, naughty bits covered in cardboard, while Maxim magazine and Hostel III titillate below.

GamePolitics reports that a Danish anti-domestic-violence Flash game allows users to beat a woman, I guess as a way to teach dudes why it’s wrong to do so. In fact, if you have a webcam, your swings and backhands will be interpreted by the model as real strikes! Is it just me, or is this plain wrong? Look, I applaud the concept of games that deal with mature, heartrending themes like violence. But when the …

Those with Showtime can check out tonight’s episode of Penn & Teller: Bullshit! at 10:00pm Eastern/Pacific. In this one, the duo of corpulent and silent will go out of their way to ridicule anti-game activists (including the disbarred but not forgotten Jack Thompson) convinced that videogames cause violence. The clip above was snagged from GamePolitics, once (rightly) described as “one of the few sites you must visit every day if you consider yourself serious about …

While I have never been what one might call an “intense” gamer, I have for years been a student of visual and printed forms of media.I have particularly followed the on-going argument related to computer gaming as art.I do this largely because it amuses me to find politicians who can barely spell “computer,” and lawyers who have an opinion about almost everything, expressing their remarkably intense and often nonsense-laden opinions.I truly believe they need to …

The Local and GamePolitics report that Germany has banned paintball and laser tag in response to the recent school shooting in Winnenden that left 15 dead, including the shooter. Germany has a long and storied tradition of opposition to violent entertainment, the result of massive and not entirely misplaced sensitivity over the perception that any presentation of violence may awaken dark memories of Nazism. It will be many decades before time “heals” that wound, and …

From the Department of WTF comes word of a panel of British teenagers who – lacking, apparently, the capacity to recognize that grown-ups do not comprehend sarcasm when it comes from kids – claim that the the UK’s recent spate of knife crime is fueled by violent video games. I don’t… even know where to start with this.