A long burden

Before I begin with this topic, I'd like to talk about Vigil Games.  Unfortunately, as I found out, there were no bets on Vigil Games as the development company, and it's core franchise Darksiders, were no more.  But there is some good news.

Many of THQ’s studios and properties survived the company’s bankruptcy, finding new life at new publishers. Ubisoft saved THQ Montreal, Sega took on Relic, and Koch Media took on Saints Row creator Volition. Vigil Games, sadly, wasn’t so lucky. Having just finished Darksiders II, a game that didn’t light up sales charts in the first place, Vigil was hard at work on a new franchise, but no publisher wanted to take the risk. What’s a studio with a cult following, new ideas, and little marketability to do? Start fresh. Germany’s Crytek opened Crytek USA Corp. in Austin on Tuesday, its first US studio, with much of Vigil’s core staff at the center.

“Crytek has always enjoyed a special relationship with gamers and business partners in North America, so establishing a permanent presence in the US was a natural step,” reads a statement from Crytek CEO Cevat Yerli, “We are extremely excited about the work that we will be undertaking from our strategic new location in Austin, with David Adams and his team of 35 experienced developers.”
David Adams was the general manager of Vigil Games before THQ failed to find a buyer for studio. “I’m thrilled to be a part of the newest Crytek studio, which will boast some of the brightest development talent in the industry.” While Yerli mentioned that Crytek USA has an initial staff of 35 in addition to Adams, not all of them are former Vigil team members.

“We weren’t just looking at Vigil’s team [for staff], but the whole Austin development community,” Yerli told Gamasutra. What will the team be working on? Crytek also bought THQ’s Homefront series, so will Vigil start working on a sequel to that game? “It would be pretty much safe to say that this team will be working on online games… and kick-ass triple-A productions. It is going to be quite a significant investment for Crytek over the next five years.”

Yerli did emphasize that Crytek will not be buying the Darksiders license for Crytek USA to continue development on.

It's unfortunate.  Though Vigil Games is no more and the same can be said for Darksiders, the team behind Darksiders will now be working for Crytek.  Looks like Crytek is slowly becoming a force to be reckoned with.

But now let's turn to another topic.  There's been bad news in gaming lately, from the shuttering of Warren Spector's Junction Point studios(Responsible for Epic Mickey) to the fall of Atari.  But those are, unfortunately, icing on the cake of chaos compared to this Huffington Post Article

Concerns about video game violence have been twinned to concerns about gun violence from as far back as the Columbine shooting, when pundits fussed and fretted over how Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold enjoyed yesteryear's most popular first-person shooter, "Doom." (Also, they were vaguely "goth," according to observers, which for a time made life hard for Bauhaus fans who just wanted to be alone and sad and misunderstood.) I was never too convinced by the argument: Video games, unlike the act of shooting up an entire school of children, were and remain popular, with hundreds of thousands millions of people partaking in the escape. That some mass-murderers occasionally participated in that culture seems to be incidental at best -- a tiny bit of statistical effluvia that should be written off as insignificant at the outset.

"Video games affect people," of course, is not actually an argument. Monet paintings affect people. Long waits at the DMV affect people. If there's anything that diminishes my worry about whether or not Alexander will seriously consider the prospect of beefing up background checks, it would be the way that this thought sort of floated out of him like flatulence, unattached to anything serious. If I could assure Alexander of anything, however, I would point out that we have spared no expense in trying to ascertain the ways in which video games affect people, up to and including whether they can be connected to violent tendencies in real life.

Because the real monsters are those who play the newest Call of Duty titles.  Now you're wondering, why aren't we doing research into this?  Well first off, restricting video game sales was declared Unconstitutional in 2011.  Second off, we've been doing this before the NES because mainstream in North America.


But there's no reason to stop there. Over at Kotaku, Jason Schreier has a lengthy piece about the past quarter century of research into video games and their connection to violence or, as it's more popularly termed, "aggression." Schreier gives the matter a thorough going-over, presenting the case for concern alongside the case against. It's absolutely fair to say that some studies have ended with the conclusion that a correlation between violence and video games exists. But it's also fair to say that many have not. Nevertheless Schreier gives serious, scholarly consideration to the matter, and so I'd urge people to go read the whole thing.

For the time being, however, here's the key data point: "The first major violent video game study took place in 1984." Yes, that's right, we are approaching the 30th anniversary of considering the impact of a globally popular entertainment medium on mass shootings in the U.S. And as Schreier points out, a sizable infrastructure has grown to support this never-ending research.

Almost 30 years of data recorded, and yet we still have no clue on what makes gaming tick.  That's a great way to spend tax dollars *NOT*

Anyway, give that page a check.  The link is in the quotes courtesy of Kotaku.  It's unclear how we can solve video games and America if even the US Constitution can guarantee Video Games a clear haven.  But our heart still goes out to those who's lives were lost in the chaos.

Works Cited:
Digital Trends
Huffington Post