"I do not, however, like the idea of a total mainstream adoption of the gaming world. It’s like listening to underground types of music, if cooperations eat them all up suddenly it becomes trashed and the audience disappears."

That's more likely to happen to individual genres in gaming just like it happens to individual genres in music. I think it could very well happen to GTA like games. All of the horrible GTA clones being released could very well, and has in my opinion, saturate the market and anger the audience.

Hey, very cool. Well done and congrats!

I second Jabrwock's sentiments, though. Boooo, indeed.

Serious Comment: This is indeed an impressive event. Perhaps media partnerships with videogame companies, no matter how far removed from the "industry" they are, will allow them to get a better understanding of what goes on in our world. It would be nice to see fewer news stories with a glaring ignorance of even the most basic working of the game industry.

Non-Serious Comment: What are the games for even lite VT and the Thailand shootings going to look like? Are we going to see corporate version of Super Columbine RPG?

Does any think there is a down side with the merger games and mainstream media?

JT: "It's a murder simulator disguised as news!"

[...] World of Borecraft Ever since video games were invented, parents and teachers have been trying to make them boring. Any child of the 1980s and 1990s will remember Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing and Math Blaster Mystery: The Great Brain Robbery, games that promised to make skills acquisition fun. They'll also remember ditching Mavis Beacon for something with guns as soon as their parents' backs were turned. Making games educational is like dumping Velveeta on broccoli. Liberal deployment of the word blaster can't hide the fact that you're choking down something that's supposed to be good for you. With video games starting to eclipse movies in revenues and popularity, the educational-gaming movement has gone into overdrive. Industry bigwigs and civic-minded intellectuals are increasingly peddling the idea that video games can cure society's ills. There's a booming subgenre of games, like the Nintendo DS title Brain Age, that claim to stave off senility via simple puzzles and arithmetic problems. A Harper's cover story last year asked whether video games were the best way to teach kids to read. (Short answer: maybe.) There's even a D.C.-based group called the Serious Games Initiative that advocates for "a new series of policy education, exploration, and management tools utilizing state of the art computer game designs." Take that, Reader Rabbit! All of these ideas are premised on the notion that video games can and should be more than mindless fun. But all of this noodling about games' untapped potential raises some philosophical questions: When does a game stop being a game and turn into an assignment? Can a game still be called a game if it isn't any fun? The company Persuasive Games makes for an interesting case study. Persuasive has gotten a lot of press due to its recent collaboration with the New York Times on "newsgames." Persuasive's releases are essentially the Blaster series for the new millennium but geared toward adults instead of children with overprotective parents. Cartoonish and uncomplicated, with graphics reminiscent of old, 16-bit gaming systems, these games generally play like Sims expansion packs that were too boring to be released. Persuasive's first game for the Times, Food Import Folly (TimesSelect subscription required), is a rousing examination of the ins and outs of FDA import inspection. Newsgames are an interesting idea, but this one is less informative than a simple article and less fun than doing the Jumble. Food Import Folly didn't make me think long and hard about FDA policy