Musician and record producer Mike Stock lashed out against the current state of pop music, stating that the “industry has gone too far” as it serves up “soft pornography” to children.

Stock, perhaps best-known as one member of a trio of songwriters and producers known as Stock Aitken Waterman, which produced and wrote songs for an impressive list of musical acts ranging from Elton John to Judas Priest to Bananarama, saved some of his blame for videogames, stating:

Before children even step into school, they have all these images. The pop videos and computer games like Grand Theft Auto confronting them, and the parents can't control it. Talking to mothers' groups, they were saying that even they have lost faith in brands like Disney.

A 28-year old Delhi Township, Ohio man visiting his son at his ex-wife’s house, stole his nine-year old son’s game system and games upon leaving and traded them in at a nearby game store.

Joseph Phillips sold the items for about a tenth of their value according to an article on Cincinnati.com. His ex-wife valued the goods at $1,070, leading the website to question why Phillips was arrested for misdemeanor theft charges and not on felony charges.

Phillips, who has a history of drug arrests, allegedly committed the deed on Sunday and was arrested on Monday. His stay in jail was short-lived due to overcrowding, but he failed to appear in court on Tuesday, leading to an arrest warrant being issued against him.

Phillips reportedly told police that he would not be around because he was checking into a Teen Challenge USA recovery program. Officials “could not confirm if Phillips was in the program.”

Spencer Halpin’s Moral Kombat, the 2007 documentary that focuses on the subject of violence in videogames, is now available for free viewing on Hulu.

The documentary features a wide assortment of game industry luminaries, pundits and critics weighing in on the topic of violence in games, including Lorne Lanning, Dean Takahashi, American McGee, Doug Lowenstein, Jason Della Rocca, Jack Thompson, Hal Halpin and Henry Jenkins.

It can also still be viewed on Amazon’s OnDemand Service, Babelgum, iTunes and Netflix.

Halpin offered:

One police officer’s profound interest in the game Plants vs Zombies allowed five inmates to easily escape a jail cell in the Filipino municipality of Cagayan de Oro City.

The officer was so deep into his game session that he left the keys to a cell within reach of prisoners, according to a story on Global Nation. While four of the escapees were quickly rounded up, a fifth, Reynard Marturillas, is still at-large.

Officials believe Marturillas integrated himself with a trash pickup in order to escape detection, though local Department of Public Services stated that the inmate would “have surely collapsed from the stench of food slop collected from the jail.”

It was noted, however, that “a convicted prisoner, who is due to be shipped out to the National Bilibid Prison in Muntinglupa, would surely find the will to endure a ride that smells to the high heavens.”

The sleepy hamlet of Beacon, located in upstate New York, is not a fan of pinball machines.

A CNN story details the problems a local man had after opening a retro arcade museum in the town. After 18 months of operation, Fred Bobrow was forced to shutter his operation because of an “arcane” law in town that bans pinball machines within the city limits.

George Mansfield, a member of Beacon’s City Council explained how the law may have come about:

Arcades in the '70s may have represented something, you know, maybe, that a community wouldn't want on their main street, or that it would attract a bad, you know, kids or whatever.

While the town, reportedly, is looking into reversing the ban, the City Council is moving very slowly and any changes will not be enacted in time to benefit Bobrow. Beacon Mayor Steve Gold stated, “Uh, the legislative process really does take its time and council's really looked very closely at all of the letters of the law, and look ahead to the future.”

Quinn Pitcock is a 299 pound defensive tackle from the Ohio State University who was drafted in the 3rd round by the Indianapolis Colts in 2007, but retired after just one season due to depression, which, he claims, eventually contributed to an addiction to videogames.

Pitcock is on the comeback trail though, attending training camp and hoping to catch on with the Seattle Seahawks. He told The News Tribune that back in 2008, he “was suffering from bouts of depression, and that he had used video games as an outlet.“

On the Seahawks website (thanks Kotaku), Pitcock explained what he did after walking away from the Colts, “I cast myself away from everybody and became almost a hermit. I ended up using video games as my out, I got sucked into that. I got lost to the world.”

A teacher arrested after making a threat to kill hundreds of people was acquitted by a jury after clarification emerged that his remark was meant to reference the taking of virtual lives in videogame play, so that he could relieve stress.

Jason Davis was a teacher at Knox Central High School in Barbourville, Kentucky, when a student, and fellow online gamer who Davis often played with, hid some of Davis’ markers. Davis, according to Kentucky.com, was apparently having a rough day and this bit of tom foolery caused him to issue utterances about killing people to relieve stress, which was apparently taken out of context by students and resulted in his arrest in May of 2009 for second-degree terroristic threatening.

A jury needed only 10 minutes to conclude that Davis was not guilty. Davis spent a month in jail before coming up with bond, and is now unemployed as the school, before the incident, informed him that he would not be rehired.

Do you live in Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Missouri, Oklahoma, West Virginia or Mississippi? If you do, odds are you need to go on a diet and, according to one “expert,” cut back on playing videogames.

The population of the states listed above had obesity rates in excess of 30 percent, according to statistics released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

An article on Florida’s TCPalm.com, where the obesity rate clocked in at 25.2 percent, discussed the fattening trend with Dr. Jefferson Vaughan, a surgeon based in Jupiter, Florida. Vaughan on the obesity epidemic:

There has been a generational change. When I was a kid, there were three TV channels and they all played Watergate tapes.

Today it's much more convenient to go through the drive-through while your kid plays his Game Boy in the back seat.

A Portsmouth, New Hampshire woman—and aspiring Fagin perhaps—was arrested for allegedly attempting to bribe a nine-year old into stealing his mother’s Percocet in exchange for a videogame of his choice.

Shannon Leathers (pictured) was busted after the possessor of the Percocet noticed they were missing and grilled her son, who caved and confessed the plot. Leathers was charged with possessing a narcotic, criminal solicitation, receiving stolen property and a misdemeanor count of endangering the welfare of a child.

Mug shot and story from WMUR 9.

The government of Vietnam has implemented a few (previously alluded to) measures restricting online games as it bides time in order to formulate an overall master plan for dealing with the industry.

Minister of Information and Communications (MoIC) Le Doan Hop called for the immediate  implementation of a trio of stop-gap measures reports Saigon Daily: until new laws are drafted and propagated, all new licenses for online games will be suspended, all public media ads for online games are banned and Internet cafes will have to shut down game services between 11PM and 6AM every day. Vietnam News stated that these measures will be in place through year-end.

Only the Daily Star could make the New York Post look like the New York Times.

We’re a little late to this one, but last week that bastion of accurate reporting, the UK’s Daily Star, ran an article insinuating that Rockstar was making a Grand Theft Auto game based on the criminal actions committed earlier this month by ex-con Raoul Moat, who killed one and injured three across a six-day spree throughout the NorthEast UK. 

GTA Rothbury, as the game was called by Star writer Jerry Lawton, contained a series of animated quotes from relatives of the victims, outraged by the thought of a game, book or movie based on the criminal’s exploits, as reported up by CVG.

The story was eventually taken off the Star’s website entirely (since it was made up) and the newspaper issued an apology (thanks again CVG) stating:

The office of California State Senator Leland Yee (D-San Francisco) let us know that the state’s Attorney General Jerry Brown (D-Oakland) will submit California’s written argument to the Supreme Court, which voices the Golden State’s backing of a law that would make it illegal to rent or sell “excessively” violent videogames to children.

Yee is, of course, the original author of the law (AB 1179), which has made it all the way to the front of the Supreme Court in the form of Schwarzenegger v. EMA.

Citing a SCOTUS decision in United States v. Stevens, in which the Court declined to ban media depicting animal cruelty, Yee indicated that the law may have been constitutional if it was more focused, stating, “Clearly, the justices want to look specifically at our narrowly tailored law that simply limits sales of ultra-violent games to kids without prohibiting speech.”

Yee added:

When not deflating the findings of game-hating researchers, Texas A&M International University Associate Professor Christopher Ferguson often conducts his own studies, including a recent example which indicates that violent videogame players handle stress better than non-players and can actually feel less depressed and stressful following a session with aggressive games.

The Hitman Study: Violent Video Game Exposure Effects on Aggressive Behavior, Hostile Feeling and Depression (press release) was authored by Ferguson and his fellow TAMIU colleague Stephanie Rueda. The study included 103 students from a “Hispanic-serving public university” in the Southern U.S. 62 were male and 41 were female, with 98 Hispanics, three Caucasian and two who declined to answer.

GP denizen PHX Corp pointed us towards a Netherlands petition started in reaction to positioning from the Dutch Minister of Justice Ernst Hirsch Ballin (pictured), which indicated that Ballin is seeking criminal prohibition of extremely violent imagery, including videogames.

Ballin seemed to specifically focus on games in his proposed banning, according to an article from Dutch gaming site Bashers (translated). In a letter to the house, Ballin, who intimated that banning violent games would be easier—and draw less resistance— than banning violent movies, wrote (bad translation, sorry):

When many gamers think of the South Korean gaming scene, the first images that jump to mind are of highly competitive real-time strategy games like Starcraft, or action-oriented MMORPGs like Aion or Lineage II. 

Jessica Rovello, Co-Founder and President of the casual/social/advergame firm Arkadium, has authored an opinion piece on the Huffington Post that cross references a CNBC piece from earlier this week (in which game executives fretted over the Schwarzenegger v. EMA SCOTUS ruling) with new statistics just released from Rockstar’s hit Red Dead Redemption.

Writing that “Since a significant portion of the industry's best selling triple A console titles are loaded with violence, it [a Supreme Court ruling for the California law] could mean a huge drop in profits for major game publishers,” Rovello noted that Rockstar had just released news that players had murdered over 132 million people in Red Dead Redemption over the first two weeks of its release.

The timing of the release of the stats gave Rovello pause. She wrote:

Dave Cullen’s comprehensive recounting of the April 20, 1999 school shooting in Littleton, Colorado is built upon innumerable interviews, police files and media reports, along with videotapes and writings made by the killers— Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris—themselves.

The shootings, which played out on live television over the better part of a day, impacted Americans and other people around the world intensely, as was the attackers intent. It also caused society to scramble to look for reasons why this tragedy happened, and some were quick to point the finger at various elements of culture, including violent videogames.

Australian Senator—and fervent anti-gambling crusader—Nick Xenophon (pictured) is turning his attention to arcade games that feature gambling elements, saying that such entertainment is a “training ground” for children to learn how to gamble.

Xenophon, who previously took on mobile and PC games based on slot machines (or pokies as they are called Down Under), was joined in his latest contention by Charles Livingstone, a Monash University “electronic gaming expert,” who told the Age that such arcade games achieved a pair of purposes: “to indoctrinate kids to gambling, to make them think this is a normal part of life; and to lure children, and with them their parents, into the pokie venues.”

As one Guardian author wondered what happened to the ambition of boys, citing videogames as at least a contributing factor, another Guardian columnist fired back, defending games as part of the solution.

Will Hutton’s Sunday column examined the possible reasons why society is churning out “so many disaffected, troubled and disengaged young men.” Hutton argued that “the great male demotivator is the risk of loss of face.” He continued:

One of the reasons that boys do not try harder is that the penalties for disengagement are so low – indeed, there are even rewards, at least in the sense that if you don't try, you can't fail. Much better to smoke dope, hang out and obsessively play computer games all day.

Claiming they were motivated by a Grand Theft Auto play session, a pair of Raynham, Massachusetts  boys were arrested after allegedly attempting to set fire to two buildings with Molotov cocktails.

The 12-year old and 16-year old tried to burn down a garage and an apartment building early Sunday morning with stolen gasoline poured into bottles, according to Enterprise News. The younger of the two suspects told police that “they got the idea from a video game they had been playing earlier in the night.”

Police Chief Lou Pacheco told the paper, (in a solemn voice, no doubt), “They appear to have crossed the line from virtual reality to reality.”

The boys were arraigned on charges of possession of an explosive device and attempted arson before being released to their families. The two are also suspected of going on a tagging spree as well, though thankfully there was no mention of the boys playing Mark Ecko’s Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure prior to that undertaking.

A Canadian researcher (and conspiracy theorist), who focuses on the “causative forces behind major changes in historical development” and believes that culture is “created and altered by those in control, always to lead the people like sheep into the next pasture,” believes that videogames, of course, are a part of this process.

Alan Watt has written a series of books on the subject and operates a website entitled Cutting Through the Matrix. In a YouTube video, Watts says about humanity, “The average person is so out of touch, so incredibly out of touch, with the only true reality there is, that it’s a different world all together. They cannot tell fact from fiction anymore.”

On entertainment in general he offers, “You cannot be entertained today and enjoy it. If you watch any of these movies… as soon as you’ve identified with these characters, you’ve lost it and you’ve been indoctrinated. They are downloading into you.”

A man in Wales who accidentally shot a city worker with a .22 caliber rifle was a videogame player, so of course that had to be mentioned in a story about the incident on a South Wales website.

23-year old Ersid Cela of Clas y Bedw, Waunarlwydd, allegedly bought a BSA air rifle “for £200 from a drug dealer in Mumbles after playing the Call of Duty computer game, in which players shoot each other with a range of automatic weapons.”

Cela was additionally described as a “fan of a violent computer game.”

Thank goodness he didn’t buy the gun before playing Call of Duty or there would be no story.

In any case, Cela was attempting to load the gun when it went off, hitting worker Jason Crocker in the shoulder as he worked out side Cela’s home. A second shot hit Crocker’s van as well. How the gun went off “accidentally” a second time was not disclosed.

Cela will be held in custody until he is sentenced on July 26.

A piece on the Scientific American website (thanks Kotaku), attempts to pick apart research from Cheryl Olson that looked into the motivating factors among kids for playing videogames.

Olson’s paper, entitled “Children’s Motivations for Video Game Play in the Context of Normal Development” (PDF) argued that “The debate has moved from whether children should play video games to how to maximize potential benefits and to identify and minimize potential harms.” Querying 1,254 kids on the reason they play games, Olson found that the top responses were “It’s just fun,” It’s exciting,” and “something to when bored.”

Maybe videogamers really are skewing older—a 52-year old Florida man invaded a home Tuesday night demanding an Xbox 360.

Allan Crosswell (pictured) was armed with a pipe, which he threatened to use when he stormed the home, unless he was outfitted with Microsoft’s console. The residents were able to wrestle Crosswell outside, then locked the door and called police who arrested the man “without incident.”

Perhaps Crosswell was just really impressed with Microsoft’s E3 showing? Sadly, the man also had the option of picking up a current generation 360 at quite a significant discount.

Charging videogames and consoles to government credit cards has helped to take down a Baltimore Mayor and may also lead to arrests in a probe of Nova Scotia House of Assembly members. Now, the lure of putting the burden of payment on the public has proven too hard to resist for yet another piece of bureaucracy, the Los Angeles Probation Department.

A Los Angeles Times article states that “mayhem has reigned for years” in the LA County Probation Department, and claims 170 cases of employee misconduct over an unspecified time frame. The author turns us on to “a story you haven’t heard yet”:

Fourteen patients from the Huai’an Internet Addiction Treatment Centre in China decided they had enough and tied an instructor to a bed in order to make their escape from the facility.

The group, which ranged in age from 15 to 22, grabbed a taxi to a nearby town, but their similar garb, and lack of funds, raised the suspicion of their driver, who took them directly to a police station. All the escapees were then quickly returned to the treatment center, according to a story on the Telegraph.

One escapee’s mom broke down in tears at the police station, recounting a story in which her son played online games for 28 hours straight.

The facility makes its charges go to bed at 9:30 PM and requires them to partake in two hours of physical activity per day, as well as take mandatory courses in calligraphy and Chinese philosophy.

A report on NPR this morning about the two young New Jersey men arrested at New York’s JFK airport as they attempted to travel to Somalia, with the alleged intent of joining a terrorist organization, piqued our interest because of the mention of videogames.

24-year old Carlos Eduardo Almonte and 20-year old Mohamed Mahmood Alessa were arrested and charged with trying to join the terrorist group al-Shabab. The pair apparently had no ties to the group and were traveling to Somalia, by way of Egypt, with the hopes that al-Shabab would welcome them into their organization.

A New York Daily News story on the two men reported that “they often went to mall stores and played first-person-shooter computer games - assuming the terrorist role.”

Seven months after being knifed virtually in an online round of Counter-Strike, a 20-year old French gamer tracked down his online assailer and stabbed him in the chest.

Julien Barreaux hunted down his victim, identified only as Mikhael, after falling under his knife in a November 2009 game of CS, according to the Telegraph. It turned out that Mikhael lived only a “few miles” from Barreaux, who visited the house and stabbed Mikhael in the chest when he answered the door, just missing his heart. Mikhael apparently survived the attack.

Barreaux was arrested within an hour of the attack and sentenced to two years in jail, and also will be forced to undergo psychiatric tests. The attacker was dubbed a “menace to society” by Judge Alexiane Potel, who added, “I am frankly terrified of the disproportionate reaction you could have if someone looked at you the wrong way in the street.”

A 17-year old from Latrobe, Pennsylvania was sentenced to 12 months probation, 250 hours of community service and ordered to pay Sony Computer Entertainment $5,000 for his role in crippling the electronic giant’s gaming website on November 16-26, 2008.

An investigation conducted by the FBI and Greensburg Police led authorities to the boy, who apparently took the website down in response to being repeatedly kicked off the PlayStation Network for cheating while playing SOCOM U.S. Navy Seals online.

The teenager reportedly used hacking tools to harness infected computers around the world and directed the botnet “to clog three games on the PlayStation site, causing it to crash and go off-line.”
 
Sony had sought over $33,200 from the teen, but Judge John Driscoll ruled that such an amount would be “too excessive” for the boy. Driscoll wrote in his order that, “the juvenile seems to have accepted personal responsibility and agrees he should be held accountable.”

The Vietnam government’s Ministry of Information and Communications (MIC) has drafted legislation that could significantly impact that country’s online gamer population.

The proposed measures, according to Vietnam Net, include limiting users to three hours of playtime for particular games, imposing licensing restrictions on the purveyors of online games (to limit the current fragmenting of the online game market) and introducing clear language that would label in-game assets as unconvertible to real-world money.

“Simple and low-tension” games, such as chess, are not addressed in the proposal and would be able to continue to run twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. The three-hour restriction on playtime would also be increased to four to five hours per day for games that are cultural or education-based.