A Japanese man has been arrested for allegedly forcing his young stepson to play Grand Theft Auto while his mother was not at home. The Kyoto, Japan resident, a 28 year-old male nurse named Maasa Kawabata forced his nine year-old son to play Grand Theft Auto IV for two-to-three weeks, with each gaming session lasting about two or three hours a day. All of this occurred while his mother was outside the home. He also apparently told the boy that he was "stupid," a "moron," and that he should "die" whenever his mother was not around.

Last night at its Consumer Electronics Show press conference Valve Software revealed that 14 third-party hardware manufacturers were working on Steam Machines that would run its Steam OS operating system and would support the Steam controller. The prices among these manufacturers for the customized Steam Machines vary wildly, with a starting price of $499 all the up to the ridiculous price of $6,000.

Earlier this week we reported on a Virginia man who bought a 3DS from his local Walmart for his eight-year-old son. To his surprise, when his son and other children decided to look at some fresh photos they'd just snapped with the 3DS' camera on Christmas day, they discovered some rather naughty adult images.

Imagine buying your child a 3DS for Christmas and finding pornography on it... That's what happened to one parent, according to WAVY News 10. On Christmas morning Tom Mayhew's 8-year-old son decided to snap some pictures with his new 3DS. When he went to go look at the photos he'd taken he found a dozen pornographic images saved on the system.

Indie developers including the makers of The Witness, Thomas Was Alone, VVVVVV, and Ridiculous Fishing, are railing against YouTube and Google over their new copyright detection policies after being the target of false copyright claims on videos of their own games.

Mike Bithell, creator of puzzle platformer game Thomas Was Alone, was the target of a claim by a group called 'Indmusic' for "systematically" claiming rights to footage of his game. He lashed out at the group via Twitter:

Last week we asked our readers, "Do Publishers Know the NSA Is Conducting Surveillance Operations In Their Games?" An overwhelming majority of voters believe that publishers are lying about their knowledge of the NSA's activities in games like World of Warcraft and Second Life, or they are blissfully unaware of what's going on.

Florida-based political group The National Liberty Foundation is catching some heat this morning for posting anti-immigration propaganda from Bioshock Infinite, a game that puts such forms of thinking under a microscope by focusing on an isolated society, its leader and the movement that wants to keep "America pure." The group describes itself as a conservative coalition made up of citizens that identify themselves as part of the Tea Party movement.

Google has implemented a new system that auto detects content that is supposedly in breach of copyright this week, and it is affecting many YouTube stars. They are claiming that dozens or even hundreds of their videos are being removed. Since these claims are automatic because of the new system, many game companies who own the copyrights in question are doing their best to help those affected by the new system.

According to a lengthy report co-published by Pro Publica and the New York Times, American and British spy agencies have infiltrated World of Warcraft and Second Life, conducting surveillance and collecting data in the games played by millions of people around the globe, according to newly disclosed classified documents. Agents supposedly created characters to snoop and to try to recruit informers, and collected data and contents of communications between players, according to the documents disclosed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden.

Riot Games, makers of the popular MOBA game League of Legends, requires a lot from players who want to sign up with them to play professionally.

Newly anointed FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said this week that it would be okay for Internet service providers to charge Netflix and other companies for a faster lane to consumers. While some think that Wheeler's stance is surprising given that the FCC implemented the Open Internet Order in 2010 to stop ISPs from discriminating against certain types of traffic, anyone who knows Wheeler's past is not in the least bit surprised. Wheeler is a former lobbyist for the cable and wireless industries.

Only a few hours after it was revealed that cloud-based file-sharing destination Hotfile has agreed to pay $80 million to the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) as part of a settlement for a trial set to begin next week, the site went offline. Not only did the site go offline, but it took all of the user content being stored on its servers with it. Users who stored legal personal and business-related documents are now left in much the same situation that Megaupload users were left in, but this time it can't be blamed on anyone except the service provider.

You've probably heard of games being cancelled while being in early development, in beta, and at various stages of development but one game is likely the first to be cancelled after it has been released. Published by 505 Games and developed by Trickstar, Ashes Cricket 2013 is the first game to be cancelled publicly by a publisher - in addition to being unceremoniously pulled from Steam for being awful. Naturally 505 Games points its fingers at the game's developer who did not deliver a game up to anyone's standards.

Is this next story officially the dumbest story of 2013? I don't know but it has to be in the running. Some users who bought Xbox One systems with failing disc drives say you can solve the problem by punching your console. Yes, you've read that correctly: people are so frustrated with the Xbox One that they have decided to, as Wally Cleaver liked to say (an obscure 1950's reference to the show Leave it to Beaver) "Give it the business."

We are not sure if the man in this video shot outside a Montreal Best Buy is pulling an elaborate prank, is genuinely angry about something or is simply out of his flipping mind, but it provides the official "WTF" moment of the day. If you watch the video to your left you'll see a man appear in the frame suddenly go berserk with what we assume is a freshly purchased PlayStation 4. He angrily tears at the console's box, raises it over his head and slams it on to the pavement.

I am pretty sure his warranty doesn't cover THAT.

You can't make this stuff up. Foxconn, the company best known for bad press related to the way it treats its factory workers (who assemble products from Apple and other technology giants in the world) will soon be making mobile games.

Taiwan’s Fair Trade Commission (FTC) has fined Samsung and two local PR firms for what it described as an organized campaign to post positive reviews of its products, while maligning competitors' products. Samsung reportedly carried this plan out through two local public relations firms who used a "large number of hired writers and designated employees" to get the job done. Samsung and the two local firms were fined $100,000 each, though the original fine it faced was much higher - as much as $1 million.

A special needs student who brought a picture of a bomb to school that he drew has been suspended. The student, 13-year-old Rhett Parham, enjoys drawing and watching videos of his favorite game Bomberman 64 on YouTube.

He drew a picture of an a old fashioned bomb and took it to his school - Hillcrest Middle School in Simpsonville, SC. At one point on Monday during one of his classes, he told his classmates that he "had a bomb" and showed them his drawing. This apparently led to the school suspending him.

His mother, Amy Parham, was shocked and outraged.

Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus recently said that he's bored with games. Pincus made his comments during a Q&A at a Tel Aviv, Israel-based startup called Garage Geeks that he was visiting. Pincus took questions from attendees and was asked by Israeli venture capitalist Yossi Vardi what his current favorite games were.

"Right now, I'm pretty bored with all games," Pincus replied, according to a Wall Street Journal writer attending the event.

A nine-year old boy from Orlando, Florida has been placed in "home confinement" for bring weapons to school. His father claims that the boy brought "an unloaded handgun, a magazine with six bullets inside, a steak knife and a small-handled sledge hammer" to school because he was emulating what the main character "Steve" does in Minecraft.

"They use hammers to dig and knives and guns to protect themselves from zombies," he said, according to the a report from Orlando news station WFTV.

When the smart phone revolution began five years ago, the National Security Agency began looking for ways to crack the myriad of devices that were hitting the market including iPhones, Android devices, and Black Berry devices. Black Berry devices were the most popular among politicians and business people at the time.

Earlier today, we reported that the White House had appointed the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, a guy who has by his own admission lied to Congress about the NSA spying on Americans, to "establish a Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies" to assess the NSA's surveillance efforts.

Australian nurse Katrina Fincham had struck it big by playing World of Warcraft. After earning around $75,000 by farming and selling gold in the popular MMORPG from Blizzard, she decided to convert that cold hard cash into cold hard gold bullion. After doing that she put it in her wall safe at her Adelaide home. All was right with the world, but then something horrible happened: her house was robbed and her wall safe was emptied!

On Friday President Barack Obama promised to create an outside and independent review board to look into the NSA's surveillance efforts. Today we have learned that the person who has been selected to oversee this undertaking is less than credible. In a letter obtained by TechDirt (thanks EZK), we learn that it's the same old same old in D.C.

There's a petition for everything it seems. For example, there's currently a petition on Change.org to make playable Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime in the upcoming Super Smash Bros. game for Wii U and 3DS. The petition directed at game producer Sora Sakurai and Nintendo has already garnered 7,752 supporters as of this writing. Here's a bit from the petition appeal:

The next Super Smash Bros. for the Wii U and 3DS will not have a Story Mode because of... the Internet. Yeah, apparently Super Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai said in his bi-weekly column in Weekly Famitsu that story mode and CG cutscenes would be eliminated from the next game because the movie scenes from it were uploaded onto the Internet. Yeah, that's really the reason for it.

The results of a new survey released today by the Newseum Institute shows that roughly 34 percent of Americans think that the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees, up from 13 percent in last year's survey. This is the largest single-year increase in the history of the State of the First Amendment national survey. The survey has been conducted since 1997 to determine public opinion about First Amendment rights and issues. The results were released today by First Amendment Center President Ken Paulson and Newseum Institute Chief Operating Officer Gene Policinski.

A former Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer claims that a bet on a Wii game competition involving sex as the prize was what triggered him murdering her in self defense. Keith Wiens is currently on trial for shooting his common law wife and faces a charge of second degree murder. Wiens testified this week, admitting that he fired a single shot into the head of Lynn Kalmring in August 2011 at their Penticton (British Columbia, Canada) home, but maintained that he did it in self defense because she was brandishing a knife.

Would you buy a peripheral - for the purposes of training yourself to be a better gamer - that gives you feedback in the form of an electric shock? If the answer to that question is "yes," then you might be interested in the $249 Foc.us, "a tDCS [transcranial Direct Current Stimulation] headset for gamers" that allows users to "overclock your brain to increase the plasticity." The Foc.us comes with an iOS app so that the headset "can be controlled manually using the touch sensor."

Hearing about the youth of China selling their vital organs for something stupid is nothing new, but apparently the trend continues... Kotaku (by way of Tencent) reports that an 18-year-old Chinese man surnamed Zhang from the Gangsu province has sold his kidney. Zhang had to find a way to pay down some debt he apparently amassed while playing "video games" according to the Chinese press.