Valve has decided that players in the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive community should be able to police themselves. With that in mind, the company has launched a beta of a new system it has called Overwatch. The system will choose reputable members of the game's community to serve as investigators. When playing the game they'll have a special "Overwatch button" that will alert them that a case is pending to evaluate.

The murder trial of Chris Harris from Arminton, Illinois began earlier this month in Peoria, Illinois. Harris is accused of murdering Rick and Ruth Gee and three of their children with a tire iron in the family’s Beason home in late September 2009. One of the children, a three-year-old girl, survived the attack. Prosecutors laid out what happened after brothers Chris and Jason Harris, intoxicated from a night of drinking and doing cocaine visited the Gee home in search of marijuana.

An attorney for convicted Deltona, Florida mass murderer Troy Victorino will once again attempt to appeal his client's conviction during arguments this week before the Florida Supreme Court. In September 2006, Victorino and another killer were sentenced to death for the brutal 2004 slaying of six people and a dog using baseball bats and knives. The crime has been described as one of the most gruesome mass killings in the state's history.

A wheelchair-bound gamer who regularly appeared on Twitch.tv has been accused of faking his disability after he stood up and walked while on camera. No, he was not broadcasting live from a faith healers temple - he just sort of did it while his camera was on. Now he is facing the outrage and wrath of the gaming community and the punitive verdict of Twitch.tv, according to Eurogamer.

An 18-year-old Oxford man (Thomas Frongillo) has been arrested for allegedly threatening to shoot up Anna Maria College in Paxton, Massachusetts. He was released on $50,000 bail after his arraignment in Western Worcester District Court in East Brookfield. Frongillo who is studying criminal justice at Anna Maria and is currently in the police academy there.

An interesting story via the Huffington Post (based on this CBC report) details sexual predators in the United States using online games and consoles to talk to children in Canada. This particular report focuses on Winnipeg, but it's not far-fetched to imagine that if it's happening in one province, it's happening to some degree in other provinces as well.

A 14-year-old in Washington state has been charged with attempted murder for allegedly shooting both of his parents in the head after they restricted him from electronic devices - including playing video games. On Monday, Grant County prosecutors asked the court that the 14-year-old, Nathon Brooks, be tried as an adult on attempted murder charges.

A former executive from GameStop's Texas division has been sentenced to 51 months in prison for embezzling $1.7 million from the company by setting up a shell company, according to an announcement by the U.S. Attorney's Office. Frank Christopher Olivera, the now former Vice President of corporate communications and public affairs at GameStop Texas was convicted this week.

A Connecticut high school went into lockdown mode this afternoon after a threatening note was discovered in a hallway, the Weston Forum reports. Weston High school, which is located in the southern part of the state and not too far from Newtown, was locked down after a note was found threatening specific members of the school staff and students.

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund points out a new two-part report produced by the Hartford Courant and PBS that reveals how video games continue to be part of the ongoing narrative of the police investigation into the Sandy Hook Elementary school shooting that occurred in Newtown Connecticut in December of last year.

The brutal murder of a 31-year-old woman is being attributed to the tenuous association of the killer's time playing Final Fantasy XIV. These conclusions are being drawn by two German tabloids, according to this Kotaku report. The 31-year-old woman, Katrin M. (the last names of both the victim and the killer are being withheld) was reportedly murdered by 18- or 19-year old Marco F, who stabbed the victim 18 times using a katana.

Quest Academy in Las Vegas, Nevada is a charter school that is supposed to spend the funds it generates to give children a better education, but the school's principal had other ideas on how to spend the money, according to Action 13 News.

Update: The New York Daily News claims that "Local media" are reporting that the teen was a "home schooled teen [who] wasn’t allowed to play video games, and that his family never let him watch violent shows on television." We're not sure of the validity of that part of the NYDN story because it's a third-hand account. Thanks Andrew Eisen for passing that bit along.

It looks like two Internet service providers accused of installing spyware on their customers' computers in order to serve up ads to them will not have to worry about a class action suit filed against them going any further, according to this Courthouse News report.

Final Update: A number of things about our previous story are proving to be erroneous as more details about the shooting today in Newtown, Connecticut comes to light. Here is what we know so far:

Adam Lanza, and not Ryan Lanza (his older brother) has been identified as the shooter. His brother Ryan Lanza, who lives in Hoboken, New Jersey is being questioned by police. Lanza's father, who lives in Connecticut, was similarly questioned, one of the law enforcement officials said.

Sony Online Entertainment CEO John Smedley wants cheaters to know that he will hunt them down to the ends of the earth and ban them from the recently launched first-person sci-fi online shooter PlanetSide 2. Smedley took to Twitter to let the community know that he will not let cheaters ruin the game for everyone else.

A former high ranking executive at retailer GameStop has pled guilty to embezzling $2 million from the company. According to a federal indictment filed on Friday, former vice president of corporate communications and public affairs for GameStop Chris Olivera diverted a couple million from the company into a personal business account. Olivera was able to do this, the indictment claims, because he processed invoices from vendors.

The owner of Salt Lake City-based Sensory Sweep Studio is going to spend some quality time in jail. David M. Rushton began serving a yearlong jail sentence on October 10 at the Salt Lake County Jail for failing to pay more than 100 employees. He was also fined $1.2 million. Rushton took a plea deal in the rare criminal case for nonpayment of wages brought by the Utah Attorney General's office - but he plans to appeal the verdict to a higher court...

A war of words between Gawker Media and the Reddit community might make for some marvelous online drama, but it doesn't sit well with Wishan Wong, chief executive of Reddit. An internal memo obtained by Gawker and attributed Wong, reveals that Reddit's CEO thinks free speech is paramount to the community but that the ban on Gawker links is not a good idea.

If you're a video game tester and you act like a dumb ass (allegedly) you'll probably get fired. Just ask 20-something Blake Marsh, who decided to try a little political comedy with a dash of misogyny and hate on his Facebook page. It's too bad for Marsh that his bosses at Eidos Montreal weren't laughing when they found out.

Following a failed assassination attempt by suspect Richard Bain on the newly-elected Quebec premier-designate Pauline Marois that saw one person killed and another severely injured, Marsh decided to make light of the crime:

Minecraft creator and Mojang co-founder Markus 'Notch' Persson is very unhappy about an incident that happened at his PAX Minecraft party (which, to be clear, was an off-site, private party) and the way the on-site security handled the situation. The grisly details of the sexual assault are detailed by the victim, an attendee named Ky. She recounts the horrific event on her blog:

If you were expecting smooth sailing with Steam Greenlight, Valve's new community initiative that lets them decide which indies should get on Steam in the timeliest manner, then you are probably delusional. While the core idea of it works, there's always going to be people that use the system to basically waste people's time and be offensive.

According to an Associated Press story found on Time's Techland, the person that was arrested for burglarizing Apple co-founder Steve Job's Palo Alto, California home stole his wallet and his driver’s license, along with other items including Apple products and jewelry, according to a police report released Tuesday.

Reporting on James Holmes' day in court today, Fox News tries to make a connection to World of Warcraft. We assume this is to tie video games to the shootings in Aurora, Colorado earlier this month, but the connection is about as tenuous as lights over Roswell, New Mexico being definitive proof that extraterrestrials exists...

Holmes was formally charged with 24 counts of murder, 116 counts of attempted murder, one count of possession of explosives, and one count of a crime of violence.

Twenty-four-year-old college student James Holmes appeared in court this morning to face charges for killing 12 and wounding 79 others at a midnight screening of the film "The Dark Knight Rises" on Friday in Aurora, Colorado. The Courthouse News report described the suspect as looking "dazed and exhausted" as he appeared in court wearing the standard issue maroon prison jumpsuit.

Unfortunately CNN contributors aren't the only ones speculating on the motivations of 24-year-old Colorado mass-murder suspect James Holmes.

Three men have been arrested for their part in bombing a home in New Jersey, but the most bizarre thing about the case is a vague connection to a "video game community." What video game community? We do not know, nor does the New York CBS station that published the story or the victimized family who made the comment.

There's probably two lessons to be learned from the following story: don't take video games too seriously and don't engage your neighbor when they are agitated and engaged in an active argument (call the police instead).

Way back in June we detailed the trouble Anita Sarkeesian ran into after launching a Kickstarter for a video series called "Tropes vs. Women in Video Games." Despite the negative and frankly inappropriate feedback to the Kickstarter, the project generated $158,922 in funding. The original goal was $6,000.

A St. Louis, Missouri man who has already been sentenced to 290 years in prison for a litany of sexual crimes against children, has been found guilty of even more crimes. Last year 42-year-old Leland Beasley was convicted for multiple child pornography crimes in U.S. District Court and was sentenced to a lengthy stay at a federal prison.