THQ announced yesterday that it will open a new office in Shanghai in order to tap into what the company terms "the fast growing Chinese market."

THQ has plans to launch Company of Heroes Online in China later in its fiscal year. The free-to-play RTS game will be based on a micro-transaction-driven business model. THQ exec Martin Good commented:

The Asian markets represent a significant growth opportunity for THQ, particularly as we execute on our strategy to grow revenue from online gaming, an increasingly important segment for our industry. We look forward to continuing to build new publishing and development relationships in China to expand our presence in this important and fast growing gaming market.

According to THQ, China's online games market was valued at $1.7 billion last year, with some 42 million players. Expectations are that the market will expand to $4.2 billion by 2010. 

The vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of China's National People's Congress has called for closer monitoring of children who use the Internet.

As reported by Xinhua, Li Jianguo is purportedly concerned about preventing addiction. From the Xinhua story:

About 10 percent of the estimated 40 million Chinese children using the Internet were addicted, said Li, secretary-general of the top legislature, in a report on the implementation of the Law on the Protection of Juveniles since it came into force in June 2007.

 

The figures were collected from 11 provinces after a two-month survey, said Li, noting that Internet addiction was mainly caused by on-line games and a lack of supervision by the authorities. Li said the management and supervision of Internet games and Internet cafes must be strengthened, and he urged researchers to study methods to help minors avoid Internet addiction. 
 
 

GP: China, of course, is notorious for both blocking and monitoring the Internet access of its citizens - often with the technical help of American corporations like Google, Cisco, Yahoo! and Microsoft.

While running your character on a long trek through your favorite MMO, have you ever imagined how great it would be to get so much exercise in real life?

The marketing site for Mana Energy Potion has posted a fascinating account of how two WoW players connected treadmills to their PCs and used their own 6mph locomotion to power their avatars:

We decided on a run from the gates of Shadowglen, through Dolanaar, to the sentries of Darnassus. We took level 1-2 elves so there would be a real danger that we'd get attacked along the way...

 

I'd first like to point out that Eli is in quite good shape. I, however, am not... We thought it would be a good representation of the gamut of gamers if we both ran the race. We donned the cheapest heart monitors we could find for kicks...

 

Eli and I stayed pretty even throughout the whole run. But about 3 minutes in, my heart rate reached over 205 BPM, and my max is around 195 BPM. I had to slow down to a walk because I thought I was going to pass out. Running in WoW is no joke... 

Final Fantasy XI gamer catwho, posting on liberal political supersite Daily Kos, describes using her feminine wiles (read: cleavage) in an attempt to win a "player of the month" election on a popular Final Fantasy XI fan site. Posted under The Politics of Video Games, catwho writes:

While the Presidential war rages on, I'm fighting the good fight on a video game forum of all places...  But now, I'm in a race on that very forum -- for Player of the Month for my video game.  This is more or less like the Democratic Primaries where it came down to Clinton and Obama -- I'm the only girl in the race, and it's the funny popular guy that is my main competition...

 

More or less, the "race" is just a popularity contest.  Unlike the Democratic primary, however, this is a no-holds-barred knock-down drag-em-out slugfest.  I'm behind in votes, so I offer to sing songs for people.  I surge ahead briefly.  Then I break out the big guns and post a shot of my cleavage.  (Sexism? What's that?)  My competitor responds by posting a pic of his man cleavage, chest hair and all.  Words cannot describe the horrors contained in this image...

GP: Seems like it worked. Election results on Allakhazam show catwho edging out her nearest competitor.

The BBC reports that gold farming, a practice much despised by some MMO gamers, is a $500 million global business, employing a half-million people.

Citing research conducted by Prof. Richard Heeks of Manchester University, the BBC reports that 80% of worldwide gold farming is based in China. Workers there earn about $145 per month for their efforts. Said Heeks:

I initially became aware of gold farming through my own games-playing but assumed it was just a cottage industry. In a way that is still true. It's just that instead of a few dozen cottages, there turn out to be tens of thousands... I was drawn to write about gold farming due to my perception that it's a significant phenomenon that academics and development organisations are unaware of...

 

It is also a glimpse into the digital underworld. Or at least the edges of a digital underworld populated by scammers and hackers and pornographers and which has spread to the "Third World" far more than we typically realise.

Heeks maintains that the worldwide gold farming business has already surpassed the annual revenue of India's booming software outsourcing market:

Meanwhile, Secure Play exec Steven Davis doesn't expect an end to gold farming anytime soon:

When you get people with more money than time and time than money the two will find a way to meet... You could get rid of it," he said, "but you would get rid of one of the most fundamental parts of player-to-player interaction.
 

A 33-year-old North Carolina postal worker is under arrest after she traveled to Delaware in an attempt to kidnap the 50-something man who jilted her on Second Life.

As Destructoid reports, Kimberly Jernigan's romance with the man ended shortly after they met in real life:

...in the beginning of August, Kimberly allegedly drove to her ex-boyfriend's Pennsylvania workplace and attempted to kidnap the man at gunpoint. Apparently she couldn't even manage that successfully, and had to come back two weeks later and track him down to his Delaware home...

 

she lay in wait for him with a set of handcuffs, a roll of duct tape, a taser, a BB gun and her dog Gogi. Her foolproof scheme failed after the man simply ran away, having entered to find a laser beam pointed at his chest. Kimberley had fled soon after, but her dog was discovered bound in duct tape and abandoned in the bathroom to stop him making noise. She was found an hour later in Maryland and taken into custody after a "brief struggle" at a rest stop.
 

GP: Wait. She duct-taped the dog? 

Video reports here...

This can't be good for your health - or your psyche.

Yahoo! Games reports that the most recent update to Final Fantasy XI added an apparently unbeatable boss. "Pandemonium Warden" survived an assault by a group of high-level players which lasted 18 hours:

...it has sparked debate over what exactly the game's developers, Square-Enix, expect out of their devoted fan base. Message boards have lit up with disgruntled players calling out the company for failing to respect its very own in-game warning telling players they have "no desire to see your real life suffer as a consequence [of playing]. Don't forget your friends, your family, your school or your work..."

 

"People were passing out and getting physically ill," leaders of the player guild said in a forum post. "We decided to end it before we risked turning into a horrible news story about how video games ruin people's lives."

Blizzard's success, along with its recent acquisition by Activision, has even business types sitting up and taking notice.

The World of Warcraft publisher is currently profiled by Business Week, where scribe Matt Vella does a good job explaining Blizzard to the suit and tie crowd. And while most gamers will automatically think of WoW, Starcraft and Diablo, the company has its fingers in a surprising number of pies:

Blizzard presides over an ever-expanding universe composed of not only blockbuster games but also action figures, novels, manga, board games, pen-and-paper role-playing games, apparel, and conferences. In South Korea, where competitive video gaming is a televised sport, Blizzard's decade-old game StarCraft inspires such fervent loyalty that tournaments still draw some 700,000 spectators a year, nurturing a niche industry worth $40 million annually. Legendary Pictures, the studio behind blockbuster comic book adaptations like Batman Begins and 300, is currently working on a big-budget, live-action film based on WoW slated for 2009. 

You hear it a lot: PC gaming is dead. Or, at least, terminally ill.

However, the PC Gaming Alliance, a trade group formed to boost the PC end of the game business, maintains that the future is bright for those who prefer to game on computers.

Speaking at GCDC in Leipzig, PCGA president Randy Stude (left) cited key findings from the group's first Horizons Report. Among the more noteworthy points:

• PC gaming was a $10.7 billion industry during the year of 2007
• Retail sales accounted for just 30 percent of total revenues
• Growth was largely driven by online revenues from Asia, the world’s largest market, which is approaching half of total worldwide sales.
• Online PC gaming revenue led the way in 2007 with $4.8 billion, nearly double the worldwide retail sales numbers for PC games.
• Digital distribution sales approached $2 billion
• Advertising revenues from websites, portals, and in-game ads accounted for $800 million.

Commenting on the findings, Stude said:

Our analysis clearly shows incredible growth in online PC gaming, proof that this industry is far stronger than anyone has reported. Today’s consumers shop where they live - online.

David Cole, DFC Intelligence analyst, added:

The real key has been the rapid growth in penetration of broadband-connected PCs in all markets around the world. Broadband-connected PCs are the key driver of growth for PC gaming. DFC Intelligence estimated that by the end of 2007 less than one-third of households in the top 20 markets for games had a high-speed Internet connection. That clearly indicates that there is still plenty of growth to come.

At one time, Second Life was viewed as having great potential for promoting political campaigns.

However, the Houston Chronicle points out that in the current presidential election, Barack Obama and John McCain have largely ignored the SL metaverse:

Campaigns haven't figured out how to reconcile the all-important image and fundraising with a world in which a Gothic nymph can sit in on a congressional hearing - or a Teddy bear might try to donate to a political campaign.

 

So for now, the Second Life campaign headquarters of Barack Obama and John McCain are pristine, glistening and completely vacant most of the time...

 

Fundraising is still not an option in Second Life, as there is no way to monitor where the donations are coming from, and the majority of players are from outside the U.S.

Julie Germany of the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet told the Chronicle:

It's been written about in fiction and cyberpunk, this idea that these online worlds could actually be used for political purposes, whether it is to recruit supporters, or train people to take action or to fund raise. It just hasn't exploded the way other online tools have exploded.

Former congressional aide Nancy Scola, who was involved in former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner's much-discussed 2006 visit to SL (screenshot at left), added that options like Facebook, YouTube and MySpace are dominating the online side of politics:

All the air's been sucked out of the room... If you're working inside a campaign, your single goal is to get your guy in the White House.  It doesn't leave a lot of room and motivation to play with new technology. Why mess with what's working?
 

How can we preserve the history of events which occur in virtual worlds? And why would we want to?

The BBC reports that researchers at the University of Texas, Austin are studying ways in which MMO history could be recorded. Said Prof. Megan Winget (left):

It's a huge challenge for archivists to deal with digital information. One of the most interesting problems for digital preservation is interactivity and how difficult that is to preserve. Video games offer all of the same problems as digital art. They are interactive, very complex and a lot of people get involved in making them happen...

 

We want to raise the consciousness in the industry about how important these records are. I do not think they save anything or it's saved in such a way that they would not be able to recognise the significance of what they are holding.

 

Key events mentioned as perhaps worthy of documenting include an outbreak of  virtual plague in World of Warcraft, the assassination of Lord British in Ultima Online and the death of Morpheus in The Matrix Online. Said Winget:

A lot of people have mentioned [Lord British's death] to me as a pivotal moment in their lives. I would like to talk to people who experienced that, saw it happen or where they were when they heard about it. Maybe we can talk to the people who did it and whether they knew Lord British was [Ultima series creator] Richard Garriott.

A report issued by the ESET Malware Intelligence maintains that July's most prevalent forms of malware targeted online gamers.

From Global Threat Trends - July 2008:

During the month of July 2008, close to 12.72% of all threat detections were flagged as Win32/PSW.OnLineGames. This is a family of Trojans with keylogging and rootkit capabilities which gather information relating to online games and credentials for participating. Characteristically, the information is sent to a remote intruder’s PC...

 

It’s important for participants in MMORPGs...  like Lineage and World of Warcraft, as well as “metaverses” like Second Life, to be aware of the range of threats ranged against them: not just harassment nuisances like griefing and pointless quasi-viral attacks like grey goo, but phishing and other scams that can result in financial loss in the real world. Their objective in such cases is to steal account information or game items and then resell them on the black market (or at any rate on eBay). 

ESET issues monthly threat reports. For the past three months, online gaming has been at the top of their malware threat list.

Worried that your ISP is choking your bandwidth?

Then jump over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF has released Switzerland, a free tool with which users can "test the integrity" of their Internet connection. Fred von Lohmann, EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney, remarked:

The sad truth is that the FCC is ill-equipped to detect ISPs interfering with your Internet connection. It's up to concerned Internet users to investigate possible network neutrality violations, and EFF's Switzerland software is designed to help with that effort. Comcast isn't the first, and certainly won't be the last, ISP to meddle surreptitiously with its subscribers' Internet communications for its own benefit.

Peter Eckersley, EFF Staff Technologist and designer of Switzerland, added:

Until now, there hasn't been a reliable way to tell if somebody -- a hacker, an ISP, corporate firewall, or the Great Firewall of China -- is modifying your Internet traffic en route. The few tests available have been for narrow and specific kinds of interference, or have required tremendous amounts of advanced forensic labor. Switzerland is designed to make general-purpose ISP testing faster and easier.

Switzerland is described as an open source, command-line tool which will sniff out whether your ISP has modified or injected packets of data in your connection.

Via: boingboing

A consumer's difficulty in canceling a Final Fantasy XI account has led to a new Illinois law which mandates that MMO providers make an online cancellation option available. Companies are also required to provide online instructions on how to cancel.

As reported by Silicon Alley Insider:

Alex Edwards played Final Fantasy Online for a few months, then grew tired of the game... His parents Frank and Cinda, who were paying the $13 a month subscription, tried to cancel the account online.

 

But Final Fantasy didn't offer Cinda a way to do that online, and didn't offer her a contact phone number, either. The Edwards finally found the number via their credit card statement -- but when they called, they spent an hour and 45 minutes on hold before someone answered the phone...

 

But unfortunately for Square Enix, who makes Final Fantasy, Frank Edwards is an alderman in Springfield, Illinois and a good friend of his local State Rep. Raymond Poe.

After hearing the Edwards' story, Rep. Poe (R) introduced a bill, HB4178, which passed both the Illinois House and Senate in May. Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) signed it into law on Tuesday.

Here's a summary:

...an Internet gaming service provider that provides service to a consumer... for a stated term that is automatically renewed for another term unless a consumer cancels the service must give a consumer who is an Illinois resident: (1) a secure method at the Internet gaming service provider's web site that the consumer may use to cancel the service, which method shall not require the consumer to make a telephone call or send U.S. Postal Service mail to effectuate the cancellation;

 

and (2) instructions that the consumer may follow to cancel the service at the Internet gaming service provider's web site. Makes it an unlawful business practice for an Internet gaming service provider to violate the new provisions.
 

GP: From a consumer standpoint, it's hard to argue with this one. Plus, Gov. Blagojevich gets to sign a video game bill that might actually survive this time. His 2005 attempt to regulate violent game sales was declared unconstitutional and cost Illinois about a half-million bucks in legal fees.

In a terrific roundup, Winda Benedetti, MSNBC's Citizen Gamer, surveys some of the more controversial independent game offerings and asks whether such games are an appropriate medium for sensitive topics.

Among other titles, Benedetti looks at Danny Ledonne's Super Columbine Massacre RPG (left), The Torture Game 2, Wafaa Bilal's Virtual Jihadi, Operation Pedopriest, and Harpooned. There are, of course, critics:

"You don’t gain appreciation for the [Columbine] tragedy by repeating it and participating in a recreation yourself and taking the role of murderers,” says Tim Winter, president of the Parents Television Council, in an interview for a documentary film Ledonne recently completed about his experiences making the game, and the aftermath.

“This is totally immoral and should be banned to everyone, especially younger teenagers,” wrote a reader calling herself Ms. Johnson in response to my recent column about “The Torture Game 2,”  a controversial Web game that allows players to torture a man-like person tied up with ropes.

David Kociemba, an art prof at Emerson College who appears in Ledonne's film, says:

The controversy should be that there aren’t more games like ‘Super Columbine Massacre RPG!’ that are as demanding and as artistically innovative... Why is it permitted for Michael Moore in 2002, to make ‘Bowling For Columbine’ — a film essay on this subject — and to use far more graphic footage than Danny Ledonne does three years later in a primitive low-res video game? Are we really going to say that video game designers are the one set of artists that do not have the right to engage in contemporary political issues?

Earlier this week Hasbro DMCA'd Scrabulous right off of Facebook.

But the popular Scrabble knockoff has returned with a new name - Wordscraper - and a slightly new look.

Cnet reports:

The game has effectively returned, but with a redesigned board, a few original play options, a different points tabulation system, and a new name...

 

The reason for Scrabulous' extreme makeover has its roots in some pretty gray legal matters: the real problem wasn't that it ripped off Scrabble, but that it ripped off Scrabble so blatantly. The colors of the board were the same, the list of rules led to a Wikipedia entry for Scrabble rules, and the two names were similar enough for Hasbro to cry foul...

 

So will this end the legal spat? Maybe... Many other games on Facebook bear strong-but-not-too-strong resemblances to board games like Battleship and Risk, but so far haven't encountered the same corporate scrutiny.

Unless they've been playing too much real-life beer pong, GamePolitics readers will likely recall the recent flap over the Wii-ware title formerly known as Beer Pong.

Released this week with an E rating, the renamed Pong Toss from JV Games sparked earlier protests from educators as well as a call from Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal (D) for the ESRB to re-rate the game as Adults Only.

Time has now bellied up to the bar to offer own examination of the Beer Pong controversy and finds that it was predictable given concerns over binge drinking:

Perhaps, in retrospect, JV Games should have seen this coming. After all, drinking games and video games may be two of college-kids' favorite pasttimes, but they are also a source of constant complaints from their middle-aged parents...

 

The controversy isn't entirely surprising. The point of beer pong is to get your friends drunk... Last fall, Georgetown University banned beer-pong... The University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Tufts University have also banned drinking games.

 

The anti-pong activism strikes JV Games' [co-owner Jag] Jaegar as somewhat fruitless. As long as students "have access to alcohol, they will create drinking games out of any activity," he says. More to the point, if students have access to alcohol, they'll drink it — no games necessary.

With knife crime a major social issue in the United Kingdom these days, it's probably no surprise that a Facebook app in which players "shank" one another is raising eyebrows.

Marketing Week reports that the stabbing game is part of Facebook's popular SuperPoke! application, created by Slide.com, an American firm. From the report:

The game...  has come in for heavy criticism from family members of those affected by the recent spate of teenage knife crimes. The use of the word "shank", a street slang term for a knife, has led to claims that the game is specifically targeted at teenagers...

 

The application encourages users to "do stuff to their friends", options include kicking and punching as well as more conventional activities such as smiling and sending flowers.

A knife icon which players sent to one another in the game has apparently been removed in response to protests.

Via: casualgaming.biz

According to a BBC report, 56-year-old John Darwin (left), on trial for faking his death in a canoeing accident, had an adulterous fling with a US woman he met in an unspecified online game.

Darwin's wife, Anne, revealed the MMO details yesterday while testifying for her own defense. The couple is charged with fraud in the case. From the BBC:

The court heard she eventually found out her husband was having an affair... Mrs Darwin said her husband turned secretive when he joined an internet role-playing game.

 

She said: "It was like a virtual world which was played over the internet. The people who played it became characters in this world and they had money to buy and sell things and they used to cast spells on each other. He became rather cagey when using the headphones and speaking into the computer if I came into the room. It was obvious he was in conversation."

 

Mr Darwin later flew out to Kansas in the US to meet a woman, who his wife believes he met while playing the game.

With tongue planted firmly in cheek, African American-themed website BlackVoices suggests that video game martial arts action might be just the tonic for the ugly situation between the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

The uproar started with Jackson's inadvertent comments that Obama has been "talking down to black people" and that Jackson wanted to "cuts his nuts off." (video here)

From the BlackVoices commentary:

Maybe this is how Barack Obama and Jesse Jackson can duke out their problems, man-to-man. None of this whispering under the breath. I think this video game is more dignified.

The game play footage is from DC Smackdown, which GamePolitics covered in December, 2007. If you find DC Smackdown objectionable, you're not alone.

We note also that the game's website, dcsmackdown.com, appears to no longer function.