Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA) President Hal Halpin offers his insights on video game ownership - a topic that has caused cheers for Sony and jeers for Microsoft at E3 in Los Angeles this week.

Here's something you may not know: Glenn Jacobs, the man who plays the "Big Red Monster" Kane character on World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) and a co-holder of the WWE World Tag Team Championships, is also the co-founder of the conservative group, The Tennessee Liberty Alliance.

Three editorials offer just about every side of the New Jersey Governor's push to study and then regulate the sale of violent video games in the State. The first two are two different sides from a special dueling editorial in The Star-Ledger called "Do violent video games breed violent behavior?". The first one, "Do violent video games breed violent behavior? Yes " was written by Paul Boxer of Rutgers-Newark.

Don't like always-on games or consoles - you know, stuff that requires you to be connected constantly to the Internet in order to use it? Well former Epic Games creative director Cliff Bleszinski thinks that there's no avoiding a future filled with always online requirements and he thinks it is "coming soon and it's coming fast." Bleszinski made his comment in a recent personal blog post - a space where he often tackles subjects that drive gamers crazy. Clearly this is one of them.

Back when OnLive was launched in 2010, cloud gaming was seen as a leviathan rising from the deep. On paper, the concept was not only pretty watertight, but it was a strong contender to traditional gaming models (especially the console market).

Cloud gaming was going to happen. It was just a question of logistics.

SimCity's "always-online requirement" may have irritated consumers at launch, but by most accounts anyone that reads this or any other gaming web site was well aware that the game would require a constant Internet connection in order to play (EA made that fact clear quite awhile ago).

The UK tabloid The Sun is running a feature length story about a saucy calendar featuring gaming and scantily clad women that is apparently all the rage in Germany - right alongside David Hasselhoff... The article is titled "Nerd is the word," and highlights the fact that the "calendar featuring classic gaming consoles and sexy girls" is a "big hit.." We think it's a big miss personally because it objectifies women in the name of geek culture.

In direct response to last month’s shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the following has happened:

Children's rights advocate and attorney Paul Mones (@MonesPaul on Twitter) delivers a "Perry Mason moment" in a new editorial over at the Huffington Post titled "Video Games Hold No Answers." In it Mones notes that making a connection between violent crimes committed by teens based on the video games, movies, or even mu

IGN has a pretty interesting feature on the video game industry taking part in Vice-President Joe Biden's Gun Violence Commission called "The Politics of Violence." What is interesting about this feature is that it solicits the opinions of "20 of the top game writers" in the United States including Adam Sessler from Rev3 Games, Ben Kuchera from Penny Arcade Report, Ben Silverman from Yahoo!

Following up on comments he made earlier last month, Mutant Mudds and Dementium developer Jools Watsham clarified his comments about the Nintendo 3DS and piracy in a new blog post (as reported by Eurogamer). Concerned that some in the community took his comments to be a slight against Nintendo and the 3DS platform, Watsham tried to clarify what he meant.

On Friday morning's edition of Morning Joe on cable news network MSNBC Congressman Tim Huelskamp (R-Kansas) said that he doesn't think changes in guns laws would have stopped the Sandy Elementary School shooting last week that resulted in the death of 20 children and six adults. He also talked about violent video games, but to the congressman's credit he mentioned his own parental responsibility in keeping his son from playing "M" rated games.

Andrew Eisen's latest video is probably not safe for work, school, or your local church group, but it raises an interesting point about who among the human race might be categorized as a$$h*les.

From DRM to piracy and attitudes about the holidays, Andrew lays it all down in the simplest terms and with the most colorful language he has used to date. You can check out his latest video on his YouTube channel or to your left.

Well, the Wii U has been out in the States for a few weeks now and many of you have gone hands-on with it.  So, how do you think Nintendo’s new console stacks up to the competition from a graphics standpoint?

This is sure to put analyst Michael Pachter on someone's naughty list: Recently he said that Activision needs to start charging a fee for the multiplayer portion of its Call of Duty games. Wedbush Securities industry analyst Michael Pachter made his comments during the Digital Game Monetization Summit in San Francisco, California (as reported by GamesIndustry International). During his presentation he said that Activision made a serious mistake when it didn't implement a subscription-based model for Call of Duty multiplayer.

My, Mr. Zelnick sure is chatty this week.

Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick told GameSpot UK that the secret to Grand Theft Auto's continued success is the fact that the games are released years apart, making each debut special.

"It's our view that if you want intellectual properties to be permanent," said Zelnick, "then you run the risk in that circumstance of having consumers fall out of love with that franchise. [Activision] obviously views the world differently."

The transition to the next generation of consoles will not be without a few casualties, says Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick.

"If you're not capitalized for the transition, you can find out that you're not there for the transition. And historically, in every transition that's occurred in this business, one or two third-parties have gone out of business."

Seizing on a new national survey in Australia, two "experts" have used it as an opportunity to warn parents of the dangers of video gaming. A survey conducted by the Interactive Games and Entertainment Association with the help of Bond University, found that right around 95 percent of boys between the ages of 6 and 15 described themselves as gamers. The survey of more than 1200 Australian households also found that the most popular genres among this age group were first-person shooters, action and fighting games and role-playing games.

In a guest post on GIGA OM, Ben Lee, the legal counsel for Twitter argues that it's high time that those who want to go to war over patents - particularly those who use lawsuits as a business model as opposed to actually building anything - should have to bear the cost of litigation.

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have decided to capitalize on the release of Pokémon Black and White 2 (it was released this Sunday) with the release of a game that depicts the abuse Pokémon might go through in their own special web game called Pokémon Black and Blue. Their catchphrase for the game is "gotta free 'em all."

Are there any themes or topics that should never be explored in a video game?

In episode 14 of the Super Podcast Action Committee, Andrew Eisen and E. Zachary Knight talk about the UK researcher who thinks parents should be arrested for buying their children age inappropriate games, Ubisoft's rootkit controversy, the results from last week's poll at GamePolitics about Humble Bundles, EA's lawsuit against Zynga, the death of the Cybersecurity Act in the Senate, and a whole lot more.

An editorial in the Baltimore Sun written by former White House and Pentagon official Douglas MacKinnon laments the "lessons lost" that could have come out of the Aurora, Colorado shooting about what the author calls "a culture that desensitizes us to violence." While his general sentiment that there are lessons to be learned about the shooting, what those lessons are or might be are up for debate.

In Episode 12 of Super Podcast Action Committee, Andrew Eisen and E. Zachary Knight discuss Fez developer Phil Fish's decision not to fix the patch for the game before re-releasing it to Xbox Live (because it costs too much money), Uniloc's patent infringement claims against Minecraft maker Mojang, last week's results from the GamePolitics poll, and the media trying to blame Batman comics, movies and games for the horrific Aurora, Colorado theater shooting.

Families of victims and survivors of the deadly shooting at the Dark Knight Rises opening movie who might want to sue the film studio Warner Bros or other companies such as AMC theaters, but experts say that history shows these lawsuits don't tend to get very far because it's tough to prove a liability. The reason that such lawsuits usually fall flat is because companies are rarely held liable for "intentional crimes of non-employees" and the ruling in Brown v.

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.

In an interview with Reuters, the US Court of Appeals (Chicago) judge who recently tossed the patent litigation case between Apple and Motorola described patent litigants as "animals" and said that many companies should not have patent protections.

If you are reading the web, playing a Facebook game, or watching a YouTube video, you could be violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1984 - at least according to the way the Justice Department has interpreted it in several recent cases. The law was originally passed to protect government computer systems and financial databases from hackers, but amendments and new interpretations by federal prosecutors have taken a well defined law into broad interpretation.

If 38 Studios is forced to sell the IP related to Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning and the MMO Project Copernicus (set in the same universe), one wonders how much both properties would be worth. Joystiq decided to ask Wedbush Morgan analyst Michael Pachter for a valuation and he came to the conclusion that 38 Studios' IP is worth about $20 million.

 The Angry Joe show is pretty angry and anyone with basic English skills should note the tone of his show with the use of an adverb as his first name. Still Joe has a lot to be angry about with Street Fighter X Tekken, because, as he notes in his latest video, it's not like Capcom hasn’t faced the outrage of fans over the practice he is ranting and raving about ("DLC" on the disc) in the past...