Recent content by Stinking Kevin

Anyone who's ever written about games -- for pay or for fun -- we all owe so much to Bill Kunkel. More than anyone else I know of, he is the guy who figured out how games journalism should work, and he showed all of us how to make it work, in the independent, honest, unabashed, grown-up way that...

They are called hit points in D&D, video games borrowed the term from there. There are no health bars in pen-and-paper RPGs, except for the granola ones that hippies eat. Gary Gygax could have called them "health points," but he didn't -- probably because D&D evolved from tabletop war games...

The best that any study like this can ever do is to show a correlation between kids who claim to have played video game "X" and kids who answered "Y" to a survey question regarding compassion. Any claim of causality between the two is an act of faith, not science. My niece has been watching...

Most of the games I really enjoy don't have endings.

My first impression was that people were a lot nicer in their posts than I. More prolific too.

Wow. Really? Surely you are not confusing "self-regulatory" (meaning not having to answer to its industry-sponsored parent company or any other external authority), with "regulatory" (as in regulating the industry, as opposed to playing an "advisory" or "educational" role). If you...

The only time a game has ever been pulled off of a store shelf due to its rating was when GTA:SA was re-rated "AO." The ESRB played a major role in that, to be sure, but it's completely backward to blame the board of censorship. Let's say some hotshot reviewer at IGN gives an over-hyped game...

I am considering comments such as "...it seems more interested in repositioning itself as an educator than sustaining its role as regulator." I don't need to glean anything: You state clearly here your conception that the ESRB acts (or is supposed to act) in the role of a regulator. I think...

Is the MPAA less relevant because people aren't paying to have their videos rated before they post them on YouTube? Or because it didn't warn theater-goers that they might overhear someone engaging in risqué conversation in the seats behind them? I find this critique of the ESRB to be equally...

I fell in love with video games when I played a pong clone on the family television set for the first time. Christmas 1976, I think. Actually being able to move an object on your own TV screen was something truly amazing to me at that time, and truly thrilling in a way younger gamers may never...

At a very basic level, a story is a series of related events in a time and place. Usually, there are characters who take part in these events, and a setting in which the events occur. This is an oversimplification, I know, but I think there's enough truth in it to serve the point I'd like to try...

Staying tuned... Meanwhile, Chris Buffa has posted a follow-up: "How to Fix Videogame Journalism." I found the differences in the style, content, and grammatical accuracy of the two pieces to support my "theory." In fact, I took the second article as a "fixed" version of the first (which I...

I wasn't giving it proper credit at first either. I had to read it three times before I even got a hint, and it wasn't until I methodically started looking for examples of all the journalistic offenses mentioned, and found at least one of each, that I was convinced. It's just too perfect not to...

Indeed, interesting and intelligent discussion has ensued, and I am not dismissing it as meaningless. Yet is seems to me that any ensuing discussion about poor journalism that is oblivious to the fact that the article itself is a cleverly manufactured example of poor journalism misses the...

I sort of feel like the guy who mentions the emperor is naked -- maybe you all realize this already -- but the article is a self-reflexive joke. There is no other explanation for it containing at least one example of every single writing fault about which it complains. Of course, the article...