The gaming industry's legislative woes continue, as our duly elected representatives demonstrate that they care about the nation's children with the "Truth in Video Game Rating Act." This kind of moral posturing is expected in an election year. Video games are an easy target to score points in the family-values column--however ill-informed the effor.t

Speaking at a roundtable discussion this week, Peter Jackson, filmmaker and icon to sci-fi/fantasy dorks around the world, summed up his reasons for moving away from the movie industry and towards the gaming industry: "I'm a little bored of movies," he said....

MTV today announced it will acquire Harmonix, the developers of the wildly successful "Guitar Hero." This is a great buy for MTV; "Guitar Hero" is one of the budding crop of games with serious appeal to non-gamers.

This week, while the gaming community was abuzz over the announced November launch date and price of the Nintendo Wii, rumors surfaced that the Playstation 3 was working with gaming social networking service Xfire on the Playstation Network Platform (PNP), Sony's putative answer to Xbox Live.

It was a simple plan. Dentara Rast, a space pirate about to hit the big time, operating with his accomplice Cally (no last name), ran a fraudulent investment house--the Eve Interstellar Bank--and, after amassing a truly massive sum of money by paying early returns out of new investments, transferred all the bank's funds to Rast, and made off with it all.

Yesterday afternoon, Mark Warner, the former governor of Virginia, flew onto the stage of a meet-and-greet, to be interviewed about his political action committee, Forward Together. Though the ability to fly around like Superman would probably play well with the American electorate, it's fairly commonplace in the constituency Warner was playing to--the populace of "Second Life," Linden Lab's groundbreaking online world.

Excuse me while I geek out for a moment. On Thursday, Microsoft announced that it will be bringing three board games--"The Settlers of Catan," "Carcassone," and "Alhambra"--to Xbox Live Arcade, allowing players to download them for a fee and play them online against other enthusiasts.

No matter what storytelling medium you're in, it will always be risky to break the fourth wall in an attempt to sell something....

Characters in Rockstar games--which include the much-frowned-over "Grand Theft Auto" series--have shot, stabbed, run over, bludgeoned, strangled, beaten, exploded, incinerated, chopped and eviscerated millions of innocent and less-than-innocent people throughout countless play sessions all over the world. The company's latest product, "Bully," is also attracting its share of controversy.

"I felt a great disturbance in the force, as if millions of game journalists suddenly cried out in terror, and were silenced," quoth the writers of Penny Arcade--probably one of the most central sites in video gaming culture--about the demise of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, announced this week.