12 days of video gaming

Tom Loftus Columnist • E-mail

In 2005 the real and the virtual continued their collision course. Sony entered the handheld market. Microsoft launched the Xbox 360. Hot Coffee became a synonym for doing the nasty. Politicians bloviated. Americans outsourced their fun to Chinese gold farmers. The Terminator threatened games.

What a year!  So, let's take a look back at 2005 with the "Twelve Days of Christmas" as our guide.

Twelve ‘games to avoid’
Just in time for the holidays the watchdog group National Institute on Media and the Family released a list of 12 games to avoid, among them “God of War,” “Resident Evil 4,” and “The Warriors -– all games, ahem, that received the thumbs-up from MSNBC.com.   "Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse," a game this site called "the finest game ever made about a 1950s-era travelling zombie salesman," came under particular fire for its depictions of cannibalism. Vegetarian zombies anyone?

Eleven politicians bloviating
Hillary. Hillary. Hillary. The senator from New York was all over the place in 2005 calling for an FTC investigation in June into the Hot Coffee mod on "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas," joining fellow politicos Sens. Joe Lieberman, Sam Brownback and Rick Santorum to sponsor legislation for a five-year $90 million study on children and media consumption and introducing legislation in December to protect kids from games. On the state level, Illinois passed a law restricting the sale of violent and sexually explicit video game sales to minors; it was then declared unconstitutional by a federal judge. Another federal judge blocked the enforcement of a similar statue in Michigan. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, no stranger to fictional violence himself, signed into law a measure banning the sale of violent video games to children and it, too, was blocked by a judge. What no one mentioned: The parents.

On the other side of the debate, Rockstar Games did not help matters when it turned out they did actually know about the hidden sex scenes in the PC version of "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas." This revelation came courtesy of a Dutch modder who made the hack available via a mod called "Hot Coffee." In true bad boy fashion, Rockstar followed up this controversy by releasing the M-rated "The Warriors" and offering screenshots of "Bully," a game where the object is to give pasty school boys "swirley's" and "pink bellies." We can only expect a puppy-beating sim in the works. Meanwhile, The Onion had its response.

Ten high-faluutin game reviews
To celebrate the one-year anniversary of New Games Journalism (imagine Hunter S. Thompson — but with less drugs — scribbling stream-of-consciousness video game reviews from a first person perspective) the Guardian UK games blog listed "10 unmissable examples" of the U.K.-born genre. The posting produced a wave of debate. "Does it make you a good writer if you go over 2,000 words and talk about how the game made you feel? Afraid not," read one post to the video game blog Kotaku. Meanwhile, everyone else shrugged and went back to shooting stuff.

Nine signs that life is one big role-playing game
2005 was the year when real life imitated art. In Shanghai, a gamer received the death sentence for stabbing and killing another gamer over a stolen virtual sword. A man in Japan was arrested for using "bots" to rob and beat characters in the online game, "Lineage II." A man died of heart failure in South Korea after finishing a 50-hour gaming marathon. In the medieval fantasy "World of Warcraft," which by the end of the year had a staggering 50 million members, a plague left some characters damaged, others dead and entire virtual cities in quarantine.

Members of virtual worlds such as "Second Life" and "Ultima Online" held virtual parties and virtual dances to raise virtual money, later traded in for real money, to help victims of Hurricane Katrina and the Dec. 26, 2004 tsunami.  South Korea and Iran protested against how video games portrayed their regions (in South Korea's case, the criticism concerned how North Korea was depicted.)

This was also the year that the mainstream media shined a spotlight on gaming's strangest trend: virtual sweatshops where underpaid employees in China and elsewhere play their way through online role-playing games to earn virtual goods that can be sold to Western gamers too lazy to earn the items themselves. That’s right, just when you thought we Americans were already too lazy — now, we’re outsourcing our leisure.

Eight sports game deals
After getting exclusive rights to the NFL in 2004, game publisher Electronic Arts continued to dominate sports games in 2005 by scooping up an exclusive six-year agreement with NCAA football and a 15-year co-branding deal with the sports network ESPN. Take-Two Interactive Software scooped up a semi-exclusive seven-year deal with Major League Baseball, which still left baseball open to first-party developers such as Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. The NBA spread the love (and the money) by signing deals with Electronic Arts, Take-Two, Midway Games, Sony and Atari. But the sports game of the year turned out to be the one title not stifled by an official license. With its hard hits, skimpy cheerleader and its attention to outrageous off-the-field antics , "Blitz: The League," ensured that game maker Midway won't be getting an NFL license anytime soon. And for that we are thankful.

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