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Trump’s White House video games meeting has a very concerning list of invitees
The list of invitees to US president Donald Trump's White House video games meeting today has been released. And it's a sorry sight, including names from notorious right-wing censorship advocacy groups, and not a single qualified expert on the topic.
Industry and academics unite to oppose World Health Organisation’s “gaming disorder”
A number of academics and games industry associations, including the UK's Ukie and USA's Entertainment Software Association, have united to oppose World Health Organisation (WHO) plans to define 'gaming disorder' as a health condition. The WHO, an arm of the United Nations, intend to create 'gaming disorder' with the next revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), their big book o' physical and mental…
The Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB), the North American industry body which assigns games age ratings, will expand its labelling on physical boxed games to include warnings of "In-Game Purchases". This will cover everything that can be bought digitally for real money, from season passes and skins to microtransaction currencies and random loot boxes. They're only a decade late to noticing all this, then. Some…
It's easy to forget sometimes that games are a legal minefield, and so much of what we take for granted - mods cheekily using repurposed art assets, or fan-games bringing joy to the masses - are often technically illegal, at least under current American copyright law. Recently, several groups including the Museum Of Art & Digital Entertainment (MADE to their friends), put forward the argument to…
If a publisher shuts down a game's online bits, current US copyright law says, you're technically not allowed to modify the game to use different servers or work offline. It's gone, that's it, bye-bye. That's a bummer for players, not to mention folks trying to preserve our short but already fading history. American digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation have been trying to change this,…
The Dying Light [official site] mod unpleasantness of the past week has been cleared up, and was indeed double whammy of overzealous protection. Developers Techland are doing something about the cheat protection that also blocked legitimate mods, while the Entertainment Software Assocation have nonapologised for copyright takedown notices issued in its name against sites hosting mod downloads. Huzzah! They don't hate mods, they simply didn't…
With the grace of a recently dumped loser shouting, "Well... I never loved you anyway!" as he starts crying, the Entertainment Software Association have announced they're no longer supporting SOPA. Which is a bit like announcing you no longer support England in the 1994 World Cup. We contacted the ESA two weeks ago to ask them about their position, and whether they would consider changing…
Firefall developers Red 5 are going further than simply expressing their denunciation of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in words. On January 18th, the studio will close the Firefall beta and website for 24 hours in a show of protest. More drastically, the developers are also refusing to show the extremely promising free-to-play multiplayer shooter at E3 this year because of the organiser's support…
Nival, the publisher and developers behind the Blitkrieg series and King's Bounty: Legions, have got in touch with us this evening to let us know that they are "anti-SOPA" - the bill currently going through the US Congress that could irreparably harm the internet. They have given us a statement explaining their position, which is below.
Apologies for the initialism-filled title, but for an explanation make sure to read the main post here. This is to say that we've created a permanent page (I'll link it from the text below the featured boxes at the top) to tell you where each member of the Entertainment Software Association currently stands regarding the censorious and extremely disturbing Stop Online Piracy Act. We've contacted…
Feature: Protect Your Internet
You've probably heard of SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, by now. It's the bill that is currently being considered in the US, that on the surface appears to be an attempt to control piracy, but with only the tiniest scrapes reveals a genuinely terrifying, draconian attempt to introduce government censorship of the internet at the behest of unelected corporations. While it initially had the…
