A lot of buzz has been going around lately about video games being (falsely, for the most part) linked to violence in young adults and teens. One of the more vicious of the recent cases is one where a young man killed his parents "because they took away his Halo", though the media failed to draw any attention to the obviously serious underlying psychological issues the young man must have had.

But still, not all of what the media is saying about modern gaming is necessarily false and shouldnt be brushed off automatically just because the source has a distinct bias. There are many documented cases of people becoming addicted to games, primarily MMOs like World of Warcraft but also to a lesser extent other multiplayer games like Halo and Call of Duty, with an emphasis on the word multiplayer. A common theme running through almost every case of "game addiction" is that the game has partially or entirely replaced the subject's social lives.

Games like World of Warcraft can act as surrogate communities for people who feel out of place in the "real world". Commonly it's those of us who are poorly adjusted, awkward and anti-social that feel the desire to fully immerse themselves in an alternate reality in an attempt to escape their own; you never hear of the popular football player spending 20 hours a day playing Warhammer Online, but rather you hear about the misunderstood outcast pouring all of his time into World of Warcraft.

I guess my point is, just because the media says that video games promote addictive behavior doesnt make it untrue. Violent behavior, on the other hand, still remains to be proven.

Something has been bugging me for a while about this whole "blogging" thing. I have the looming feeling that if you're not already established in the blogging community that it's incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to get the same level of recognition even if your editorials are of a higher caliber. Specifically, I'm referring to myself and my own posts.

I remember a few months ago having the goal of making it onto the user soapbox, and I spent a couple hours writing an editorial about how binging on games can somewhat ruin the experience altogether. It was funny, thoughtful, well written and with the perfect amount of perspective – and yet, it didn't make it onto the soapbox. In fact, for all I can tell only one person read it (though that person commented that they thought it was a good post =P).

Now I look at the soapbox and see posts like "Vote for Giygas!" and "Why Vader shouldn't be in the contest" prominently displayed, even though identical sentiments have been expressed on the forums dozens of times. Meanwhile, I'm here writing thoughtful editorials about the rapidly growing infection of gamespot users converting to trolls and about people using a second online avatar to protect their first, and I get nothing.

What does it take to get some recognition?

People always talk about how when you go onto the internet you're almost completely anonymous, which generally causes people to act more strongly than they would if their actions were more directly (or at all) related with real world consequences. However, what happens when you build up an avatar in cyberspace to the point that you actually care about your/its standing in the community?

A quick example would be World of Warcraft since my mind is already on the subject. I poured so much time and effort into my human rogue that his interactions with other in game players started to feel reflected on my real world conciousness so much so that it was important to me to regulate my actions as to not receive backlash not on myself but rather on the artificial construct - my avatar.

It's a farily common occurance to see someone ranting and raving on the WoW forums about the latest patch notes, a botched raid attempt or a personal attack against another player. 4 times out of 5, the person posting has shielded themselves behind a second layer of anonymity since the first, their actual character in the game, has become too important to tarnish his reputation. So instead of a level 80 (that's still the max, right?) character complete with name and guild affiliation, you get a level 1 orc with a name like "Bankalt" or "Lolwhathi" screaming at the top of their lungs to anyone bored enough to listen.

I myself have been guilty of this at one time or another. Since my youtube channel has received a moderate level of attention for my music, I've been careful when posting on other people's videos for fear of revenge backlash on my own. If I feel the desire to criticize someone else's work, depending on the severity of my opinion I might switch over to my secondary account and channel my opinion through it instead of my main one with my own work attached.

What does the future hold for those of us who care enough about our online personas to erect an avatar to protect the first one?

As I'm sure most of you are aware of, our Greatest Game Villain contest has been and is being tampered with by outside forces bent on ruining the fun for everyone else. Of course I can't explicitly say the name of the forerunner without being instantly moderated, but the fact still remains that the massive troll communities of the internet are unified in their goal of, well...trolling.

More shocking than their interference, though, is the apathetic or even positive response the trolls have received on our very forums. I've seen many a gamespot user emulate their destructive behavior, either by spreading messages across the site like "Yes we RAAM!" or just refusing to be reasoned with; in effect, the troll incursion is beginning to infect our own users at an alarming rate. Others still refuse to believe that the contest is being tampered with altogether despite the overwhelming evidence from the boards of the offending sites, posts on our own forums and the striking fact that two relatively weak villains (General RAAM, Team Rocket) can defeat two of the strongest in the entire contest (Sephiroth, Ocelot).

What is gamespot doing? Well, so far they haven't done a thing. Many arguments have been made that they don't care either way just as long as the contest keeps bringing in an increased number of site views, which in of itself isn't too farfetched, but I find it hard to believe that gamespot would forsake their entire community just for a couple thousand extra site hits.

The worst part is that our own users don't seem to care. They quip that "it's just an internet contest" and "it was boring before the trolls got involved", which is a virtual slap in the face to those of us who actually put in the effort by creating campaign kits, carefully crafting our brackets matchup by matchup and even participated in the forums at all leading up to the invasion of the trolls.

I find it somewhat hard to believe that relatively normal internet users can be converted to trolls and troll supporters at the flip of a hat, but that seems to be what is happening right now.

So I was lucky enough to win the prestigious "Malevolent Monet" achievement today (or rather yesterday, I stay up too late) along with at most 63 other gamespoters, it's currently being prominently displayed off to the left of this blog post underneath my hypnotically awesome Link spin attack avatar. Be sure to verify its existence to make sure I'm not lying for the attention.

Just in case you didn't catch my drift

I was waiting for them to announce Ganondorf's image winner for a good part of the afternoon, they decided to announce the characters with the most submissions last so I had to wait through all of the Sinistars and Geese Howards.

Did I deserve to win? Probably not, but Gamespot in their infinite wisdom made it so that you couldn't win more than once, so about a dozen guys like me edged in after the big fish already won for some minor character. One such big fish is my new friend Splinter_Girl88, who was kind enough to be obligated to step down from the Ganondorf competition after winning for Andrew Ryan. Congrats to her on her victory by default, as well as to my othernew bigfish friend Leviathan620for his win on Revolver Ocelot. Seriously, between the two of you you guys could have won about half of the contest if they let you =P.

My friends, I have a serious problem. Every time I try to fix it it just comes back bigger and stronger, and I'm not sure I can deal with it on my own anymore. Even now I can feel it eating away at my soul, egging me on to do unspeakable horrors. Alcoholism? No. Sex addiction? I wish. Addicted to snorting NesQuik through a bendy-straw? …Maybe, but that's a problem for another time. No, my problem isn't something you might find in a psychology textbook, or on any of those news programs run by the 'liberal media elite'. Good people of Gamespot (and possibly Google if you got redirected here), I, The-Techspert, also known as Jurugar/x|c/Ghettofabulous/Kinkbot3000, have an undeniable urge to complete video games too quickly.

The liberal media rarely reports on the "real" issues like this one. At least I know there is one woman out there who I can count on.

I have been this way for as long as I can remember, ever since I started playing on my cousin's SNES. I, like many of you out there, have been wondering all my life just what went wrong. Why did god make me this way? Was it because my father was distant and my mother was overbearing? Was it because my mom did heroin and cocaine on a daily basis while I was in the womb? Was it because I was dropped on the head not once, not twice, but 7 ½ times? Ok, I think I'm getting a little off topic.

The average video game these days is anywhere between 10 and 30 hours long – some are much more and, sadly, some are much less. All games, whether they be good or bad, long or short, violent or child friendly, strive to entertain their users. I've played a lot of great games over the years, and I've recently noticed a pattern emerge: I buy a game, spend all day (and night) playing it, and end up beating it within two or three days. There are some notable exceptions – for example, Dragon Age: Origins took me about two weeks to play through, though I did have a lot of other stuff going on that sucked up my time from playing. However, I still played it whenever I could, and compressed what could have been a month's worth of entertainment into a significantly shorter time span.

If you finish a game per week, they really start to pile up…

Often I find myself in an "interim" period between games, where I just got finished with a game but it's too early to buy a new one. I find myself with nothing to do, and nothing to look forward to so that I can get through the day with a smile on my face (of course there *gasp* other forms of entertainment out there besides video games, such as interacting with other people…but I'm only really talking about video games here). But of course whose fault is that but my own, since apparently I am just physically incapable of rationing out my play experience, like a little kid with a bag of Halloween candy – I eat as much as I possibly can until what would have lasted for a week or two is gone in a heartbeat.

Are my expectations too high? Am I only supposed to get a few days worth of enjoyment out of a game before I shelf it and move on to the next one? I refuse to let myself buy a new game every week, and not only for monetary reasons (a new Xbox game every week would cost over $3000!). I won't let myself believe that a game that dozens or maybe even hundreds of people worked on for years and spent millions developing and perfecting can be drained of all entertainment value within a just a few days.

.

Going through games too quickly can really suck out the enjoyment (or soul, either one works)

But it's us, the gamers, that decide how much fun we get out of a game, especially if the game is open-world or sandbox. Take Assassin's Creed – the game itself is superb, but playing around in the world in which it was situated was almost as much fun. For example, I would pick a part of the city and just kill anything that moved in that area while still being stealthy. Some citizens would show up, and I'd kill them and go into hiding. Some guards would respond to the noise and I kill them. More guards would show up and I'd kill them. Eventually the intersection would be covered by a pile of bodies, with no end in sight. Other times I would just round up as many guards as I possibly could and fight them all at once. Another example would be Morrowind, where I would just get up on a tall building and kill everyone I saw with my bow and arrows. Shenanigans like this – not necessarily intended by the game developers, but still doable in the game – can extend the life of games well beyond the scope of just the storyline. Of course, that's provided that the game ALLOWS you to do such things; not every game has as immersive a world as Assassin's Creed or the Elder Scrolls series do.

Catch me if you can!

Of course for multiplayer games the timeline is significantly extended. I played World of Warcraft for two years and, no matter how much time I spent playing it, I couldn't "beat" it. It was a reprieve and immensely satisfying to have a game that, if I wanted to be entertained, always had something interesting to do: battlegrounds, arenas, raids, dungeons, general tomfoolery, twinks, questing...And if you ever truly got bored with a character, you could always make a new character of a differentrole or faction and get a whole new play experience! Of course this was as much a curse as it was a boon for someone like me, who can't help but pour all of his time into a game until it is done…as you can imagine, I logged more hours into that MMO than I'm proud of, and it took a surprising amount out of me to quit the game. That's why Nesingwary-US won't be hearing from Jurugar the human rogue

Warcraft is great if you have time to burn…but awful if you don't want to have ALL of your time burned

But where is the middle ground? A game can only have so much content, even an MMO, so how do you stop yourself from running through it too quickly? Multiplayer games like Warcraft do effectively throw a "speed bump" into the mix with differentiated difficulty curves and the social aspect (the two M's in MMO); there is only so much you can do on your own, and while you might feel like raiding for 8 hours straight at 3 AM on a Sunday night until you kill Arthas (are they even up to him yet content-wise?), if you're lucky you might even find a handful of companions, but good luck finding 24 (or is it 39?) other people. And god help you if you're looking for skilled players.

I was going through the Game of the Year categories earlier today, impressed by all of the good games released this year - Assassin's Creed II, Uncharted II, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Dragon Age, Infamous, etc. However, when I got to the Wii section, I was disappointed at the incredibly poor showing of games that came out for the Nintendo Wii. One first party game - practically identical to any side-scrolling Mario game ever made in essence - and a lousy selection of third party titles, none of which were even worth buying.

I do consider myself a Nintendo fanboy, but it's getting harder and harder to keep that up. It seems that the only reason I turn on my Wii anymore is to play Super Smash Bros. Brawl, and I have a feeling that I'm not the only one; most games made for the Wii just arent worthwhile. From the Wii games that Gamespot has reviewed, a grand total of 8 have gotten a score of 9.0 or higher. Compare that 8 to the 29 on the Xbox 360 and PS3 (some games did overlap).

The only other thing that the Wii had going for it was that it cost less than the PS3 and Xbox 360, but that is no longer the case; The Xbox 360 and the Wii now both cost $200, while the PS3 costs $300 (but also includes a Blu-Ray player). Now all it has is vastly inferior graphics and a clunky motion-sensor system that all but eliminates the possibility of playing games with any sort of precision or accuracy.

Nintendo needs to face the fact that their motion sensortechnology just isnt good enough to be integrated into a mainstream video game console. They need to either: A) Start making regular games again, B) Improve their motionsensor technology (by a lot), or C) Find a way to disintegratemotion sensorsaway from the core of their games

/2 cents

I really dislike reviews that are nothing more than a repetition of what Gamespot or any other review site has to say about the game. If a game recieves widespread acclaim for its graphics, I dont need to read from a fellow player that the game looks "sweet" or "awesome". When I go to the player review section, I expect to read things that I wouldn't necessarily see in a official review. Like, in the previous example, I would find it helpful for someone to say that the graphics look good, but there are some noticable glitches when using XXX card from nVidia or ATI. THAT is useful information that isn't just regurgitating something you yourself just read on the Gamespot review.

"This game is so good I love it it rocks" is not a legitimate thing to say in a review. "This game is good because of X and Y, but could have been better if Z" is much more helpful and useful, especially if you elaborate on each point.

While this is a game website, reviews are supposed to be more like a high school english essay - introduction, body/support, conclusion. Please read the review guidelines.

I try to make my reviews as useful as possible to the Gamespot community, and I will continue to do so. If you want to read a helpful review of a game, I would recommend tagging/friending/whatever...ing me or anyone else you come across that has high quality reivews. While I dont play every game (for example, I dont have a PS3) or find it necessary to write a review about every game that I have played, my reviews are consistently well recieved by the Gamespot community.