Video Game Coverage

E-Sports has grown big enough for the New York Times to report on it, unfortunately it's about growing drug use.

The world of the professional video game playing received a lot of attention this week after leaders announced an expansion of testing for performance-enhancing drugs. according to the New York Times:

In response to those comments, the Electronic Sports League, one of the most successful leagues in competitive video gaming, said on Wednesday that it would test players for performance-enhancing drugs starting at a tournament in August. E.S.L. said it would work with two international agencies — the same ones that help oversee anti-doping policies for cycling, the Olympics and other sports — to create anti-doping guidelines and a testing program for players.

The announcement is perhaps the clearest sign yet that e-sports, as professional gaming is widely known, is evolving into a mainstream form of competitive entertainment. This year, overall revenue from the global e-sports business is expected to surpass $250 million from more than 113 million e-sports fans worldwide, according to estimates from Newzoo, a games research firm.

The sport has never exactly endorsed drug usage, however players recently flaunting the use has brought the whole thing into a brighter spotlight.

E.S.L. has long had a general prohibition against doping, but its rules did not specify which drugs were not allowed, and the league did not police players. That changed, though, when Mr. Friesen, who plays under the name Semphis, was interviewed earlier this month and said that he had used Adderall during an E.S.L. tournament for the shooter game Counter-Strike while playing with a team called Cloud9.

"We were all on Adderall," Mr. Friesen said of his team, for which he no longer plays. "Tons of people do it."

With one of the biggest events in professional gaming, the DOTA 2's The International, starting Aug. 3, this definitely won't be the last we've heard about it.

People in Turkey are really worried that “Minecraft” is going to turn their kids into hardened criminals.

The country’s Family and Social Policies Ministry has launched an investigation into the game after receiving numerous complaints from parents that the game encourages violence (particularly towards women), according to Hurriyet Daily News.

Apparently Turkey hasn’t heard of GTA V.

“In the higher levels of the game the player may need to kill women, allies and even friends for survival reasons,” the article says.

Minecraft is probably one of the least violent games in existence right now, with a majority of the game devoted to hours of mining, farming and building a life in a blocky, pixelated sandbox where anything is possible.

According to the report:

If the ministry’s investigation decides that the game encourages violence, the ministry will proceed by opening a law suit against the game for a country-wide ban.

This isn’t the first time “Minecraft” has been accused of promoting violence.

Last year PETA launched a HQ in “Minecraft” as a sort of animal sanctuary where no one was allowed to harm the digital creatures.

Ralph H Baer, the inventor of the Magnavox Odyssey, has passed away at the age of 92.

His invention was the first home video game console, and he's oft considered the inventor of video games. Baer is also the inventor of the first light gun for video games, called The Shooting Gallery. You can also thank him for that electronic, wickedly frustrating memory game, Simon.

Without Baer, you certainly wouldn't be complaining about whether or not your next-gen console is next-gen enough, so think of him the next time you turn yours on. Check out the video above to watch an interview he did with PBS about his work.

Time to change those passwords again!

In a move to pressure game companies to update their servers and prevent cyberattacks, a hacker group named DerpTrolling has posted thousands of usernames and passwords from PSN, 2K Games and Windows Live.

"Dear Internet, the following is a very small portion of Lord Gaben and the rest of his crews glorious raids across the high seas of the Internet," the group said.

The document they released contains info on 2,131 PSN users, 1,473 Windows Live users and 2,000 2K Game Studios users, but they say they have access to alot more data (around 7 million usernames and passwords) which has not been leaked… yet.

The group also claimed resposibility for a DDoS attack on Blizzard's "World of Warcraft" servers last weekend.

PETA is launching a new headquarters in Minecraft on Saturday, as a safe haven where players are not allowed to harm animals… or at least their pixelated counterparts.

So for all you creative sickos out there - that means no compact chicken cookers, barbaric egg farms, cow torture chambers or pig slaughterhouses.

From PETA's website:

Visitors to PETA's custom-made digital island will explore vast expanses of landscapes where the animals of Minecraft roam free. They can also visit extensive vegetable and flower gardens, walk through a fantastic re-creation of PETA's HQ, and discover an abandoned and decaying slaughterhouse.

PETA has gone to the aid of video game animals before, including Pokemon, World of Warcraft seals, the Tanooki suit in Mario Bros., and dogs in Call of Duty.

What a world we live in...

In a scene that sounds straight out of a video game, police officers and a helicopter descended on a Washington home Thursday, after receiving a 911 call that the family inside was being held hostage.

According to Komo News:

"The caller said he had an assault rifle and he had placed explosives in the yard and he was holding a family hostage," said Nathan Elledge, chief of police at the Sammamish Police Department. "He wanted $20,000 to release the family."

It turns out that the call was actually made by a computer, and the owner of the home is a top exec at Bungie, the game developer behind "Halo" and the recent hit "Destiny."

And on top of all that, investigators think the suspect "has ties to the video game community."

Let the conspiracy theories begin.

Well, there goes the workday.

The Internet Archive, a non-profit working to build a library of the Internet, has added over 900 originally coin-operated arcade games to its site this week, all playable in your browser without any additional downloads.

"A lot of people are going to migrate to games they recognize and ones that they may not have played in years. They'll do a few rounds, probably get their asses kicked, smile, and go back to their news sites," writes Jason Scott the man who put this all together, effectively destroying workplace productivity across the country.

Last year the Internet Archive added a "Console Living Room" section, that included games from Atari and Sega.

GamerGate has made its way out of the internet trenches of 4chan and 8chan and into mainstream media, most recently with Stephen Colbert dedicating a portion of his show Wednesday night to the topic (including his obsession with Ms. Pac-Man) and interviewing host of "Feminist Frequency" Anita Sarkeesian.

For those out of the loop, here's a brief overview of GamerGate via Know Your Meme:

GamerGate refers to the online backlash against perceived breaches of journalistic integrity on video game news sites that occurred as a result of the Quinnspiracy, an online controversy surrounding indie game developer Zoe Quinn's alleged affairs with a number of men working in the video game industry, including Kotaku staff writer Nathan Grayson.

We promise the vid isn't borked. It's just spooky scary so it's black.

This is what it's like when worlds collide.

Could this be the future of gaming?

RoomAlive is a proof-of-concept prototype that transforms any room into an immersive, augmented entertainment experience. Our system enables new interactive projection mapping experiences that dynamically adapts content to any room. Users can touch, shoot, stomp, dodge and steer projected content that seamlessly co-exists with their existing physical environment. The basic building blocks of RoomAlive are projector-depth camera units, which can be combined through a scalable, distributed framework. The projector-depth camera units are individually auto-calibrating, self-localizing, and create a unified model of the room with no user intervention. We investigate the design space of gaming experiences that are possible with RoomAlive and explore methods for dynamically mapping content based on room layout and user position. Finally we showcase four experience prototypes that demonstrate the novel interactive experiences that are possible with RoomAlive and discuss the design challenges of adapting any game to any room.

Security researcher Michael Jordon has managed to hack a Canon Pixma printer so that it can run the original DOOM

"Canon Pixma wireless printers have a web interface that shows information about the printer, for example the ink levels, which allows for test pages to be printed and for the firmware to be checked for updates."

However, he found that the interface doesn't need any sort of authentication to access. Off the bat the worst anyone could do would be print off hundreds of test pages and use up all of the printer's ink. Jordon found you could do much more, though. The interface lets you trigger the printer to update its firmware. It also lets you change where the printer looks for the firmware update.

In theory, you could create a custom firmware that spies on everything that printer prints, it can even be used as a gateway into the network it's tied into.

To show off what he'd learned Jordon opted to show DOOM running on the printer.

Canon has stated they will provide a fix as soon as possible.

That deal for Mojang is going through, and Notch is leaving the company. In his announcement, Persson said,

I don't see myself as a real game developer. I make games because it's fun, and because I love games and I love to program, but I don't make games with the intention of them becoming huge hits, and I don't try to change the world. Minecraft certainly became a huge hit, and people are telling me it's changed games. I never meant for it to do either. It's certainly flattering, and to gradually get thrust into some kind of public spotlight is interesting.

As soon as this deal is finalized, I will leave Mojang and go back to doing Ludum Dares and small web experiments. If I ever accidentally make something that seems to gain traction, I'll probably abandon it immediately.

Meanwhile, Microsoft celebrates their huge acquisition in the video above.

An NPC named Robin has been found. WoWhead, asite that scours the game code for new additions, picked up three instances of the tribute in a recent update for the Warlords of Draenor beta build - a male human, a female human, and a blue genie.

This model has been used before as a boss in a dungeon, but the idea is that this version of the model will most likely transform into other Robin Williams' characters.

The fish named Grayson Hopper has been playing for around 135 hours. Grayson has even acquired his first Pokémon, a Charmander named AAAABBK, and defeated the rival's Squirtle!