Month: May 2006

Parents in China Sue Over Warcraft Suicide

Parents of a 13-year-old Chinese boy are suing the distributor of “Warcraft: Orcs and Humans” in that country after their son committed suicide after playing the real-time strategy game for 36 hours straight.

The Associated Press quotes a Xinhua News Agency report that the boy left behind a suicide note saying he wanted “to join the heroes of the game he worshiped.”

The basis of the suit is that in the United States “Warcraft: Orcs & Humans” is rated by the ESRB as T (Teen) meaning the game’s “content that may be suitable for ages 13 and older.” The Associated Press story incorrectly suggests that T (Teen) means the game is suitable only for children older than 13.

And that leaves aside the obvious problem of how a 13-year-old ends up playing a game for 36 hours straight. Is poor parental supervision actionable in China?

The only upside to this might be if we could persuade Jack Thompson to take his violent video games dog and pony show to China. Permanently. Certainly, the Chinese seem to have the same respect for freedom of speech as Thompson does.

Source:

Game distributor sued over boy’s suicide. Joe McDonald, Associated Press, May 12, 2006.

About Those Terrorist Video Games

In early May, Reuters ran a story about a hearing of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence where a Defense Department official claimed that terrorist groups were using video games as part of their recruitment efforts. According to the Reuters story,

Tech-savvy militants from al Qaeda and other groups have modified video war games so that U.S. troops play the role of bad guys in running gunfights against heavily armed Islamic radical heroes, Defense Department official and contractors told Congress.

The games appear on militant Web sites, where youths as young as 7 can play at being troop-killing urban guerillas after registering with the site’s sponsors.

“What we have seen is that any video game that comes out … they’ll modify it and change the game for their needs,” said Dan Devlin, a Defense Department public diplomacy specialist.

The basis for this claim was in-game footage of Battlefield 2 that Devlin showed lawmakers. Again, according to Reuters,

“Battlefield 2” ordinarily shows U.S. troops engaging forces from China or a united Middle East coalition. But in a modified video trailer posted on Islamic Web sites and shown to lawmakers, the game depicts a man in Arab headdress carrying an automatic weapon into combat with U.S. invaders.

“I was just a boy when the infidels came to my village in Blackhawk helicopters,” a narrator’s voice said as the screen flashed between images of street-level gunfights, explosions and helicopter assaults.

The only problem is that the evidence turns out to have almost certainly been this Battle Field 2 recording and the “narrator’s voice” mentioned in the Reuter’s piece is dialogue stolen from Team America.

In other words, the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence got pwned by a parody passed off by idiot contractors and defense department officials as a genuine terrorist production.

Sources:

Islamists using US video games in youth appeal. Reuters, May 4, 2006.

Creative Sues Apple Over iPod Interface

As I mentioned the other day, Creative Labs’ $100 marketing effort to overtake Apple has led to Apple controlling 75 to 80 percent of the portable MP3 player market, while Creative posted a $114 million loss in its recent 3rd quarter financial results.

So what do you do if you’re in Creative Labs’ shoes? Of course, the only recourse is to sue Apple for patent infringement.

According to an article at MacNN,

The patent is for an invention that “provides an efficient user interface for a small portable music player. The invention is suitable for use with a limited display area and small number of controls to allow a user to efficiently and intuitively navigate among, and select, songs to be played. By using the invention, very large numbers of songs can be easily accessed and played,” according to the filing at the US Patent office.

Specifically, it describes overlapping categories that would allow for selection of the same song via different categories and for multiple functions assigned to the same device button or control. The patent also calls for organization based on metadata associated with each track as well as internet-based sources such as CDDB as well as the now popular playlists for organizing music.

“The creation of playlists is one technique to organize the playing of songs. A set of songs can be included in a playlist which is given a name and stored. When the playlist is accessed, the set of songs can be played utilizing various formats such as sequential play or shuffle,” the company wrote its patent filing.

Given how Creative Labs has pretty much ripped off the iPod look-and-feel, using over something as basic as overlapping metadata categories and playlists is beyond absurd. And it will probably prove as effective as Creative’s marketing campaign to unseat the iPod.

Source:

Creative sues Apple over iPod interface. MacNN, May 15, 2006.