Month: February 2008

WeGame.Com – A YouTube for Gamers?

WeGame.Com has been billed on some sites as a sort of YouTube for gamers. The site features a downloadable client that lets you record in-game video and then upload it to the WeGame website.

The site says the client is “as fast as a Zergling rush” and a number of commentators have contrasted it with dedicated screen recorders like Fraps. Personally, though, I saw no difference between Fraps and the WeGame client — both kill my system performance (and, admittedly, my computer is a POS compared to what most gamers would consider a real machine).

On the other hand, the WeGame client is free, which is hard to beat — though still Windows only.

The DC Comics Action Figure Archive

The DC Comics Action Figure ArchiveThis is one book that I’ve been waiting for almost a year to come out. Scott Beatty is a former editor at Toyfare magazine and a sometimes comic book writer. He talked Chronicle Books into letting him do a coffee table size book chronicling every DC action figure — 1,400 in all with 600 full color photographs.

The book is arranged alphabetically, with each action figure entry containing details on the name of the company that produced it, the name of the series it was part of, the releae date, scale, articulation, accessories and occasional additional notes. If you’re an action figure fanboy, this is like a drug. Please, oh please, can I get a Marvel version too?

Not that the book isn’t without problems — in fact it is getting slagged on Amazon at the moment. The book’s critics have two complaints.

First, the book is about action figures — as it says on the title — and so doesn’t include any DC-related toys prior to Ideal’s Captain Action which was released in 1966. This upsets folks who apparently wanted a more comprehensive look at DC collectible toys, but the scope of the book is made fairly clear in its title.

Second, and more serious, there are mistakes in the book. In at least one instance, the Captain Action series is ascribed to Mego. Some of the photographs, especially of the earlier action figure, are not accurate (they appear to show modified/damaged action figures). And despite the book’s claim to completeness, there are omissions. The ’52’ Isis figure is include, for example, but the Mego Isis is nowhere to be found.

Even with its faults, however, this is still an incredible volume, and well worth the $26 asking price at Amazon.

Athletes Aren’t the Only Ones Using Performance Enhancing Drugs

U.S. News and World Report’s Alex Kingsbury does a nice job discussing another profession where the use of performance enhancing drug is believed to be widespread — classical musicians. According to Kingsbury, a significant percentage of musicians — as well as actrs and other performers — turn to beta blockers to lower their blood pressure and thereby presumably improve their performance.

Use of Ritalin and other ADHD drugs is allegedly common on college campuses, and personally I don’t start my day without a 32 ounce helping of my favorite caffeine-laced performance enhancing diet cola.

It is a shame that Kingsbury can’t take the obvious next step as to whether those of us who use our own performance enhancing drugs should really be judging athletes who use drugs more appropriate to their profession. Instead he dredges up bioethicist Greg Kaebnick who offers this pearl of wisdom,

There’s no general ethical principle for enhancement — a performance that one group celebrates as a manifestation of natural talent and practice boosted by a drug, another group sees as cheating.

Ah, the ad hocracy that is contemporary bioethics. Forget any attempt at logical consistency or, god forbid, something as quaint as a general ethical principle.

Debate Over Performance Enhancing Drugs

A few weeks ago, Bob Costas moderated a debate on the proposition that, “We should accept performance-enhancing drugs in competitive sports.” NPR has the completed, unedited debate in streaming media format on this page, or you can download a PDF transcript of the debate (PDF).

On the Reason magazine blog, debate participant Radley Balko describes a bit of the debate from his point of view, noting that at least when it comes to safety issues, performance enhancing drugs like steroids are far safer than other things that top tier athletes are regularly required to do to their bodies in order to meet the requirements of their particular sport,

[Sportscaster George] Michael also took offense to a comparison I made between the relatively modest risks of steroids and HGH and the other health risks other athletes take to excel. The example I used was horseracing, where the athletes subject themselves to sweat boxes, diuretics, eating disorders, and all sorts of other damaging weight-control techniques. Michael, a horse breeder, was offended that I’d make such accusations—until he realized I was talking about the jockeys, not the horses. Oddly, that didn’t seem to bother him as much.

Dr. Norman Frost put that argument more explicitly in the debate, which NPR features in a pull quote on its page,

I ask you in the audience to quickly name, in your own minds, a single elite athlete who’s had a stroke or a heart attack while playing sports. It’s hard to come up with one. Anabolic steroids do have undesirable side effects: acne, baldness, voice changes … infertility. But sport itself is far more dangerous, and we don’t prohibit it. The number of deaths from playing professional football and college football are 50 to 100 times higher than even the wild exaggerations about steroids. More people have died playing baseball than have died of steroid use.

In general, the argument against allowing performance enhancing drugs in sports tend to lack any coherence. Rather, people who complain about performance enhancing drugs seem to have the same sort of visceral reaction as people of a different era had when anesthesia became widely used to alleviate pain during childbirth — it just violates widely held moral intuitions that amount to one society-wide “ick” at the thought of athletes explicitly modifying their body chemistry with drugs in order to achieve better performance.

It just seems wrong, even if the arguments against it aren’t all that logically consistent.