Tech Support: games

Rummelhart joins a number of parents who have been horrified by purchases of Smurfberries and other virtual items in top App Store games. The 17 highest-rated comments on "The Smurfs' Village" in the App Store all complain about the high cost of the Smurfberries, and two commenters call it a "scam."

Apple introduced "in-app purchases" last year, letting developers use the iTunes billing system to sell items and add-ons in their games and applications.

This year, developers have started to use the system in earnest as the main revenue stream for many games. Of the 10 highest-grossing apps in the App Store, six are games that are free to download but allow in-app purchases. Four of those are easy, child-friendly games. Two of them, "Tap Zoo" and "Bakery Story," have buttons for in-app purchases of $100 in just two taps.

Capcom Entertainment Inc., the publisher of "The Smurfs' Village," says inadvertent purchases by children are "lamentable." When it realized what was happening, it added a warning about the option of in-app purchases to the game's description in the App Store, and it's updating the game to include warnings inside it as well. The game has retreated to being the fourth-highest-grossing app in the App Store.

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14/12/10

Are video games art 2010 Edition

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While the role of the professional critic in the realm of books, film, music, or art is well-established, for interactive entertainment the lines are less clear. As a (relatively) young medium, questions about how to actually write about video games are still being hashed out, by consumers, fans, bloggers, established media critics, and others.

The default to date has been to consider a work of interactive entertainment as a packaged consumer product -- hence game reviews that focus on the number of levels, hours of gameplay, and other technical details. I am more inclined to consider a game as a cultural or artistic effort -- which is hopefully how even a very mainstream entertainment-minded audience sees it, consciously or not (to not do so would be akin to judging a film such as "Apocalypse Now" by the number of explosions per minute).

Over the course of this year, as part of CNET's revolving brain trust of gaming experts (typically alongside my colleagues Scott Stein and Jeff Bakalar) I've endeavored to take that broader view, looking at how these games fit into the larger cultural landscape, and hopefully providing some useful context and analysis along the way. Whether I have or not is up to you to decide, and to that end, I've collected some of the more interesting (and perhaps self-indulgent at times) excerpts of my year-long attempt to discern the artistic and cultural value, if any, of the games of 2010.

Film critic Roger Ebert has approached the issue from the other end, at first famously declaring that "video games can never be art," and later amending that to say, "in principle, video games cannot be art." Despite the torrent of replies Ebert has received, ranging from calm and rational to angry and hyperbolic, he's actually more correct than his detractors. Just because we can provide some cultural or artistic context for some games, doesn't mean the medium has done more than scratch the surface (or as Ebert describes it, these are primitive cave paintings compared to Michelangelo's ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.)

Click through the accompanying slideshow to see the worlds of Bioshock, God of War, and Fallout filtered through Ayn Rand, Joseph Campbell, and Cormac McCarthy, then add your voice to the debate by commenting below.

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