Game Girl Advance was already one of my favorite game sites on the web. After posting a nice mention of buzzcut, well, now, I'm blushing.

If you haven't checked out the site, they combine a serious and smart love of games with a very personal style. It's tops.

Videogames don't cause real world violence. Therefore, videogame developers don't have an obligation to mitigate or censor their violent content.

It's an airtight conclusion that has grown in popularity in the electronic entertainment business. It's also the sort of dogma that the industry will grow to regret if it continues to toe this defensive line.

In the videogame biz, we tend to think about the 'next generation" as the forthcoming and inevitable wave of technology. PlayStation 3, Nintendo GameCubed, Xbox Next, whatever.

As a journalist who covers videogames, I can't help but see this unbelievable cultural momentum building up behind the next generation of adults--the early teens, the pre-teens and the kids of today.

People that make videogames hold people that talk about videogames with general suspicion. Who are these people that are not content to just play the games, but seem bound and determined to sit around and talk about them?

"Games are popular art, collective social reactions to the main drive or action of any culture. Games, like institutions, are extensions of social man and of the body politic, as technologies are extensions of the animal organism. Both games and technologies are counter-irritants or ways of adjusting to the stress of the specialized actions that occur in any social group. As extensions of the popular response to the workaday stress, games become faithful models of a culture. They incorporate both the actions and the reactions of whole populations in a single dynamic image."

---Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

This is the story of the platypus:

The divine creator phoned down to the head of the mammalian-avian team at the end of a grueling seven day creation project and asked for a status. After being told that the new creature could still use some work, the Lord asked if it was functional. "More or less," said the angel in charge of the team. "Well then,” boomed the voice from heaven, "Ship it."

Or maybe that’s what happened with The Getaway, a game that’s actually an experiment to see what happens when you sew the face of movies onto the body of games.

The crtiical urge comes early.

For children, their first words are inevatbly expressions of need and identity: "mama", "daddy" and "kitty". But soon, within the first 10 words, comes the "no."

Even a baby has a critical urge. They know what they like and they know when someone tries to put something they don't want down their throat.

Another Comment from a friend, 14-years-old. He is starting high school next year and offers this opnion:

As all of you know, back in the early days of gaming, anyone who freely admitted that they played games every week was instantly labeled as a nerd. All the jocks and popular kids most likely played video games, but never admitted it in fear of being tormented or discriminated against. Now in the "future", anyone from any background can enjoy the love and heartbreak known as the video game. Does this situation sound familiar? Of course it does.

Back in the days of old (about twenty years ago) anyone that even mentioned that they were a homosexual was instantly labeled different and then hated and teased and discriminated against.

Just like the video gaming public but in a toned down version, the homosexual situation is getting better and better, and just like video games, it?s a thing that anyone can openly speak about what was once was touchy subject.

Now don?t get me wrong. People who are very obsessive about video games and people who are very "out there" are still hated by some and teased by some. But anything that is happening for the better I will take without a blink. I only have one thing to say; Video games are more than games, they are a mock up of what has happened in our world, what is happing in our world, and what is to become of our world.

The best quote from E3, 2003:

"Negativity sells," John Romero told me as we talked at a party.

If you know who Romero is, you probably also have heard of E3?the Electronic Entertainment Expo. If not, maybe we should take a couple of steps back and do a little explaining.

For the past seven years, I have attended E3--the Electronic Entertainment Expo--as a working journalist.

Finally, this year, I took along a digital camera.

I've added some of my favorite shots to the site. Check out the Image Gallery for my visual impressions of E3. Sorry, no game pictures. These pictures are about conveyiing the big blur that is video gaming's biggest event.