RE the Peter Watts situation: for those of you not up to date with it, check out his blog for the latest http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=1186 The claim that he had choked a police officer was shredded by his lawyer in court. He was found guilty of not following a border officer’s orders (i.e., failing to immediately get down on the ground when he was told). Sentencing is April 26nd.

@ David – I don’t know if I would totally agree with the idea that the gaming industry is where movies were in the 1920’s. There have already been numerous examples of great games in this thread alone and there are a ton of others. I actually would go so far to say it is somewhat unfair to compare to the two industries directly. One produces non-interactive entertainment. It passes or fails solely on the quality of the story and the acting ability of the cast. The game industry relies on that as well, but also more importantly, there is the interactive component where the game has to be fun, intuitive, etc. So you can’t expect ALL games to have world class writing, since obviously some games are going to just be simple little diversions such as a game like Geometry Wars.
Obviously we aren’t talking about the casual games here. I think the history of video games is peppered with gems.. much like the movie industry. I would point out games like the old Wing Commander series, specifically when the started putting in live actors in the mid 90’s (WC4 was amazing in particular). Anyway, we can all probably chip in examples.. I would just say that I see every year games are getting better and better. The original Xbox had 2 titles that I actually played all the way through. Halo and Beyond Good and Evil. I have about 30 games for my Xbox 360 and have finished at least half of those because the quality is just better. With all that said, I really do hope to see the trend continue. And getting some established authors into the mix (alongside some established movie producers nowadays) can’t hurt at all!

Ok didn’t realize Menzies was the name of the person shot right after the UK bus and subway bombings.

I’m not familiar with the Menzies thing and will take a look. Also I think if you wade through the Watts posts you will see that there were reasoned posts as well as people thinking he had it coming(of which I am not one them). My biggest issue with the whole Watts meme was that based on a post by a self admitted friend of Watts, Cory Doctrow spun a narrative of wrongdoing. Now like I said here on Dave’s site that I am not saying that either side was right or wrong. I wasn’t there and didn’t see what happened. I also know that people have a way of not realizing how they themselves might be escalating a situation. So in all honesty I have no idea what happened with Watts and why the guards acted the way they did, nor do I have any idea how Watts acted when they stopped him. I think anyone getting beaten because of a traffic stop is pretty ridiculous.

On the whole of people posting that he got what he deserved, dude take a look at peoples comments on any topic like that and you are almost always going to see the assholes come out in force. It’s easy to be a jerkoff on the internet. Of course that doesn’t excuse it but assholes are assholes and I wouldn’t let a handful of assholes on the internet stand proxy for any sort of majority.

Look (as I said in the posts) what galled/scared me was not so much the incident itself, but the reaction of scads of American citizens posting about it, who seemed to think that what happened to Watts was normal verging on acceptable, i.e. that any tiniest failure to meet Authority with anything other than craven obedience should be taken as sufficient provocation to justify physical violence and imprisonment. The blog headings were used advisedly, to juxtapose this neo-fascist cant with the self-image of the US as a beacon of freedom, democracy and human dignity.

You’ll know, if you’ve read my blog on other occasions, that I have no time for abuse of power, no matter which nation is instituting it; and certainly the British police have their moments – as Jean Charles de Menezes would testify, if he hadn’t been shot so thoroughly to death by British police officers. This shit can happen anywhere. The difference is that when that particular incident happened, I didn’t catch any British citizens going on about how Menezes pretty much had it coming. We were all pretty horrified over here, because I think most Brits (and probably most Europeans) see police power as, at best, a necessary evil, and something to be suspicious of at all times. It just depresses me to see consciousness in the US stepping away from a similarly irreverent and healthy disrespect for the organs of government and power, and into what appears to be, all hyperbole aside, a proto-fascist state of compliance. These are dangerous times for western liberal (and secular) democracy, and we need to spot the canaries in the gold mine while they’re still breathing. I was angry (I’m still angry) about this shit, and I think it needed to be called to the max.

In regards to Watts I was talking about you;re two blog posts about him. Mainly the first one. I get that you back him, Dave does too, I just thought you veered straight off into the jackbooted American thug thing. At least that’s how I interpreted it.

MW2 had me laughing out loud many times. It was total bullshit, lacking CoD4’s sly pokes at American hoo-ah antics in the Middle East, and just strained credulity. The Russians invade the continental US by air? Right. A sub can cross the Pacific in a few hours? OK.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2’s plot is more explicitely sciencefictional but is much better imho.

I don’t really get mad when games are just adequately written. I get mad when they suck donkey balls, like MW2. Here’s hoping Crysis 2 is both a great game and has a decent story.

Arkham Asylum – I agree with you pretty much 100%; it’s the only game that has ever made me enjoy melee combat as an ongoing mode; the game-play dynamics were great, the artwork was cool…..(these are all things I actually said in interview, but of course they’ve been white-washed over in favour of the “Morgan says AA is crap” dynamic) However:

For whatever reasons (IP lock-up by Vertigo maybe) the story-telling was for shit and time after time I literally forgot why it was I was doing what I was doing. In fact, once I discovered the training sections were to all intents and purposes excerpted slabs of the main story, I pretty much abandoned the campaign and played those instead. In the end, I never actually finished the game, and that was because the story-telling failed.

And I really think the female character work was cheap and sleazy verging on blatantly sexist – comic-book origins yeah, but it highlighted the very worst of those origins. The great Batman stories of the last several decades (Dark Knight Returns, Killing Joke etc……) have garnered so much praise and attention specifically because they *step away* from such bargain basement dross – it would have been nice to see some of *that* comic-book basis imported into the game, but no chance – that would have mitigated against that ol’ Lowest Common Denominator.

@ Mike – Peter Watts comments? I backed (still back) the man to the hilt, I think he’s been martyred to a law enforcement sector totally out of control. What are you talking about?

@ David – You’re wrong, so wrong, about the conscious dynamics of this – I literally just talked to those guys, gave my opinions good or bad. Never gave a second thought to how it would come out. Hand on heart, man.

As to giving a fuck, I give a fuck that I’ve been misrepresented; I don’t like people lying about me. Apart from that – hey, I’m just here for the pub conversation