Was Lady MacBeth playing video games?

The famous piece of Shakespeare is not related to video games thou the effect of moral guilt depicted by the lady who hallucinates blood on her hands after participating in a conspiracy of murder. Putting a heavy burden on her moral believes. This effect can be witnessed on others when being part either passive or active in something that goes against the personal understanding of moral, ethics or humanity. Some try to literally wash off the guilt which gave this effect its name.

This of course is an extremely basic description. I recommend to read up on it if your interested. For the following it should be enough to make the case. This is not the average gaming raises violent behaviour in our kids discussion. But rather what kind of emotions and feelings a game can cause in us. I am pretty sure all of us have fond memories of our gaming experience. The good, the bad and the ugly. I strongly believe games can make us happy and evoke strong emotions of all kinds. Even so much more if other human players are involved.  We yell at our games, we throw the controller away, we complain about the difficulty of a game, unfair players and subjective illogical decision in the game. We all remember crying when Aeris died, how lucky we were to finish a great game for the first time and our first successful group event that included 30-60 other human players. But the question in regards to violence and realistic graphics is what happens if we witness in a game cruelty, torture, murder or mass killings? Do we feel morally challenged? Are we feeling guilty for shooting civilians? Is it against our ethics to kill a serial killer ourselves? Where is the line if any for games?

Think back to all the horror and war games you played or maybe even just the last platformer. Was there ever a time you felt guilty? Ashamed? Saddened? Something you wished you could wash off even thou it is just a game?

References

• Wikipedia: Lady Macbeth effect
• the escapist: Violent videogames cause “Macbeth” effect
• ScienceDaily: Inexperienced video gamers show Macbeth effect

Screenshots: Guild Wars 2

Update on my two main characters on Guild Wars 2

Ouya: New challenger or next phantom?

Much has been said about this impressive kickstarter success. The initial goal was around 900.000 but they finished with 8.500.000 US Dollar. That sounds like an impressive bank but is it enough to get an open console running into commercial success?

I believe commercial success will be very difficult to achieve. An open console means it will run all kinds of ports from day one but also illegal software copies. This leads to the conclusion that you cannot make money from software sales. The most obvious choice would be to offer software for free and monetize it from within: free to play business model with micro-transactions. The question is how many of this kind can you run on the market without cannibalising other titles? The odds are very high you could end up with an Apple Store like situation. The market is flooded with ports, software of all kinds and copycats. From here on the mission is clear: create a healthy visible place which allows small developers to make an entrance and to have a chance of visibility without big marketing budgets.

Once you are at this point I think you could easily create a place where many can make money via the f2p model. The recent announcements for support from major players like SquareEnix shows that these see either a new chance or a new challenger. In any case they will want a foot in the door to make use of it or to leave the ship without big risks in case failure is imminent.

I don’t see yet any big success for Ouya because it lacks a clear mass market benefit. So far it can’t do anything we can’t do already with our home consoles or android devices. Upcoming initiatives like Microsofts SmartGlass could further decrease Ouyas positive but short bullet list.