According to this New Orleans Times-Picayune article from Nola.com, Loyola University media professor David Myers took it upon himself to run a social experiment over a couple of years in City of Heroes/City of Villains to discover and document what would happen if he played by the rules as the designers had intended and not by the customs and taboos accepted among its player population. Twixt, his heroic avatar in the game, was a well-established character by the time Myers decided to embark on this quest.

See, Myers actually plays video games and is one of the first university-level professors to examine games from an academic perspective. That's right -- he plays and condenses what he learns into papers that his peers read and evaluate on an academic level. Instead of simply nodding at a piece of negativity that we might hear on Xbox Live, people like Myers are trying to find out why that's the case and how games have affected us on the social level (among other things).

As much as your opinion or mine are treated as nothing to be surprised about when we use the mute button on Live, lending a kind of scholarly legitimacy to this is something of a vindication. The proof has always been out there, but to see it being taken as seriously as this is an encouraging, if not surprising, indication that our favorite pastime is maturing in other ways outside of the ESRB label.

And as you can already guess, it's not pretty.

Gossipgamers has an article that links to a virtual tour of Michael Jackson's arcade goodies here showing off a lot of stand ups, pinball machines, and even a Sega R360 machine. It's off of Pinsane which also has a collection of other panoramic views covering the canceled auction from Julien's that had turned into a temporary public display afterwards.

I love Lucasarts of old. I have fond memories of their best games, streaking across the stars in X-Wing and Tie Fighter or delving into the forgotten mysteries of Atlantis with everyone's favorite archaeologist who isn't out looking for his mommy. So when they made the big announcement that their most classic titles would arrive on Steam, I was  a bit confused by the list.