Media: June 2007 Archive Page

--Text to Speech (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

Over the summer when I spend little time in the office and a lot of time outdoors, I often fall behind in my reading. The past few weeks I have been using TextAloud, a fairly simple but interesting program that converts text files to MP3s. I then put the MP3s on my PDA, and have listened to student papers that were submitted to finish off incomplete grades, a dissertation chapter that touched on a subject I know a little bit about, an administrative planning document on assessment, a 93-page article of mine that I've been developing, on and off, for about five years; and today when I drive to work briefly I'll be listening to a Gamasutra article on Zork.

TextAloud offers a free version, which was good enough for short and routine stuff, but the AT&T professional voices sound excellent -- far better than anything I had ever experienced before, and I figure they're well worth the cost of about a DVD movie each (one male, one female).

I have been toying with the idea of having my journalism students practice taking notes from audio recordings, and I figure a tool like this will let me work a little more efficiently, since I won't have to get a voice actor to record the dialogue each week. Of course, once I get a sense of what kinds of mistakes the students make, I can firm up the scripts and get someone to record them more dramatically.

I can imagine, with this text-to-speech program, setting up an RSS feed of all my student's overnight blogging on a given topic, converting it to an audio file, and then listening it on the drive in to work.

It almost makes me wish I had a longer commute.

What is it for? Why is it there? Did whoever put it up realize that if there were no sign, there would be no need to warn about it? Is this a joke from the developers? Is it a lesson in recursiveness? Is it a philosophical prop? --Bizarre Sign (Lushlush)

Does it mean "Don't forget to knock your head here?" Obviously, it would be much less painful to bang into a light sign hanging from a chain than to bang into that horizontal bar right behind it. So I guess, in a way, they do want people to bang into the sign. It's just like those "low overhead" signs hanging outside garages -- it's better if the top of your vehicle makes that sign wiggle than if your vehicle gets wedged under a support.

(I flipped the image and cropped it to emphasize the effect. Not something one would do as a journalist, but that sort of thing is frequently done in the context of design.)

Back in the projector room, five hairy men wearing nothing but overalls, hardhats, and grime were toiling away, trying to get things under control. "It's too powerful! It can't take no more!" they yell as they hopefully pull levers and turn valves. "The movie is living up to the franchise! We're going down!"

Meanwhile, in the audience, we all gasped at the disturbing site of celluloid going to pot. But, once the shock wore off, everyone began clapping and cheering. There were no qualms about what we had just witnessed: this film, in all it's sheer awesomeness, destroyed itself. --Living Free, Dying Hard, and All That Jazz (Tranquility Lost)

Mike Rubino writes about how the movie melted during the climax of the showing he was watching.

I have a weakness for the 2nd movie in the Die Hard series, because I watched it over the summer while taking a German intensive-language class, and the bad guys spoke German.

However, perhaps this is not a simple matter of cause and effect. Perhaps it?s wrong to assume that the availability of good graphics technology caused the decline of games like Zork. If "interactive fiction" has migrated to the margins of the computer gaming industry, it could be due simply to a lack of good marketing, not evidence of some inherent limitation of the genre. It's quite possible that one day, when enough gamers are at last disillusioned with the latest 128-bit smoke and mirror show, interactive fiction titles will again enjoy the lucrative rewards won by Infocom during the heyday of the Zork trilogy. After all, the treasures of Zork are still there beneath the old white house, awaiting their discovery by new generations of gamers. Zork is not obsolete; merely under appreciated. Perhaps Zork is not the past of gaming, but its future. --Matt Barton --The History Of Zork (Gamastura)

I'm convinced that some people simply don't have the gene that makes them love text-adventure games. Nevertheless, now that the rhet/comp crowd has started following James Gee into an exploration of the educational value of computer games, I think we'll see more scholarship on IF.

Barton quibbles with my claim that "Zork" began as a simulation of "Adventure," but he is right to note all of "Zork"'s technical improvements. Of course, in order to recognize the need for those improvements, the "Zork" implementors first had to be both obsessed by and annoyed at "Adventure."

Nevertheless, a good article that offers some of the close-reading that I missed in "Down From the Top of Its Game," the 2000 MIT student project that tracked the rise and fall of Infocom. Barton offers some new interviews that contextualize the available academic information for the benefit of a general readership. Maintaining accuracy while not putting the general reader asleep is not an easy task, and Barton does a good job here.

(Thanks for the e-mail, Matt, but it was already in my RSS reader, thanks to Slashdot.)

Doctors backed away on Sunday from a controversial proposal to designate video game addiction as a mental disorder akin to alcoholism, saying psychiatrists should study the issue more. --Experts oppose video game addiction designation (Reuters | C|Net)

The books Amazon will offer will include many rare volumes -- some that are hundreds of years old and others that are too brittle to be handled by people day after day. With digital scanning and printing technology, such books can be reproduced for anyone who wants to buy them. --Dan Carnevale --Amazon Will Digitize Universities' Books and Sell Print-on-Demand Copies (Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription))

I wonder if they will reprint books with personal annotations -- that is, if Thomas Jefferson scribbled notes in the margins of a book, would it be possible to get your own copy of the book, with Jefferson's notes reproduced along with the book text?

The division is cleanest in communities where the predator panic hit before MySpace became popular. In much of the midwest, teens heard about Facebook and MySpace at the same time. They were told that MySpace was bad while Facebook was key for college students seeking to make friends at college. I go into schools where the school is split between the Facebook users and the MySpace users. On the coasts and in big cities, things are more murky than elsewhere. MySpace became popular through the bands and fans dynamic before the predator panic kicked in. Its popularity on the coasts and in the cities predated Facebook's launch in high schools. Many hegemonic teens are still using MySpace because of their connections to participants who joined in the early days, yet they too are switching and tend to maintain accounts on both. For the hegemonic teens in the midwest, there wasn't a MySpace to switch from so the "switch" is happening much faster. None of the teens are really switching from Facebook to MySpace, although there are some hegemonic teens who choose to check out MySpace to see what happens there even though their friends are mostly on Facebook. --danah boyd --Viewing American class divisions through Facebook and MySpace (danah.org)

I personally find boyd's use of a lowercase logo for a name to be be right up there with Prince's use of an unpronounceable symbol and the star in "Wal*Mart," but I gather it makes her seem more approachable to the young people whose online habits she observes so carefully (and analyzes so well).

At a packed session for academic librarians attending the annual meeting of the American Library Association, in Washington, the topic was how to help students who have learned many of their information gathering and analysis skills from video games apply that knowledge in the library. Speakers said that gaming skills are in many ways representative of a broader cultural divide between today?s college students and the librarians who hope to teach them. --Scott Jaschik --When ''Digital Natives'' Go to the Library (Inside Higher Ed)

I'd love to learn more about how libraries are modding themselves in order to take advantage of the considerable digital literacies that our students bring with them when the arrive on campus.

Traditionally, many news organizations have applied the rules to only political reporters and editors. The ethic was summed up by Abe Rosenthal, the former New York Times editor, who is reported to have said, "I don't care if you sleep with elephants as long as you don't cover the circus."

But with polls showing the public losing faith in the ability of journalists to give the news straight up, some major newspapers and TV networks are clamping down. They now prohibit all political activity -- aside from voting -- no matter whether the journalist covers baseball or proofreads the obituaries. The Times in 2003 banned all donations, with editors scouring the FEC records regularly to watch for in-house donors. In 2005, The Chicago Tribune made its policy absolute. CBS did the same last fall. And The Atlantic Monthly, where a senior editor gave $500 to the Democratic Party in 2004, says it is considering banning all donations. After MSNBC.com contacted Salon.com about donations by a reporter and a former executive editor, this week Salon banned donations for all its staff.

What changed? --Bill Dedman --Journalists dole out cash to politicians (quietly) (MSNBC)

Also of interest is a long list of excuses/apologies/evasions offered by reporters and editors who made partisan donations. Several of the donors were up front about their attitude, saying that as reporters they don't give up their right to participate in the political process. But in many cases, their employees have a policy in place that stipulates exactly what a news employee must do in order to prevent the appearance of bias from affecting the public's faith in the publication's ability to present the news honestly, without bias.

This response from the copyeditor of The New Yorker is illuminating: "I've never thought of myself as working for a news organization."

Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Beginning to plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the Little Ice Age, should be a priority for governments. It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world, especially Canada. As a country at the northern limit to agriculture in the world, it would take very little cooling to destroy much of our food crops, while a warming would only require that we adopt farming techniques practiced to the south of us.

Meantime, we need to continue research into this, the most complex field of science ever tackled, and immediately halt wasted expenditures on the King Canute-like task of "stopping climate change." --R. Timothy Patterson --Read the sunspots (Financial Post)

Because Hollywood and the mainstream press in America have pretty much decided that human activity have caused global warming, I am always interested when I come across reports of an alternative way of thinking .

Environmental reporting is an area in which journalists who are sympathetic to the agenda of environmentalists (after all, who doesn't want clean water and air?) are too quick to pass along scary statistics and predictions that have little or no basis in scientific fact.

He is full of high sentence, like J. Alfred Prufrock. But beneath it all, one finds a sense of cultural history combining one part idyllic idealization with two parts status anxiety. Gorman only appears to be facing hard questions about the new digital order. Actually he is just echoing debates on "mass society" from five or six decades ago.

So let us go, then, you and I -- friends, as we are, of dusty pre-digital cultural literacy -- into the library stacks. Let us locate a bound volume of Sewanee Review from 1957 and open it to read "Daydreams and Nightmares: Reflections on the Criticism of Mass Culture" by Edward Shils. The same text may be found in Shils's collection The Intellectuals and the Powers and Other Essays, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1972 -- a volume not yet absorbed by Google Books. --Scott McLemee --Mass Culture 2.0 (Inside Higher Ed)

A good response to librarian Michael Gorman's latest anti-technology rants.

Of course he would expect I was in the pay of those whose interests I advanced. Why else would I advance them? Both he and I were in a business in which such shilling was the norm. It was totally reasonable to thus expect that money explained my desire to argue with him about public policy.

I don't want to be a part of that business. And more importantly, I don't want this kind of business to be a part of public policy making. We've all been whining about the "corruption" of government forever. We all should be whining about the corruption of professions too. But rather than whining, I want to work on this problem that I've come to believe is the most important problem in making government work.

And so as I said at the top (in my "bottom line"), I have decided to shift my academic work, and soon, my activism, away from the issues that have consumed me for the last 10 years, towards a new set of issues: Namely, these. "Corruption" as I've defined it elsewhere will be the focus of my work. For at least the next 10 years, it is the problem I will try to help solve. --Larry Lessig --Required Reading: the next 10 years (lessig blog)

Lessig is an excellent communicator and an inspiring leader. It will be interesting to see what he accomplishes when he turns from copyright reform to the broader concept of corruption.

WATCH out YouTube lovers - the online video service are trialling new technology to prevent people posting unauthorised material they don't have the copyright for.

YouTube will trial the new technology with two of the world's largest media companies, Time Warner Inc. and Walt Disney Co. --YouTube no longer yours (Sunday Telegraph)

I designed this site to enable those of us who are having difficulty in solving Adventure / Colossal Cave to work together to solve the game.

This is not a hints site, and there is no spoiler space. Information is presented as fully as I can, though the information in the walk through tends to be less detailed and that in the object, people, and places pages to be more detailed. --afjbell --Adventure/Colossal Cave Home Page (Hypertext Walkthrough Index Page)

A useful site that breaks Adventure down into objects, places, and a walkthrough (all hyperlinked). The same site also similar treatments of Zork and a few other games.

The best interviews I've had were with people obviously familiar with my work. A great interview with a reporter feels like a natural conversation with a friend you've never met. They'll ask you questions that you haven't answered a hundred times before, and really dive into your experiences that led to something newsworthy. A good interview will feel open ended and go wherever the conversation leads. A good reporter will send you an email when the article is posted and thank you for your time. If you notice any of these qualities, relish the opportunity because these kinds of interviews account for maybe 5% of the interviews I've ever done. --Matt Haughey --How to talk to the press (fortuito.us)

The tips added by Grant Barrett are also helpful.

I'll be teaching an entry-level journalism course this fall, and this will be a helpful way of getting my cub reporters to think about the interview from the perspective of a subject-matter expert.

News emerged over the weekend that Church authorities have complained to Sony about the depiction of Manchester Cathedral in the game. Some reports have stated that the Church may pursue legal action against the company.

But according to Alex Chapman of Campbell Hooper solicitors,"The Church will have an uphill battle in a legal claim against Sony, and indeed it is likely that there is no basis for a claim." --Church will face ''uphill battle'' if suing Sony, says legal expert (Games Industry Biz)

I've been following this story about Resistance: The Fall of Man.

I'm reminded of when sculptor Frederick Hart was surprised to discover that that a copy of a sculpture he had created for the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. was featured for about 20 minutes in the movie Devil's Advocate, and that the filmmakers had actually animated the sculpture to turn it into what the Anglican church leaders called a distortion of a religious sculpture.

Sony was forced to re-edit the film before they could release it on DVD and video (after agreeing to put disclaimer stickers on the copies of the movie that had already been produced).

The National Cathedral case involved a living artist, who still owned the copyright to a work that was commissioned for a religious purpose. The Manchester Cathedral case probably doesn't involve much recently-produced art, and the leaders object to the fact that the digital re-creation of the church is the setting for a gunfight.

It will be interesting to see how the mainstream media represent the Manchester case, since it involves a video game. (We've already seen that even the very edgy indie Slamdance Film Festival is not a safe place for envelope-pushing videogames.)

"There are days when I watch 'The Daily Show,' and I kind of chuckle. There are days when I laugh out loud. There are days when I stand up and point to the TV and say, 'You're damn right!'" says Brown, chair of the communications department at Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and an associate professor of broadcast journalism.

Brown, who had dismissed the faux news show as silly riffing, got hooked during the early days of the war in Iraq, when he felt most of the mainstream media were swallowing the administration's spin rather than challenging it. Not "The Daily Show," which had no qualms about second-guessing the nation's leaders. "The stock-in-trade of 'The Daily Show' is hypocrisy, exposing hypocrisy. And nobody else has the guts to do it," Brown says. "They really know how to crystallize an issue on all sides, see the silliness everywhere." --Rachel Smolkin --What the Mainstream Media Can Learn From Jon Stewart  (American Journalism Review)

Thanks for the suggestion, Mike.

A Courier-Journal sports reporter had his media credential revoked and was ordered to leave the press box during the NCAA baseball super-regional yesterday because of what the NCAA alleged was a violation of its policies prohibiting live Internet updates from its championship events. --Rick Bozich --Courier-Journal reporter ejected from U of L game: Bennett removed for blogging super-regional (Courier-Journal)

I'm posting this version because I find it interesting that, when the Courier-Journal reported on the incident, it emphasized the involvement of the paper, while when this story attracts the blogosphere, it will be the identity of the reporter as a staff blogger that gives the story legs.

It's unusual for a newspaper to interview its own staff members, but the paper's executive editor, Bernie L. Ivory, gets a few good zingers about First Amendment rights, and a lawyer-friendly response to a claim that the NCAA threatened to punish the University of Louisville if officials did not revoke the reporter's press pass: "If that's true, that's nothing short of extortion and thuggery."

The Courier-Journal carefully included the "If that's true" part of Ivory's quote, which is a good hedge against future accusations of libel. (See this current story about how selective quoting made Edwards sound like he was talking about the Paris Hilton saga, when in fact he twice said he wasn't talking about her.)

The reporter was warned before the game that if he blogged during the game, it was in violation of NCAA policies. He consulted his editors, and went ahead and blogged anyway.

According to the Courier-Journal, staff blogger Brian Bennett was approached by NCAA officials in the fifth inning of a game between the University of Lousville and Oklahoma State, told that blogging "from an NCAA championship event 'is against NCAA policies (and) we're revoking the (press) credential and need to ask you to leave the stadium.'"

In its article, the Courier-Journal quoted its executive editor, Bennie Ivory, as saying, "It's clearly a First Amendment issue. This is part of the evolution of how we present the news to our readers. It's what we did during the Orange Bowl. It's what we did during the NCAA basketball tournament. It's what we do." --Blogger removed from NCAA baseball game for blogging (C|Net)

--How NOT To Use Powerpoint By Comedian Don McMillan (YouTube)

Thanks for the suggestion, Josh.

I generally ask my students to post their presentation notes on their blog, and rather than read through their blog entry word-for-word just take the class through the links and talk us through their main points.

--IF Comic (David Garcia's Blog)

So far there are three installments of a new interactive fiction comic. I'll be watching this site.

"Looking at this brochure, it's obvious Paul just wanted to use the 'wave' frame effect from that new PhotoFrame 2.0 software package we got last week," fellow Blue Moon graphic designer Jared Mahaffey said. "There's whacked-out, psychedelic edges all over the place--on the photos, on the floor-plan charts, even on the text boxes, for God's sake." --Graphic Designer's Judgment Clouded By Desire To Use New Photoshop Plug-In (The Onion (Satire))

BioShock will be Ken Levine's magnum opus. It will be his career defining game. It's ambitious, unusual and aggressive, mixing the high polish expected of a "next generation" shooter, with equal parts storytelling, politics, and philosophy, all wrapped up in a bloody, underwater, 1940's bow.

[...]

The most prominent character in BioShock -- Andrew Ryan, Rapture's founder -- is an embodiment of a self-centered, free-will political ideology called Objectivism. Objectivism is the brainchild of 1960s author Ayn (rhymes with mine) Rand. She defined it thus: "Man as a Heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity and reason his only absolute." Put more simply, an Objectivist says "the world is what it is, my place in it is important, the only way to know anything is to use your own head, and the best political system is one that leaves me the hell alone. "Andrew Ryan is Ayn Rand meets Howard Hughes," explains Levine.

The initial plot of BioShock -- the founding of this utopia -- mirrors the plot (albeit through a glass darkly) of Rand's 1960's epic book "Atlas Shrugged." In "Atlas Shrugged" the worlds elite -- the "atlases" -- stage a minor rebellion and remove themselves to a better place: a valley where they can be free of the eye and hand of the world's governments and those who would leech off their talents. While the rhetoric of Rapture's founder, Andrew Ryan (an anagram of Ayn Rand with an extra "rew" thrown in for obfuscation) sounds like a Randian polemic, his nemesis is ambiguously named "Atlas." To figure out which one is really the good guy or the bad guy, we'll all have to play the game.

BioShock's story -- for those who wish to stop blowing things up to delve into it -- is about translating this Objectivist ideology into the real world. "One of the things that's very appealing about Rand to me, and about Rapture, is at least in the beginning they're driven by reason." Indeed, this is what attracts most people to Objectivism: it's based on rationality above all else. By both highlighting and skewering Objectivism, Levine's on the warpath against zealots. "I'm trying to write about what happens when real people try to do things," he explains. "The characters in Ayn Rand's books are paragons." But paragons aren't real people, and Levine has written his characters to be as real as possible. They may be drawn in broad strokes, but they're human. "Real people aren't perfect. That's the problem with ideologies. Real people carry out ideologies. So even the best of intentions gets screwed up."

To attempt to do this in a game -- not a college art project, but an actual commercial blockbuster game -- is phenomenally ambitious. "You don't elevate the discussion by saying 'listen to me!'" says Levine. "You get it by saying 'look this is awesome, oh and by the way we're also talking about being a human being. We're also talking about power.'" --BioShock (Gamers with Jobs)

Mr. Singhal is the master of what Google calls its "ranking algorithm" -- the formulas that decide which Web pages best answer each user's question. It is a crucial part of Google's inner sanctum, a department called "search quality" that the company treats like a state secret. Google rarely allows outsiders to visit the unit, and it has been cautious about allowing Mr. Singhal to speak with the news media about the magical, mathematical brew inside the millions of black boxes that power its search engine.

[...]

Until now, Google has preferred pages old enough to attract others to link to them.

But last year, Mr. Singhal started to worry that Google's balance was off. When the company introduced its new stock quotation service, a search for "Google Finance" couldn't find it. After monitoring similar problems, he assembled a team of three engineers to figure out what to do about them.

Earlier this spring, he brought his squad's findings to Mr. Manber's weekly gathering of top search-quality engineers who review major projects. At the meeting, a dozen people sat around a large table, another dozen sprawled on red couches, and two more beamed in from New York via video conference, their images projected on a large screen. Most were men, and many were tapping away on laptops. One of the New Yorkers munched on cake.

Mr. Singhal introduced the freshness problem, explaining that simply changing formulas to display more new pages results in lower-quality searches much of the time. He then unveiled his team's solution: a mathematical model that tries to determine when users want new information and when they don't. (And yes, like all Google initiatives, it had a name: QDF, for "query deserves freshness.") --Saul Hansell --Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine (New York Times)

Interesting details... so PageRank is not as important now as it once was.

Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.

This, despite the fact that reviews, critiques and essays over the decades say that is precisely what it is all about. Even Bradbury's authorized biographer, Sam Weller, in The Bradbury Chronicles, refers to Fahrenheit 451 as a book about censorship.

Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.

"Television gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was," Bradbury says, summarizing TV's content with a single word that he spits out as an epithet: "factoids." He says this while sitting in a room dominated by a gigantic flat-panel television broadcasting the Fox News Channel, muted, factoids crawling across the bottom of the screen.

His fear in 1953 that television would kill books has, he says, been partially confirmed by television's effect on substance in the news. --Amy E. Boyle Johnston --Ray Bradbury: Farehheit 451 Misinterpreted (LA Weekly)

I've never taught this book, but I've been thinking about it, and this is actually the approach I would have taken -- that it was a storyteller's response to the rise of storywatching.

Cutler has spent much of her time fending off a lawsuit by ex- boyfriend and fellow DeWine staffer Robert Steinbuch, who claims Cutler's blog publicly humiliated him. He is seeking more than $20 million in damages.

[...]

The lawsuit is being closely watched by online privacy groups and bloggers because the case could help establish whether people who keep online diaries are obligated to protect the privacy of the people they interact with offline. --Sex Blogger Files for Bankruptcy (Breitbart | AP)

CNN is widely credited with initiating the acceleration of the modern news cycle with the fall 2006 debut of its spin-off channel CNN:24, which provides a breaking news story, an update on that story, and a news recap all within 24 seconds. In addition to creating its groundbreaking format, CNN:24 broke many important stories with reports such as "Ford No Money Everyone Fired," "Iraq Bomb Kill Truck," "Country Hates Bush," "Dow High Now," and "Squirrel Water Skis."

"TV news reporting has always been about breaking the story down into only the barest, most salient facts, but the breakneck pace of contemporary reportage doesn't allow for that anymore," said Professor Robert Kubey, director of the Center for Media Studies at Rutgers University. "Today's ace reporter isn't the one with the best command of the language, but the one who can say 'Congress!' or 'Health care?' or 'Slam dunk!' with the most appropriate expression on his or her face." --Media Landscape Redefined By 24-Second News Cycle (The Onion (Satire))

So I pour myself a glass of red wine, settle in with a fresh pair of flannel pajamas and start channeling my inner geek with glee. Primetime or not, I love the Bee. I love it. I love the celebration of intelligence, the championing of nerd-ship, of the brotherhood of brainiac. This is why the Bee should be on primetime network television. So that the Steve Jobs in all of us gets some real screen time. So that the incredible freakiness of spelling into your hand has an audience. A chance to shine. A chance to let every kid who spends his evenings rocking back and forth in his bedroom dreading the misery of junior high see that it is going to be okay. That geekiness has a freaking point! The Bee is a nerd manifesto! WHOO-HOO! --West Coast Bee Call (Throwing Things)

Detailed commentary on last night's spelling bee championship, which I watched with the family.

A screenwriter couldn't possibly have come up with the victory interview, in which the winner says he prefers math and music to spelling because spelling is "just memorization." After the reporter invites him to give his opinion of the bee now, the kid pauses for a long, long time and says, "Does that mean I'm supposed to like it more now?"

Way to put a serrefine on that post-competition enthusiasm.

You may or may not be familiar with V-Tech Rampage, a flash game created by Ryan Lambourn. True to its title, the game allows the player to take on the role of Cho Seung-Hui and re-enact the fateful school shooting of April 16th. The game drew hatred from the mainstream media and gamers alike; many feel the game to have no ultimate purpose other than allowing players to kill simply for the sake of killing.

Similar complaints have been lodged against Super Columbine Massacre RPG!, created by Danny Ledonne. Like V-Tech Rampage, SCMRPG allows the player to take the roles of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold on the day they massacred twelve of their peers.

In an effort to get Lambourn's side of the story and answer some nagging questions I had for Ledonne, I interviewed these two frequently despised, often applauded game creators about the possible importance of their games. --Virtual school shooings: interviewing two of the most hated game creators alive (Destructoid)

Ryan Lambourn, the creator of V-Tech Rampage, sounds defensive and juvenile. I haven't played his game yet, so I'm just filing this for later.

Same with I'm O.K. - A Murder Simulator