Danny Ledonne's Super Columbine Massacre RPG!

Does reading Level Up sometimes feel like drinking water from a fire hose? Or surfing a tsunami? Does it ever give you the sensation that you've been buried under an avalanche of words, words, words? Yes, we know that the dizzying length of certain Level Up posts can read more like a manifesto or a jeremiad than a blog entry. For you, we offer the occasional feature "Things You May Have Missed," which will cull compelling excerpts from our more voluminous posts.

Yesterday, we wrote about our appearance of last week on CNN's "American Morning" to discuss Rockstar Games' forthcoming Manhunt 2. In that post, we discussed the host's repeated invocation of the word "kids" as part of an inadvertent but nonetheless pernicious assumption that all videogames are toys aimed at children rather than entertainment for a wide range of different audiences, of which children are simply one of many. Today, we revisit our Q&A with Game Developers Conference executive director Jamil Moledina, in which we discussed the Slamdance Film Festival's decision to pull Super Columbine Massacre RPG! from its videogame competition, and more specifically, the idea held my many gamers and non-gamers alike, that videogames are ultimately toys for tots.

To read our summary, click on the link below.

For comic book fans, movie buffs and videogame lovers, there are few things as exciting or as risky as the team-up. From Marvel Team-Up to World's Finest, Freddie Vs. Jason to Aliens Vs. Predator, Marvel Vs. Capcom to Rise of the Imperfects (dare we add Vs. Mode and Monday Morning Quarterback to the roll call?), the team-up has had a rich history. To that list, you can add the back pages of Edge, where the Western world's most respected videogame magazine is now featuring a monthly column penned by the staff of this humble blog.

A few explanations are in order. There's no interesting backstory as to how this came about: we were asked to contribute; we secured permission from our editors; we accepted the assignment. The column itself is named "Playing in the Dark," after the title of Toni Morrison's 1993 collection of essays on "Whiteness and the Literary Imagination"; as for the subtitle "...because people refuse to see," we took that from the prologue to Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man." The more we push ourselves to write critically about games, the more we realize that we still don't know, or have trouble articulating, about how games work. Our column's title and subtitle both reflect this confusion and signal our intention to keep grappling with the challenge of making sense of this developing medium; to answer not the question of "Are videogames art?" but rather "What kind of art are videogames?"

We can't help but point out the post-colonial irony in our appointment to the U.K. publication, seeing as our parents hail from Guyana and we ourselves from Canada, both former British subjects. And while England's imperial ambitions, thankfully, are not what they once were, this stateside addition to the magazine's roster should mean that the sun will never set on Edge's empire. We thank editor Tony Mott for the opportunity, and we hope that you'll take a look at what we've got to say in the pages of his magazine.

1. EGO...trip: the sincerest form of flattery 
2. NOA...Nintendo's U.S. CEO wins recognition
3. TF2...The Demoman shares his plight
4. HEH...Microsoft v. Bungie divorce, pictured
5. WoW..."I am the LAW-GIVER!"
6. PSP...online store rumors proliferate
7. SAD...Legal woes mount for anti-game gadfly
8. IGF...Independent Games Festival submissions