Should a smack as part of good parent correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?

Today I received a citizen initiated Referendum "Should a smack as part of good parental correction be a criminal offence in New Zealand?"

Although this blog about gaming, I think this referendum is important enough for me to blog about. This is a very loaded question which any academic would rigorously reword. By placing the word 'good' in front of parental correction, we are creating the idea the smacking is 'naturally' a good/positive part of parental correction. Who doesn't want to support 'good parenting'? If smacking is part of 'good parenting' than we should support 'good parenting'. Hence we should not criminalise good (smacking) parenting. It is after all 'good'.

However the real issue here is smacking. Smacking is often used as part of parental correction and has only recently been made a criminal offence in New Zealand over the last couple of years. Seen in this context, this question favours the pro-smacking side and this referendum is clearly misleading. It is an attempt to sway the opinions of politicians to support the pro-smackers. I hope people will realise that this is a very poorly constructed referendum question and I think can not be used as a proper measure of public opinion for the reasons covered in the previous paragraph.

For more information, please check out Yesvote.org . It's a website devoted to retaining the existing laws and is anti-smacking.

Update: I don't forget to visit Referedum Generator where you can generate your own (nonsensical) referedum!


Disclaimer: I don't think smacking is right.

Relic Games Sale on Steam

Steam is having a sale on relic games and if you're into strategy games but still haven't bought Dawn of War or Company of Heroes you should definitely check it out. With the currency exchange rate though, you might find that some games are almost the same as in Mighty Ape with games such as Soul Storm.

I recommend getting

• Relic Super Pack for US$25 which includes the first Dawn of War up to the Dark Crusade expansion and Company of Heroes and the first expansion pack.
• Company of Heroes Gold (US15) which includes the Company of heroes and the first expansion
• Dawn of War II for US$30
  

Curiously, the Dawn of War Anthology which includes Dawn of War and the Dark Crusade expansion is exactly the same price (US$25) as the Relic Super Pack so don't even bother buying that!

Good Old Games - Business Model

Good Old Games is a game company that recently launched focused around offering 'good old games' for a cheap price. Considering they are DRM free, I thought I would do a quick run down of what they offer and what I think their marketing strategy is.

1) Work with the Community aka Trust the customer -
All games are DRM free and this is quite a bold move by a games publisher. They are relying on community support rather than trying to convert pirates. It seems they've been paying attention to Star Dock's Brad Wardell's Gamer's Bill of Rights and his general comments on not treating paying customers as pirates.

2) Convenience
Many of these games are hard to find in any retail store. Perhaps more importantly, they are also made Windows XP compatible which is something quite hard to do as I've found out.
GOG has also expanded its catalogue and is trying to become a one stop shop for all your old gaming needs.
Finally you can redownload a game you've purchased as many times as you like where ever you are.

3) Extras
As recently mentioned in an interview by Gamasutra, their games "frequently includes additional pack-ins like soundtracks and development-related materials". For the collector types (like myself) which probably make up a substantial amount of their market this is good news.

4) Service/Support
The original publishers have long given up supporting these games. So GOG.com now takes upon itself to not only update the game for Windows XP but also to provide technical support.

Do you agree or disagree with my breakdown? Go ahead and comment if you like.

SCUMMVM wins awards again

SCUMMVM once again wins the Sourceforge choice awards. Yah! Adventure games aren't dead!

Digital Presvation in the Cloud

The US library of congress announces that it will start trialling cloud technologies as a way of preserving their data. Check out the press announcement. Hopefully this is the start of an international precedence for using cloud computing within the academic world.

Bungie parts ways with Halo

As Kotaku reports, Halo: Reach will be Bungie's last game and I for one feel that Bungie deserves gamer's support for doing that. It's tough walking away from such a successful IP as Halo but I believe that also frees Bungie to create another IP. Few Halo players remember that Bungie as a game studio has been famous for creating other memorable games such as Marathon and Myth which were revolutionary in their own way. Let's forget about the terrible action game Oni for a moment which did nothing for any genre.

Here's to hoping for another amazing game series, whatever it is!

Adventure games in European Game Stores

While I was in Europe, I took a peak at the European game stores and was pleasantly surprised to find that adventure games (as in the traditional point and click adventure games) occupied an equivalent amount of shelf space as other genres. Obviously, adventures as a market are still quite popular in places like Europe and has a much more stable niche than in the US, Australia or New Zealand.