Gamers' Perks, or 'Playola'? (thanks Penny Arcade): The gist here is that game reviewers get crazyass free trips and prizes from game companies. (As you well know if you've been watching those terrible movie segments on the monthly PS2 demo disk.) Yes, they do. It's common practice for any promoter to give away free stuff to reviewers/buyers. It's why I have a Jerry Springer keychain and a Jamie Foxx Show baseball cap.

The only bit that sucks is that the extravagance and the expense far outweighs the rewards. What exactly is Sega going to get out of paying $100,000 to send some monkey boy up in an F-14? Or sending several monkey boys? Hopefully a cover feature, but they probably just get a 4 star review instead of a 3 star review. "Review" being one paragraph in the ass end of the magazine. Generally, the reviews I read are very quick to point out what sucks in a game, and I innately believe that the respectable publications (primarily the EGM family) don't let Barnum's ballyhoo trump up a lousy game.

As for the less respectable press, well, only twelve year olds pay attention to them anyway. Who decided that website journalists have any kind of reach? Who is this "Tom Ham," whom the article describes as "one of several dozen opinion makers in the $20-billion global games industry"? Sorry LA Times; never heard of him. That's like saying Harry Fatass Knowles is one of several dozen influential Hollywood magnates.

Death of a Game Addict (thanks again Penny Arcade): This one is a hoot. Some idiot blew his head off right after playing EverQuest. Honestly, that'd be my response too.

We should all be thankful that this moron was satisfied with merely offing himself, and not one of those extroverted killers. A world with one less EverQuest player is a better place. Some great excerpts:

"She has a list of names her son scrawled while playing the game: "Phargun," "Occuler," "Cybernine." But Woolley is sure if they are names of online friends, places he explored in the game or treasures his character may have captured in quests." (I guess "Cybernine" isn't cooperating with investigating authorities.)

"Shawn was playing 12 hours a day, and he wasn't supposed to because he was epileptic, and the game would cause seizures," she said. "Probably the last eight times he had seizures were because of stints on the computer." (Uninvolved parenting. Nice work, Mom.)

"Woolley knows her son had problems beyond EverQuest, and she tried to get him help by contacting a mental health program and trying to get him to live in a group home." (But that pesky guilty feeling isn't going to stop Mom suing Sony.)

"The social component is big because it gives players a false sense of relationships and identity," Parker said. "They say they have friends, but they don't know their names." (This one takes me right back to my MUSHing days. It was true then and it's truer now, since games like EverQuest have so much play in them that you can skip all the boring MU-style conversation time.)

"Elizabeth Woolley remembers when her son was betrayed by an EverQuest associate he had been adventuring with for six months. Shawn's online brother-in-arms stole all the money from his character and refused to give it back. "He was so upset, he was in tears," she said. "He was so depressed, and I was trying to say 'Shawn, it's only a game.' I said he couldn't trust those people." (Geez, if you can't trust polygonal virtual anonymous avatars named (KL)PornKilla7401, who can you trust?)

Mom was obviously very familiar with what was going on with her stupid, lonely kid. What he needed was forced therapy then, not painful guilt-ridden lawsuits now.