Column: 'Blogged Out: On Medpacks, Anonymity, Real-Life Headshots'

In today's latest column, regular columnist Jim Rossignol presents this week's 'Blogged Out', a news report that looks at the world of developer blogging and the conversations being had with the community at large. This week, Rossignol takes a look at anonymity in MMOs, the (non)effects of games on soldiers in Iraq, and the Canadian Red Cross' insistance that the use of the organization's logo in video games somehow tarnishes its image, as Terra Nova's Dan Hunter recently blogged about: "In trademark law this issue gets played out as 'tarnishment' and the implication here is that the Red Cross's mark is somehow tarnished by association with a violent videogames. Please. I could maybe buy this if you built a videogame that had Red Cross workers as spawn of Satan, going round killing innocent babies under color of helping them. But the mere use of a Red Cross symbol within the game? C'mon." Rossignol's response, as extracted from the full column: "Of course the real point that The Red Cross could have made is that the use of health or 'med-packs' in a game is often an atrociously lazy way of dealing with giving your game avatar health at all. There are better ways, both for the game mechanic and for coherence within a game world - I know I wasn't the only person who choked on his salad sandwich when confronted with Medal of Honor's 'tank health'. (Tanks get first aid from oil drums, so they do...)" You can now read the full Gamasutra column, including a bit from 'Generation Kill' author Evan Wright (no registration required, please feel free to link to this column).