If you haven't heard by now, Brandon Crisp, a 15 year-old from Barrie, ON, went missing a couple of weeks ago. He ran away from home after his parents took his Xbox 360 away because they felt he had been spending too much time playing Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. You can read all about it.

The media are blaming video games and their supposed addictive nature, citing them as the likely reason for Brandon's disappearance. Like I'm sure that Pac-Man inspired many a person to gobble magic pills while listening to horrible repetitive music. Oh wait, I guess that's what raves are for. But that's besides the point. What the media, and specifically the writers who probably don't have first-hand experience with gaming culture (yeah, I said "culture"), don't realise is that gaming is (and always has been) an activity chock-full of social interaction. Back in my younger days, I frequented arcades where people would pump quarters into wooden cabinets and compete for the right to post their initials (or three-letter dirty words like "FUK", "ASS" and "POO") in the games' high score rankings. We'd gather around the machines where someone was playing exceedingly awesomely, alternating between cheers and boos. The sights, sounds and smells might have been different, but it was totally not unlike a hockey arena or baseball diamond.

With the power of today's computers and video game consoles, arcades are a relic of the past. However, the social interactions are now online. Xbox Live allows gamers to play with/against friends/strangers, which is essentially the same as the arcade experience without actually being there.

So when Brandon's parents took away his Xbox 360, they took away one of his means to socialise. I don't see how that is the fault of the video games. Even that, I don't think, would be the underlying reason why Brandon would run away. I think the XBox 360 could be interchangeable with a cell phone or TV privileges and the result could possibly be the same. That being said, perhaps the blame heaped on video gaming is covering for inter-family reasons, and honestly, it's really not our business. However, pointing the finger at video games is a lazy attempt to find a reason for Brandon's disappearance when the problem might simply be of the human variety.

As an aside, Call of Duty 4 is rated M by the ESRB, which means that it should not be sold to those under the age of 17 without parental consent. Brandon's 15 now, but CoD4 was released in 2007, when he was 14. Much like music, movies, TV, books and so on, I believe a parent should be informed about the type of media that their children consume and help them to be able to put it all in perspective.

All in all, hopefully Brandon returns home safely.

Update 11/6/2008: Brandon's body was found in a field near his home: link

The fact that I own a Wii probably contributes to my lack of enthusiasm for PC gaming. Say what you will about its modest hardware specs when compared to the Xbox 360 or PS3, the Wii's control scheme stands alone. No where else is this more evident than in FPS games. The goal behind FPSs is to make the gamer feel like they are the protagonist - not by viewing the action from above, the side, or over-the-shoulder - by viewing the game from the character's perspective. An enemy's attacking you? Shoot him by aiming your Wii remote at the enemy, much like a weapon in the real world, and pull the trigger. It's natural (not the homicide part), intuitive and exhibits the behavior of our three-dimensional existence.

Let's contrast this with the keyboard and mouse. While this control scheme - employed by countless FPSs on the PC - provides plenty of accuracy, it still feels like a game. You have to map three-dimensional ideas to a two-dimensional implementation. On a flat surface, you first move your hand along the x-axis to the position of the enemy and then along y-axis to the desired height (or in the reverse order). That seems more like Battleship to me. I shouldn't knock the keyboard+mouse combo too much, it's still better than using two analog sticks for aiming like the Xbox 360 and PS3 employ; they're similar to those stuffed toy crane games that used to be found in arcades.

Jeff Atwood, who I regularly read on his Coding Horror blog and anticipate the launch of his StackOverflow project with Joel Spolsky, is a developer and writer that I respect. But I had to disagree with him couple of months ago when he said, via Twitter, that the Wii couldn't be a serious gaming console. I replied to him and mentioned that Metroid Prime 3 was the best FPS experience I ever had, thanks to the control scheme and I was able to enjoy it from the comfort of my living room couch. Here's the conversation: 1, 2, 3, and 4).

The only thing that irks me is that the Wii's excellent control is not exploited in the way that it should be. There's far too much shovelware and awful software available for the Wii at the moment, with the odd gem or two. But I think that will change with some promising new disc releases like The Conduit, Fatal Frame 4, Dead Rising : Chop Till You Drop and Mad World.

The Conduit

Fatal Frame 4

Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop

Mad World

Even though some upcoming WiiWare games like Alien Crush Returns and Mega Man 9 won't highlight the Wii's innovative control scheme, I'm still looking forward to them too

Seeing this arcade makes me nostalgic for the days when gaming-related networking involved bumping elbows and face-to-face conversations instead of TCP/IP. Peter's pride and joy looks like a faithful representation of the arcades that I grew up in, minus the drug dealers.

A few other things that I noticed when I hooked our Wii back up, which sometimes didn't jive with the note that Nintendo left in the package, are:

• Re-synching our 4 remotes was neccessary; easy-peasy.
• I had to clear and re-enter my wireless network settings. They were preserved, but for whatever reason, didn't work until I re-entered them.
• You have to download anything you've downloaded in the past from the Shopping channel. As such, I proceeded to download the Opera web browser, Everybody Votes, and Check Mii Out channels again. No biggie.
• Our Miis were still there (including the one that I created that totally resembles my father in-law) but they are no longer editable

Other than that, Nintendo took good care of our console and it returned to us in an acceptable amount of time. Oh, and one more setting I made sure to change: WiiConnect24 -> Standby -> OFF! As off as off can be

On Friday evening before venturing to the airport to get Dena, I decided to pass the time by trying to make some progress with Metroid Prime 3. After an hour or so, I began to hear a loud buzzing noise. I was in new (to me) areas of Sky City so I thought it was part of the sound effects...until I heard the same sound on the map screen. I turned off my TV to rule out a problem with it, and sure enough, the sound remained. It was the Wii. To troubleshoot, I went back to the Wii Menu: no buzzing noise. I popped trusty Wii Sports: no buzzing noise. Guitar Hero 3: buzzing Noise. Metroid Prime 3: buzzing noise. It concerned me, but not all that much.

Then yesterday, while playing Metroid Prime 3 again (and defeating Ghor, for those interested), I noticed "sparkly" pixels when ever Samus entered a Save point or her ship. I backed out to the Wii Menu and the "sparkly" pixels were there too. After poking around the Web a bit, I found a video of someone playing Resident Evil 4 with the same problem that I was having:

I called Nintendo Support today and have shipped my Wii off to Nintendo of Canada in Scarborough for repair, or rather more likely a replacement with my save data copied over (I backed up my save data to an SD card just in case). Of course this is all covered under warranty. When I was filling out the Purolator waybiil today, the clerk asked me if it was an X-Box 360 that I was sending away for repair since, as she said, "we see that a lot". I had to hang my head a little bit when I replied that it was a Wii that I bought back in April 2007.

The Internet consensus is that this problem is caused by overheating. I keep my Wii in a cabinet, but there are 20 centimetres of spaces on each side and the back is open. I'd hate to think it needs more room than that, but perhaps it does. One thing I did notice is how warm the Wii would get while it's on Standby with WiiConnect24 enabled. My plan is that when my Wii returns, I'll disable WiiConnect24 as a precaution. I'll miss waking up to the glowing blue light when ever there's a new message or system update, but I'd rather not have to send my Wii off for repairs again.

I've never played the original Manhunt game, which received an M rating, but I've read reviews and it is apparently pretty violent. So how much worse can Manhunt 2 be to be slapped with the dreaded AO rating?

Only 23 games have ever received an AO rating. 21 of those games are PC games, where anything goes; although you won't be able to buy an AO game at EB or Wal-Mart. Of the two console games, GTA: San Andres was a originally an M rated game, but the "hot coffee" mod that was discovered after its release prompted the change to AO, and Thrill Kill never saw the light of day.

The head of the ESRB was really vague in detailing why Manhunt 2 got the AO rating. So does Rockstar have an M-rated version of the game ready to go and this AO version was just part of the hype machine?