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Yes, because we certainly don't have games targeting adolescent male power fantasies anymore.

That's totally the underrepresented demographic here.

Actually it caught some users off-guard and resulted in the ban hammer to hit hard. The COD black ops forums exploded since yesterday with complaints of people being banned.

Read the summary and article carefully: They wrote "Call to duty 4." That's the confusion. to != of

Of course, if you google "call to duty 4" (with quotes) the Wikipedia article for Call of Duty 4 is the first hit. Without quotes, you get http://www.callofduty.com/

I don't know about you guys, but when I search for "call of duty 4" the first hit is http://www.callofduty.com/ which has call of duty 4 modern warfare as the main page. It even has an age restriction drop down menu to make sure you are old enough to view a site advertising a rated M game.

Much of the stigma to games as far as their art design and story telling is fairly justified. Like all new media, games are desperate to keep the public buying. The result is that games often feature 'stories' which are gratuitious, cliche or even all together incongruous.

Many people have compared games to another 'young media' called comics. Comics and games share an audience, one that generally abhors the mainstream media. There's no reason that a comic can't be about true crime [too many to list], just like you can make a game about Desperate Housewives.

Games and Comics don't want to be ligitimate. A fairly big chunk of their appeal comes from an appeal to misfits, and as long as that's where they aim the money beam they have a guaranteed income. This quote from Phil is just a knowing wink, "Hey. We get you..."

The exception? Games without stories like Madden, Gran Turismo and The Sims. It's these games that have people buying entire systems just to play them. Eventually, they pick up something like Soul Calibur or Halo and the next thing you know there are more gamers.

Ironically, it's these-- the least emotional --games that are legitimizing the industry.

The only problem with your description is that Call of Duty games are not published by EA; they're published by Activision. So maybe you should be griping about them and not EA.

How about Quake 4 and Call of Duty 2?

Remid me that next time anyone on /. sees me playing Call of Duty to go murder some people and have the ''victims'' blame Infinity Ward and Activision and the Pope while the're at it...
But seriously, I strongly agree with dfenstrate; "What the fuck is wrong with this kid, and his parents?"
my 2''''

In my town we have a shop dedicated to LAN games any day of the week & a large public LAN once a month.
Most of those games are never played at LANs I've been to.

The most popular games are (in order of popularity):
Call of Duty
Battlefield Vietnam
UT2004
BF1942: Desert Combat mod

When some of the students in my degree have a private LAN, we play all the above games (except for call of duty) as well as Star Craft: Brood War & C&C Generals: Zero Hour

Seriously, in the not-too-distant future, I imagine the first thing I do after I buy a new game is to go download the pirated version.

That was just unacceptable, so I did the only thing I could do to play the game I purchased: pirate it.

Shut up nigger, and go back to playing Call of Duty.

in "Optional" mature content. How many awesome games were NOT sold due to some kid's parents saying it was too violent/had too much cussing/etc?

I understand that some people want "mature" content in their video games. But make it optional. Call of Duty has the blood as an optional setting. Halo: Combat Evolved does too, at least in the pc version, albeit disguised as "texture quality".

My suggestion is to have options like so in all video games, with a few exceptions, of course. Let the end user decide if he wants the gore. Cussing, naturally, isn't as easy to censor optionally, and I see no reason to have two different meshes for all female characters... one in the bikini, the other mesh with full-length dress, that's just nonsense. ;)

Is "Mature" necessary to the video game industry? Yes and no. Yes in the sense that some gamers won't buy games unless they have "mature" content in them, but no in the sense that a game has to have "mature" content or it won't sell well.

Call of Duty multiplater games show instant replays every time you get killed from the other player's perspective/view. I think this is a cool idea. It would be nicer if you can record that too.

I am a hardcore gamer who spends > 40 hours per week on games. Ranging from Dark Age of Camelot (an MMORPG), Call of Duty, America's Army and C&C Generals, depending on what mood I'm in. On top of this I try to get some programming in as well.

Today I have less time to invest 'dedicated' to one particular game, which is frustrating because you develop friends in the online gaming community that you lose when you move on. To me its saddening, and I'm clawing on to keep at the level I used to be at, but it isn't working. :(

Oh well, time to find a girlfriend, get married, and put the money spent on computers and games into a home deposit!

looking for free games? or retail games($)?
Me, personally, I've been playing Battlefield 1942, which just got Punkbuster added to it. Then there's the free Desert Combat mod for it. Also been playing Call of Duty. And Battlefield : Vietnam should be out within the next month or so.

As for free... How about America's Army? I haven't played it in a long time, but I loved it when i did play it. There's also Wolfenstein : Enemy Territory.

So did the Russian Army during WW2 (See Call Of Duty, it's a nice WW2 sim, or the Wikipedia entries for WW2, Stalin, and The Great Patriotic War).

Seriously though, if the US or Russia ever went up against China (Like in Tom Clancy's The Bear And The Dragon ), we might have to resort to a tactical nuke or something, the Chinese army is HUGE..

I am also unsure of whether or not action gamers... will buy into a title that seems to lack the excessive fiction, approachability and interactivity that drive practically all of today's modern games.

While these 'fictional' shooters are indeed fun, I've found myself quite taken with games like Call of Duty, and Battlefield 1942 whereas i used to be into Half Life, Gore, Doom, etc.. I seem play these types of games to put myself in the shoes (boots) of those that actually went to war, and less and less about just killing things.

Maybe it's just me getting a little older...who knows..

What were their reasons? I also wonder why twenty of the lead developers working on Medal of Honor: Allied Assault left an Electronic Arts funded studio to found Infinity Ward. Is it really the money, or is it something else? I have no knowledge in this field, so if anyone has any inside information or pertinent experience, please post, I'd love to hear it.

As far as the reallocation of talent goes, I had high hopes for Troika's Arcanum, seeing as how Troika consisted of several key members of the fantastic team which produced Fallout, but wound up disappointed at its lack of polish, whereas Inifinity Ward's soon-to-be-released Call of Duty looks by all means to be incredible even in its juvenile state. Maybe high-level-folk like doing things their way, for better or worse, without the interjections of a publisher seeking marketability. Once again, I'm only hypothesizing. Are there any game-developers out there willing to testify?