Okay, I admit it: I have a strong tendency to assign to blame for every gaming- related crime I hear about to Grand Theft Auto. I don’t know why, I just do.

Thankfully, though, this one doesn’t seem to have a GTA connection, just a Lame Pathetic Crook connection.

The guy walks into a video game store, asks to see an XBox 360, then lifts up his sweater to show the pistol stuck in his pants, and walks off with the console and just two games. Yes, just two.

We here at the ol’ Gaming Technology Blog really love keeping tabs on the continuing tit for tat, give and take, mano a mano dialogue between people who think video games are bad, evil, unwholesome corruptions sent by the devil, and people who use their brains.

Example of people who use their brains? These psychologists who have
“discovered” that playing video games has benefits, and that you can’t just lump them all up under the “bad” category.

You can read the whole article by clicking on this link.

What They Play, a parents’ guide to video games, conducted two separate studies asking parents about things their kids did that they as parents found objectionable.

Around 3,000 parents responded by ranking video games a “more objectionable” activity than watching porn or drinking beer.

They also ranked violence in video games as more objectionable than sexual content.

With a game like Grand Theft Auto, you’re bound to get an “I told you so” from some crime-obsessed, watching-out-for-the-kids type media watchdog, somewhere along the line.

And we certainly didn’t have to wait. This week a Thai teenager knifed a 54-year old taxi dead, in part, according to the youth, to find out whether it was as easy to kill and rob in real life as it was in the video game. The teenager had a self- confessed obsession for the GTA4 game.

More fuel to the fire of video game violence, certainly. In 2005 a teenager was killed two police men and a 911 dispatcher after months of playing Grand Theft Auto.

So the idea was to find and collect letter shapes formed by the corpses of Elites and Spartans (those are playable characters from the game). What they got was a full alphabet, including numbers and even a few punctuation marks!

Take a gander at this monumental achievement by clicking on this link.

Anthony Puzo, son of the late Mario Puzo, is suing Paramount Pictures for at least $1M for breach of contract, after the studio allegedly failed to turn over revenues from the video game adaptation of Mario Puzo’s novel “The Godfather”.

Paramount licensed game published Electronic Arts to turn the original 1972 film into a video game in 2006. According to the younger Puzo, the Puzo estate has not received any revenue from the video game since then.

A recent study by an Australian Psychology graduate suggests that gaming addicts, for all their shortcomings, are not the antisocial nerds we tend to make them out to be.

Of the 621 adult respondents to the study, 15% calimed to spend more that 50 hours a week playing video games, but only 1 percent exhibited behaviors like poor social skills and low-self esteem.

One caveat is that the survey was done online, where people tend to be less shy any way.

How? By playing video games, of course.

In particular, she’d like kids to start playing Our Courts, the video game she’s helping to create, which is aimed specifically to help kids learn about how legal courts work. The program will be distributed for free online, though no release date has yet been set.

Don’t click on the image above! The link to the actual video is at the end of this post.

This Youtube vid-slash-flash-lecture is by a certain Daniel Floyd, who works at the Savannah College of Art and Design. In it he explores the oft-discussed relationship between video games and sex.

You can watch the clip by clicking on this link.

Not many gamers are aware just how much they owe this man, Ken Kutaragi. “Father of Playstation” as he is also known in Japan, Kutaragi was responsible for bringing cd-rom-based gaming to the world, changing the face of the gaming industry and leading Sony to the top of the gaming industry.

But all that changed when the latest version the the Playstation, the PS3, sold poorly, and Kutaragi and Sony parted ways.

Now it seems he will be joining the board of media conglomerate Kadokawa Holdings, which has its fingers in publishing, film, and of course, videogames.