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If you have any interest in video games, I highly recommend Tom Bissell’s profile of voice actor Jennifer Hale in the New Yorker. It’s a fascinating look at a profession that is underappreciated and little-understood. (It’s also, sadly, behind the online paywall. Print is still cool, though! Grab a hard copy.)

I also recommend the supplementary podcast episode, which is freely available and features further discussion of Hale’s signature role, Mass Effect’s Commander Shepard. In the podcast, Bissell offers this interesting explanation for why he chooses to play as female characters in games (a preference I increasingly share for reasons that I’ve not been able to articulate):

I can say, for me, I play as a woman because it adds an additional layer of fiction onto the fictional experience. I don’t play games to feel empowered; I play games to be part of an experience involving characters that I’m not. And so taking a woman actually, you know, exaggerates that quality of games that I really like. But I think a lot of young men play action games for, you know, a kind of very facile sense of empowerment. And that’s lamentable, but it’s unavoidable. You know, eighty percent of people pick the male Shepard even though in my humble opinion — and in most people’s opinion — Jennifer’s performance is quite a bit more affecting than Mark Meer’s. Which is a — Mark Meer’s is a good performance, don’t get me wrong. But Jennifer’s really touches something, you know, a little bit more fantastic and moving, in my mind.

(This also echoes an old Escapist piece from Kill Screen editor Chris Dahlen.)

Interested in Skyrim but unsure about jumping into a new franchise? Not to worry — these videos from Morrowind and Oblivion will have you caught up in no time.

Good news, everyone: GQ has named Boston the worst-dressed city in America! There’s a little added bonus for my neck of the woods, too:

For the more proletarian-minded, there are the modest little burgs of Cambridge and Somerville, where everyone dresses like the proprietor of his or her very own meth lab. If you wonder how a people can live like this, well, it’s Jurassic Park for fashion troglodytes: life finds a way.

(Via N’Gai Croal.)

Psychotherapist Lori Gottlieb, writing for The Atlantic:

Here I was, seeing the flesh-and-blood results of the kind of parenting that my peers and I were trying to practice with our own kids, precisely so that they wouldn’t end up on a therapist’s couch one day. We were running ourselves ragged in a herculean effort to do right by our kids—yet what seemed like grown-up versions of them were sitting in our offices, saying they felt empty, confused, and anxious. Back in graduate school, the clinical focus had always been on how the lack of parental attunement affects the child. It never occurred to any of us to ask, what if the parents are too attuned? What happens to those kids?

Conflicting messages from the front page of Kotaku right now:

Actress Felicia Day, in a post on the new social network Google+:

This service is confusing! I’m part of people’s circles but I didn’t agree to be in them, I don’t know who I’m sharing with and how…eeep! Trying to figure out how to use it more like Twitter than involuntary Facebook groups.

This is an interesting problem, and one that I think will only get worse at Google+ propagates to less technical users.

To successfully establish this thing Google not only has to overcome the network effect, but also a sort of metaphorical inertia from its prospective users. The idea of a “friend” on Facebook maps intuitively onto a real-life relationship; a “follower” on Twitter is a bit more nebulous, but the popularity of celebrity accounts and newsfeed bots make it pretty obviously asymmetrical. Day, and others, quite reasonably expect that Google+ will follow one of those models.

Instead Google+ offers a new metaphor: the “circle.” Under the hood, circles are essentially user-customizable privacy levels, but the language surrounding them is intentionally imprecise. Google is melding Twitter’s asymmetrical relationships with Facebook’s symmetrical ones, so that it’s possible to “follow” someone (one of the default circles is helpfully labeled “Following”) or to befriend them (which Google+ indicates with the clinical message “You are in Dan’s circles too”). The effective difference between the former and latter, though, is intent — your “following” circle is for people you don’t know and don’t expect to add you back.

I like Google+ so far and hope it succeeds, but it might be just opaque enough to put people off. We’ll see!

From a post on EarthBound Central:

If a character likes cheese, the HP they regain from eating it increases. This is nothing new. But apparently Lucas’s personal preference is decided by what you name him – if his name has an odd number of letters, he’ll like cheese, and if it’s an even number, he’ll hate cheese.

I haven’t tried this out myself, so if anyone knows if this is true or not, please let me know!

If it isn’t true, it’s the best video game urban legend I’ve ever heard. If it is…I don’t even know what to say.

The Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association today, arguing that a California law to restrict the sale of violent video games to minors violates the First Amendment.

A PDF of the full decision is available here, but I thought this section about the purported link between video games and aggression was particularly interesting:

The State’s evidence is not compelling. California relies primarily on the research of Dr. Craig Anderson and a few other research psychologists whose studies purport to show a connection between exposure to violent video games and harmful effects on children. These studies have been rejected by every court to consider them, and with good reason: They do not prove that violent video games cause minors to act aggressively (which would at least be a beginning). Instead, “[n]early all of the research is based on correlation, not evidence of causation, and most of the studies suffer from significant, admitted flaws in methodology.” Video Software Dealers Assn. 556 F. 3d, at 964. They show at best some correlation between exposure to violent entertainment and minuscule real-world effects, such as children’s feeling more aggressive or making louder noises in the few minutes after playing a violent game than after playing a nonviolent game.

Even taking for granted Dr. Anderson’s conclusions that violent video games produce some effect on children’s feelings of aggression, those effects are both small and indistinguishable from effects produced by other media. In his testimony in a similar lawsuit, Dr. Anderson admitted that the “effect sizes” of children’s exposure to violent video games are “about the same” as that produced by their exposure to violence on television. App. 1263. And he admits that the same effects have been found when children watch cartoons starring Bugs Bunny or the Road Runner, id., at 1304, or when they play video games like Sonic the Hedgehog that are rated “E” (appropriate for all ages), id., at 1270, or even when they “vie[w] a picture of a gun,” id., at 1315–1316.

Of course, California has (wisely) declined to restrict Saturday morning cartoons, the sale of games rated for young children, or the distribution of pictures of guns. The consequence is that its regulation is wildly underinclusive when judged against its asserted justification, which in our view is alone enough to defeat it. Underinclusiveness raises serious doubts about whether the government is in fact pursuing the interest it invokes, rather than disfavoring a particular speaker or viewpoint. See City of Ladue v. Gilleo, 512 U. S. 43, 51 (1994); Florida Star v. B. J. F., 491 U. S. 524, 540 (1989). Here, California has singled out the purveyors of video games for disfavored treatment—at least when compared to booksellers, cartoonists, and movie producers—and has given no persuasive reason why.

(Scalia, by the way.)

I’m not sure what inspired me to track it down, but I just reread this excellent two-part story from Shamus Young concerning a high school trip to a ski resort. Highly recommended.

What do Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, and Vermont have in common? Yes, they all allow, or will soon allow, gay marriage — but they are also all states I have been to. (Even Iowa. Twice!)

Given that, we can assume that the next state to allow gay marriage will be one of the following: Georgia, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, or Virginia.

Well…hmm. At least a few of those seem, ah, unlikely. I might need to go to some more states.

Anyway. Good job, New York — I’m glad to be from you.