This year was kind of special to me. Even though I'm not working in the IT or gaming sector, I was invited to participate at the Quo Vadis gaming days in Berlin in end of April. The reason for that is, that I was doing some market research on F2P gamers and I did a presentation of the data I collected during that research on the Quo Vadis in Berlin. To say the least, it was kind of fun to meet all these gaming people there in Berlin and see all the games that they were producing. Most of these F2P and online games aren't much different from the games we 8bit freaks played in our youth. Okay, the graphics is a little nicer, the sound a little more digitalized, but essentially the games and the gameplay haven't really changed that much, since we played it on 8 bit with 4 or 16 colors... Besides the Quo Vadis I was also an invited goest to the German gaming awards/ Lara awards show. This was also a special occasion this year, because for the first time ever, an ego shooter (Crysis 2) was voted as the best German game of the year! The nomination of Crysis 2 was quite controversial to start with, but when it actually won the game of the year award the outcry in the media and by politicians on all sides of the political agenda, was loud and a lot... I think everybody has to make up his own mind, whether he thinks this awards was deserved or not. At least this showed us, that a lot has changed in the past years. It was a long way from the endless "Killergame" discussion to the winning of the German game awards Lara. Since no major high school massacre has happened in Germany in some time, the media hyped association between ego shooters and actual violence has fallen away from the public and political agenda. Maybe the "idolizing" of school massacres that started with the Columbine Massacre and kept on for some while was just a time limited fantasy of the young outcasts of the teenage life style and the school system. Many of us, the 8 Bit generation were outcasts in our own schools and peer groups, but as far as I know, none of us committed a school massacre, but canalized our frustration and energy in more fruitful endeavors, like writing demos or games or just playing "Who dares wins II" (which incidentally was removed from the German index of youth endangering media earlier this year!), "Rambo - First Blood, Part II" or "Beach Head 2". Hopefully, we're not going to see another school massacre in any time soon and thus won't be judged anymore for playing "Crysis 2", "GTA IV" or any Facebook game (okay, maybe for the latter, because all these "Join my at ..." are really irritating ;-). Anyway, here are the pictures from the Quo vadis and from the Lara Awards. Enjoy  Cheers, Odie
last updated on Saturday, August 11th 2012 by Odiesoft Legal disclaimer under which this service is provided to you.