Computer games are art

What happens when the boundary between real-life and computer games becomes blurred? If you want to see how important historical events would have turned out if they had been played out like a computer game, pay a visit to a new art exhibition. The No Absolutes exhibition at the Arizona State University features a series of pictures entitled Screenshots by Jon Haddock. The artist has translated a number of historical events from the assassination of Martin Luther King to the car crash that killed the Princess of Wales into a series of computer-generated 'screenshots'. ...more

Retro a go-go

If you're of a certain age you might be able to remember the golden age of gaming, when home arcade units took batteries and had a mini screen of its own. Author Jaro Gielens has put together a coffee table tome all about the early days of handheld gaming, long before the Nintendo Gameboy hit the scene. The book is called Electronic Plastic and chronicles the first 13 years of battery-operated handheld fun. ...more

Tech giants club together to fight child exploitation

Tech giants have clubbed together with the US National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) to form a Technology Coalition to combat child exploitation. AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft, EarthLink and United Online will work with the NCMEC to build tools for law enforcement agencies, use their expertise and technology to create solutions to detect and prevent the distribution of child porn, and share information and carry out research into the methods used by those exploiting children in this way. A conference to initially organise the coalition will be held next month and funding is kicked off with the members scrabbling around the backs of their sofas to pool just $1m to the effort. ...more

More PS2s arrive in UK

If you were one of those impatient gamers who paid extortionate amounts of money on eBay or QXL to secure a PlayStation in time for Christmas, prepare to start crying over your console. As reported yesterday, Toys R Us are supplying the console off the shelf and they now have been joined by Dixons, who yesterday ran a national newpaper campaign trumpeting its new consignment of consoles. But now you can also buy a new PS2 straight off the shelves from the Virgin Megastore in Oxford Street - but get there quick! There is a steady trickle of the consoles coming into the UK and Ray Maguire, the Managing Director of Sony Europe, yesterday confirmed that 400,000 PlayStation 2 units would arrive in the UK before 31 March. ...more

Visual Studio .Net gets LiveSource support

Programming support that has been available for Java will now be available for Microsoft's .Net Framework. Improved design and modelling support is the promise of the 'Together Edition for Microsoft Visual Studio . ...more