Cheryl K. Olsen and her husband Larry Kutner have everything it takes to become the next big names in the videogame media wars. So far the only really well known figure we have is Jack Thompson, and we all know what he's like. No, Larry and Cheryl are nothing like Jack Thompson. They are unbiased, intelligent, thoughtful, and most of all, well informed; their book Grand Theft Childhood proves that.

What Cherly and Larry lack at this point is exposure, but hopefully that is about to change. They are both going to speak tonight, July 9th, at an engagement in the Boston area specifically intended for Boston-area videogame developers, though the event is open to the general public as well. Click here for details. 

Following that, Cheryl has informed me that she and Larry will also be speaking at this year's PAX, in a forum moderated by none other than N'Gai Croal. If that's not the stuff of future power and influence in the realm of videogames, I don't know what is.

While I'm certainly not the first person here on Destructoid to talk about Grand Theft Childhood, it's mostly been relegated to highlights of others' discussions or a mention on Podtoid. As per usual, I blame Japan on keeping me from reading my copy of Grand Theft Childhood, as I just finished the book earlier this week. So for this iteration of Weekend Reading, I want to dive into a discussion of the book and its message.

For those of you who don't know what the book is, it's the summary of research performed since 2004 by two of the directors of the Harvard Medical School's Center for Mental Health and Media on the effects of videogames on youths. The $1.5 million study was funded by the Department of Justice.

Just as a side note, if you've enjoyed Weekend Reading here on Destructoid, I'd like to announce that Japanator is now running its own Weekend Reading column on Saturdays. This week, we're discussing the cult of fansubs and their impact on the industry. We also take a look at how the various American companies have responded to the fansub culture as well. It's a rather lively discussion, so please be sure to check it out and join in.

Well, let's get into this.

A few of us here at Destructoid love to have the crap scared out of us. I know for a fact that Jim, Dale, Colette and I all have periodic competitons to see whose erection for Silent Hill is larger. The competition is usually so close, we need to call in one of the other staffers to judge.

So naturally, I was excited to see .tiff cover Konami's Gamer's Night and put up some coverage on Silent Hill V. Being in the land of Japan, I was separated by a damned 13-hour time difference, leaving me unable to join in the excitement fest. So, I just kept reading about the game.

Once I read the description, watched the trailer, and pondered about the future of Silent Hill, I got to be a little worried. I wasn't at the point where I'm calling the Silent Hill series dead, but I think it may be time to put Silent Hill in the retirement home and focus on something new.

I've found myself cursing at the members of my party in Final Fantasy Tactics and Disgaea from time to time. I'll chastise the characters for not hitting their targets, or dealing less damage than I wanted them to. Alternatively, I'll praise the characters when they manage to pull through in a time of great distress. Really, it's not all that strange when you do it, but when you try to tell others about it, it just seems strange.

Why? Well, because you're not even talking about the main characters of the game. It'll usually be about those randomly generated party members that you'll have since the beginning of the game, or will pick up as time goes by. They never have a speaking role in any of the dialogues. They don't give you any sort of feedback in terms of emotion. They just do the actions that you tell them to with an unchanging face.

"Bullsh*t! I never do that sort of gay stuff!" If this is what's running through your head, then I'd like to say you're wrong.

The "videogames as art" movement is a funny thing. Artsy wooks like myself love to wax philosophic about the potential that games have in terms of narration or eliciting meaningful, emotional player responses. We laud innovative game designers for forcing us to make morally ambiguous choices about ourselves and the characters around us. Unfortunately for us in the post-post-pre-metamodern crowd, games as a medium fall short in one crucial, yet easily overlooked, way: They only go half of the distance.

What I mean to say is that while lots of the elements of the game are designed and featured in artistically and culturally relevant ways, a huge part of games is left out of the artistic amalgam: the controls. The controller is the fundamental aspect of videogames as a medium, yet developers and fans alike seem to totally overlook it. Unless the control schema is laughably bad or unnecessarily confusing, it gets nary a mention.

Even worse, the control scheme is almost exclusively relegated to a basic function and fails to convey any sense of artistry or contribute to an overarching metaphor.  I'm not talking about good, responsive controls, or button mapping that is particularly intuitive; I mean a control scheme that, in and of itself, has something artistically important to say.

Intrigued? I hope so. Hit the jump to read how Fumito Ueda's Shadow of the Colossus achieves what so few other games have.

A large portion of the videogames as art debate focuses on games telling serious stories, having deep meaning, and being fairly unique. Yet, there's another issue within the games as art debate that I want to focus on: the auteur.

Behind every successful game, there is a large team that goes into making it. From the writers to the programmers to the think tank of designers who come up with all the various facets of gameplay. Yet, who do we attribute the success of the project to? Is it thanks to a luminary like Will Wright, or to a particular developer like Harmonix or Valve?

If you'd be so kind as to follow me after the jump, I'll go into what the auteur theory is when it comes to television and movies, and take a shot at applying it to videogames. And hey, this will be one of the few "games as art" pieces that doesn't mention Ico or Shadow of the...dammit.

While mucking up Podtoid 37, I really liked the question about the industry maturing. While videogames are definitely more mainstream, with regular articles covering the industry in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, there is still a stigma revolving around videogame culture. For every article that talked about Halo being a billion-dollar franchise, there was someone on TV claiming that games are just for kids.

If you look on TV and in movies, gamers are still furiously tapping the buttons on whatever system they're playing, as though their heart rate depends on smashing that A button in until it breaks. I'm sure once they get up to putting Wiimotes in actors' hands, they'll be swinging about wildly and throwing them into TVs. I can see it now, actually. Jake, the pudgy little boy on Two and a Half Men, gets a Wii for his birthday, because he can use it to "exercise." Charlie Sheen decides to join in, and throws the remote right into the TV. Now, it's a race against time to find the money to replace the TV.

So, when will the general culture of videogames evolve beyond "that thing for kids" into a legitimate art form where we won't need to hear from those like Roger Ebert, telling us that videogames can't be art? Well, I think that can be pretty soon. 

Zombies aren't an integral part of video games, but dammit, they should be. Sparked by watching Resident Evil: Extinction, I began to think about enemies in video games. Mostly the run of the mill types: zombies, henchmen, soldiers, etc. There will sometimes be a shift in how these enemies act. Suddenly, they'll go from being a minor nuisance to being a challenging threat, or after fighting one as a boss, become extremely common and less of a challenge.

Alright, I'll admit it: this is mostly me railing on Resident Evil: Extinction some more. Really, it's a rant on zombies, flow, and horror games. I mean, shouldn't the enemies be challenging throughout? Just because you've played through the game for a while doesn't mean the enemies should get any easier.

Ever since the inclusion of the NES cartridge battery, we've had a way to save our progress, giving ourselves a little break from the constant struggle to beat a game in one sitting. It was a truly life-changing invention, really -- allowing for the creation of much longer games, and sparing us the need to resort to passcodes.

Nowadays, we've got a myriad of saving structures, from those found in the overly sparse Dead Rising to the quick-saves in most PC games -- Half-Life, for example -- accessible at any point in time. The thing that's changed most with the advent of the save structure? It's in how we play the game. 

Most every game that hits the shelves attempts to tell some sort of story. Whether it be a tale of a captured love, who lies in a faraway castle, or one of revenge, striking down those who cursed your family. Some games try to achieve more, by having the player experience the story, and feel as though they are an active part of what is going on.

Whatever the case may be, there is still the all-important cutscene. It's a chance for the game's director to present the player with important information, along with plot points, such as character death, new powers, or a change in the party. Yet, the question is, how best to present it?

It's a matter of the director's taste, but each way offers different effects when the message is delivered. As some of you in the blogs noted, I probed you last night about the whole thought. Let's dive in.

From time to time, I love to play devil's advocate. Such an opportunity came across recently, and so I wanted to turn it into a full-fledged post. This week, I'm delving into the depths of /bridget/ itself, in an attempt to argue the heterosexuality of Bridget.

Now, I know that everyone's gay for Bridget. It's a given fact. It's right along there with the bombing of Hiroshima and the giganticness of CheapyD. Soon, it will be incorporated into history textbooks. This, though, does not mean that Bridget is a homosexual. We all might just be "weird people," as Bridget would put it.

So first, for the uninitiated, who is Bridget?

Sounds promising, doesn't it? Well, this week, I've sat down with Mark Nebesky, one of the co-founders, and the CMO of Goozex, Inc. For those of you that don't know, Goozex is a game-trading site that's been around since last year. Gaining popularity at Cheap Ass Gamer, some of the Destructoid editors have hopped on the bandwagon and joined this site.

To give a quick rundown before the interview begins, the system works like this: you list up a game on Goozex that you have in your collection (in either disc only, disc and manual, or full game quality), and then you get matched with another user on the site. The system will then deduct the points from one person's account, and then you ship out the game. Once the other person recieves it, then you get the points for that game, which you can then spend on purchasing other games. Goozex makes its money by charging $1 for every trade from the buyer.

Anyways, let's get into the interview, and be sure to check out the site. If you've got any questions about the system, there are a few Goozexers on the site, or there's always the Goozex forums, if you want to meet the trading community.

In the attempts at coming up with a title for this week's column, my mind kept coming back to Seinfeld. I suppose it's because the question kept popping up in my mind after I was trying to kill some time in my local GameStop. I'd peruse the aisles, looking at games and making mental notes as to what I'd consider checking out on Goozex to see if the prices were cheaper.

I needed to kill some more time, though. So, my journey into the PC gaming section of the store began. While I was going through these games, my thoughts weren't, "which ones should I buy" -- rather, they were "which ones should I pirate?"

For those of you who don't know me, I'm strongly against pirating console games and movies. I'm even going so far as to search eBay and elsewhere for a cheap Japanese PS2 so that I can play import games, and not be tempted by the ability to play burned discs. Why is it, then, that I felt absolutely no compunction about pirating these PC games?

So, this week we've seen a ton of news come out from Sony. Early on, we got the announcement that they'll be cutting the price on the PS3 60GB model by $100, sending the sales of the system shooting up. Next, at E3, we also got the announcement of the PSP redesign, along with a reconfirmation of Metal Gear Solid 4 as a PS3 exclusive. Sony had some great announcements coming out of the gate.

And then it all went to Hell. People have been less than thrilled with the fact that Sony is going to be dropping the 60GB model of the PS3 in favor of the 80GB, which will keep the console at a price point of $599.99, a good $120 away from the Xbox 360 Elite, which will likely drop in price once the 65nm chips make their way into the system.

So, what is the Japanese behemoth to do? "Roll over and die" is what I'm sure a bunch of you would love to say, but that really isn't an option right now. So, let's take a look this week to see what Sony can do to keep themselves from being just another set of 4chan memes from now until the end of the console's life.