Games Not Cause Of Aggressive Behaviour

Sydney Morning Herald

Monday April 1, 1996

Edited by JULIE ROBOTHAM

SOME Attorney-General sponsored research into computer games "tends to show" that violent games do not make players aggressive. Well. Does it or doesn't it? The research, which is to be used to decide classification of computer games, found players were more interested in the challenge of computer games than any violent aspects.

Really? So can we look forward to gardening computer games, where the virtual players have to test the skill of their spades against recalcitrant buried rocks? Or knitting games, with four difficulty settings: plain, purl, cable and Fair Isle?

Apparently the research was conducted with the same intellectual rigour as applied by those people who insist that they're interested in the humour of racist jokes, not the racism.

OLD WAR

HERE'S an idea that's not so much violent as an assault on aesthetics and public decency: Former CIA Director William Colby and his erstwhile Cold War enemy ex-KGB general Oleg Kalugin, are going virtual for their next battle.

Their story is being taken up by Hollywood, and it's not a sequel to Grumpy Old Men. It's an interactive CD-ROM thriller - Spycraft: The Great Game, from LA-based Activision. The two play themselves in the story, following in the multimedia footsteps of Charlton Heston who was recently to be seen in an unseemly interactive frolic through some of the biblical haunts which made his name and bank account such a long time ago.

Kalugin, former rocket fuel recipe thief, has dropped at least one state secret - it's dead boring being a top spook. At least that's what Cyberspy infers from his comment that "Hollywood is great fun ... This is the most exciting time in my life".

Colby's also suffering from a debilitating case of inanity: "We've got lots of former enemies. We fought a lot of them, and now we are allies," he said, with chilling absence of insight. By comparison with these boys in their dotage, the Rolling Stones look like they're aging with dignity.

FRENCH DIAL-UP

THE idea of Internet phones and a cost structure collapse for regular telephony brings the older-and-wiser mafioso out of the woodwork - unable to believe in technologies developed after they hit middle age.

But their cause will not be helped by some recent pronouncements by the French company Alcatel, one of the world's largest manufacturers of heavyweight traditional phone exchanges and transmission equipment. Reporting a punishing loss - "France's biggest corporate loss this century" according to one report - Alcatel boss Serge Tchuruk said the company could only rebound by moving headlong into the Internet and multimedia industries.

Alcatel's traditional business of supplying switches to national telephone operators would decline, he said, maybe not yet in volume but certainly in profitability. Tchuruk said one of Alcatel's hottest prospects was its Alcatel Data Networks division - a joint venture with Sprint of the US - as a direct result of demand for its asynchronous transfer mode products, engendered by the Internet.

SEGA VENTURES

SEGA is to establish a 75 per cent joint venture with US company, Softbank, to port its console game software to run under Windows 95. Games developed for the upcoming 32-bit Saturn console will be moved to the Microsoft OS, which is also largely 32-bit.

Sega expects more than 25 titles, including Sega Rally and Daytona USA, will be available on both platforms in time or the Christmas market this year, and is targeting revenue of $US50 million in the year to March 1997 (the end of the Japanese financial year). But don't expect to buy it here. For some inexplicable reason, commercialisation so far is planned only through Sega of America. A case for the grey market if ever there was one.

OBITUARY

DAVID Packard, 83-year-old co-founder of Hewlett-Packard, died last week. With William Hewlett, Packard founded the company in a Palo Alto garage in 1939. Legendarily, the two men tossed a coin to see whose name would go first in the name of the mercurial firm which has since grown to employ more than 100,000 and generate annual revenue over $31 billion.

It has done so in consistent financial health, despite never having achieved the software standards dominance of Microsoft or an overwhelming hardware market share like IBM. Today it operates across more sectors of the computer industry than the textbooks would say were possible and desirable - networks and network management hardware and software, Unix software and RISC hardware, personal computers, and low-end and high end printers and graphics production products, to name but a few.

"Get the best people, stress the importance of teamwork, and get them fired up to win the game," is how Packard, who published his autobiography last year, described the guiding principle in building HP.