Last week Wolfire Games announced the "Humble Indie Bundle," a collection of five popular indie games packaged together under one price. The enticing factor was that you could choose to pay whatever you wanted for the package. One might think the lack of DRM coupled with the ability to get a number of stellar games for as little as a penny would mitigate the need to pirate the collection. But on a blog post to their site, one of the co-founders of Wolfire Games posted numbers indicating that he believes around 25% of direct downloads of the bundle are pirated.

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Completely escaping my attention, in the beginning of March, Microsoft reversed a long-standing policy against the inclusion of qualifiers for sexual orientation within Xbox Live profiles. Though there were several cases of players having their accounts suspended over this, the issue really came to a head last February when The Consumerist ran a story about "Teresa" who allegedly had her account banned following habitually abusive behaviour by other players because she said she was a lesbian in her profile.

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A Hooked Gamers editorial published last week and making the blog rounds today makes the claim that Ubisoft's always-on DRM plan, which I've discussed here already, is actually pretty cool or something. Through a rambling escapade of analogies and references to electrical plugs on planes and the 360's common red-ring-of-death, in the end the final judgement is that Ubisoft's DRM is both progressive and "ahead of its time."

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Lt. Dan Choi, an individual who has inadvertently become the face of repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell in the US, got arrested last week for an act of civil disobedience wherein he chained himself to the gates of the White House to draw attention to the issue. What started out with Choi apparently gatecrashing a Human Rights Campaign rally with Kathy Griffin ended with Choi marching to the front of the White House and handcuffing himself to the fence. He was arrested, along with the co-chair of GetEqual, Robin McGehee, and Cpt. Jim Pietrangelo (who had also chained himself alongside Choi). What had begun as a photo op for HRC got hijacked by Choi and, tellingly, HRC refused to get themselves involved.

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Long has the stereotype of the "gamer" crowd been one of lonely, overweight nerds living in the basements of their parents, with no social contact with the outside world beyond virtual interactions in video games. One company with a clear aim to capitalize on this perception is GameCrush, who have announced that they're creating a new service which hooks said depressed, isolated gamers up with "PlayDates" in the form of supposed hot women who just want to game, man.

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While excited gamers this week have been treated to the first full expansion to BioWare's epic RPG Dragon Age: Origins, customers who purchased the Mac port of the game are left wondering when they'll get in on the latest content themselves. Since being launched the Mac port hasn't been supported in the least, and nobody at any of the involved companies have confirmed or denied whether or not the expansion will be coming to OSX.

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Earlier today, Australia's largest video game retailer, EB Games, delivered forty-six thousand submissions to the federal Attorney-General's department supporting their recent discussion paper around creating an R18+ classification for video games. EB Games collected submissions in all of their stores across Australia, as well as online, and in just two weeks it collected the staggering number of favorable statements advocating such a classification for 18+ video games.

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