The "Defence of the Ancients" genre has exploded in recent history, inspired in part by highly successful spin-off titles such as League of Legends. In turn developed by some of the people involved in the original Warcraft 3 custom map, "LoL" has won a number of prestigious awards and boasts a userbase in the millions. I first tested a review beta of it back in September 2009 and while my initial impressions were not at all favourable, a few months ago I started playing it again out of curiosity at its immense success given the lacklustre experience I had originally.

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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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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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We Fly Spitfires, one of my favourite blogs, posted an entry documenting a recent spat in the WoW-blogosphere regarding that terrible dragon of gold-buying. I'll admit upfront that I've bought gold in World of Warcraft before; back when I first started playing and the thought of how much grinding I'd need to go through in order to purchase my first mount, the time commitment seemed unlikely. A little spam message in my inbox telling me how much game-gold I could get for a pittance of money seemed like a no-brainer: in the trade off between grinding for time, amidst my actual real life day job, or plunking down cash for the same result, ease won out.

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It should be obvious to anyone who watches the news that, at least in the US, when it comes to how the public at large handles depictions of gratuitous violence or gratuitous sex, reactions usually vary wildly. We're used to violence on movies and television shows, to say nothing of the perpetual sport we as gamers partake in through gunning down criminals and generic "bad guys" through the course of any FPS or action game. We're "desensitized" to this, at least when our impetus is killing enemies in the name of a greater good, and most people don't really balk unless said killing is exceptionally graphic and excessive.

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Yesterday both Joystiq and Kotaku covered the release of a new academically-approved public survey soliciting opinions from LGBT and heterosexual gamers about what they look for in video games. The survey itself didn't impress me much, personally, but it's a good jumping-off point to examine the sort of outrage anything like this generates in heterosexual-dominated gaming circles.

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Somewhere around the third or forth character I created in Champions Online I realized I just really didn't care about the Qularr invasion. There I was bouncing about with super powers in a gorgeous environment, but although the landscape was visually engrossing, try as I might I couldn't get attached to the conflicts on any [...]

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