Another Humble Indie Bundle has just been released. These collections of great independent games come packaged and are available to the user for whatever money he or she deems they are worth. I have nabbed some fantastic games from this site for (ashamedly) a small amount of cash. What does this offer to both the experienced and new gamer? For the experienced gamer, it allows those who just don't want to blow all their time on Call of Duty and Starcraft...both excellent games in their own right...on trying out something new and different from independent developers. For the new gamer, it starts providing a breadth of knowledge on what games are out there, and how, again, they are different from the Call of Duty and Starcraft series. Best yet, whatever money you donate to purchase these games a portion goes to charities. I feel like that is honestly a win-win.

My thoughts on this particular marketing strategy is that while it may not monetarily reward the developer for their time and effort, they are getting a much larger audience than they may have using old strategies such as going through their own site or any other sites. If you end up liking the game enough, and in the case of Super Meat Boy and Bit.trip Runner which are already extremely popular games, you end up following the series and/or the designer. There are cases of piracy, with some claiming that from all copies of the bundles as many as twenty-five percent are pirated copies. But honestly, do you really want to steal from a company that is willing to let you name your own price for several games and gives some of the money to charity? If so, you're a big jerk. Go buy the bundle and play through some games.

Video below.
Skyrim is the most recent addition to the Elder Scrolls RPG series, and has single-handedly eaten the hours of many people in the GLS. I myself have tried to keep far away from learning about all the glory that is supposedly Skyrim, but I do peek in now and again to see all the great...and in this case not so great things people are doing with the game. I came across this lovely story when browsing Kotaku. An enterprising gamer decided to use an exploit from the game to create his (or her) own pit of death. 

"oh well, one thing lead to another. I ended up with a bunch of headless corpses in my house and I thought I might as well pose them. I suppose I was inspired by the Hannibal movies."
The exploit allows a player to carry on a conversation with someone at the door of their house. Once the player enters the house, if they are still talking to that person, the person follows them in. This player decided to then decapitate the heads of the women and pose their bodies around the house, leaving their heads to sit in the cabinet as trophies.So why do I start my first blog post about this particularly gruesome video? Probably because a lot of the comments that followed both in the Kotaku and YouTube forums was really about expertise and knowing the design of the game. There are macabre postings cheering this person on to be sure, but people were more concerned with trying to figure out just how this player got these people inside, showing inside knowledge of the characters themselves that he decapitated, and the regions in which these women were from before they met their untimely end. 

I'm actually surprised that the news has not crawled all over this story, but they're usually about six months behind when it comes to video games and only in slow news cycles. But here, we have a particularly offensive way of manipulating the original programming of the game, and people engaging in discourse to both show their expertise in the game's subject matter and the design of Skyrim. 

Kind of cool, even if something as reprehensible as this spurred that discussion. These are the moments in games that I look for and try to research. I didn't say convincing you what I do is completely valid was going to be easy. Credit: Kotaku