This is super cool. Sony Computer Entertainment is teaming up with Stanford University to create a distributed computing network of PS3s to help study the causes of a number of diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, cystic fibrosis and many cancers.

The next software update for the PS3, expected to hit at the end of the month, will include a new Folding@home icon for the cross media bar. To join the program you just click on the icon. You can also set up your PS3 to work on the application whenever the console is idle. This second option will require leaving the console powered on and connected to the Internet. Not sure if that could create a heat issue.

The Cell-powered PS3s will tap into Stanford's Folding@home program which has been in use on home computers since 2000 to work on studying disease by simulating the process of folding proteins. When performed on a single computer this simulation can tak up to 30 years, but Folding@home allows thousands of computers, and now thousands of PS3s, to work on the same simulation through distributed computing.

Sony says the Cell process inside the PS is about 10 times faster than a standard chip in a computer, so this will be quite a boon to researchers.

"Millions of users have experienced the power of PS3 entertainment. Now they can utilize that exceptional computing power to help fight diseases," said Masayuki Chatani, Corporate Executive and CTO Computer, Sony Computer Entertainment Inc. "In order to study protein folding, researchers need more than just one super computer, but the massive processing power of thousands of networked computers. Previously, PCs have been the only option for scientists, but now, they have a new, more powerful tool — PS3." "We're thrilled to have SCE be part of the Folding@home project," said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at Stanford University and Folding@home project lead. "With PS3 now part of our network, we will be able to address questions previously considered impossible to tackle computationally, with the goal of finding cures to some of the world's most life-threatening diseases."

This is just the first use of the PS3 for distributive computing, according to Sony. The company said they will continue to support " a wide variety of academic fields such as medical and social sciences and environmental studies."

This is a very admirable thing that Sony is doing. Good for them. Brian Crecente

It seems that Peter Baxter's messaging had been polished to a high sheen.

When Baxter first told Danny Ledonne that he was pulling the game from the Slamdance festival it was because of the threat of lost sponsors. When he told me why, it was because of personal objections to the game's morality. When he re-released a statement on the Slamdance page it was because of the threat of a suit. And now, well here's now:

The story of how this once-electric gathering lost its luster began with a phone call earlier this month by Mr. Baxter to Danny Ledonne, a 25-year-old Colorado filmmaker and the creator of Super Columbine. Overriding the panel of the judges who had included the game among the 14 finalists, Mr. Baxter told Mr. Ledonne that he had decided to withdraw his game because of outraged phone calls and e-mail messages he'd been receiving from Utah residents and family members associated with the Columbine shooting. He was also acting on the advice of lawyers who warned him of the threat of civil suits if he showed the game.

"I personally don't find the game immoral, because an artist has a right to create whatever he wants, whether a filmmaker or a game maker," Mr. Baxter said. "But when you're responsible for presenting that work to the public, it becomes more complicated."

That "how family members associated with Columbine" thing is patently not true. He said something similar to me in my interview, but when I asked him directly if any of the family members of those killed or injured in the Columbine shooting contacted him, he said no. Then he said something about people pointing out to him that the game was about real people who had been killed. Something I'm sure he knew going into the festival.

I hate to use the word liar, but if the shoe fits...

Check out Heather Chaplin's full NYT story (she's the one what wrote SmartBomb) for more details about half empty presentations and squirming festival directors. Brian Crecente

Video Game Tests the Limits. The Limits Win [New York Times]

The Associated Press has an interesting story out there about the rising popularity of political games.

Friend of Kotaku and Georgia Tech prof Ian Bogost serves as guide to the story, talking the writer and readers through the evolution of the niche and its growing importance in society.

"I'm not against fun. I like to play the same video games everyone else does. But I don't believe that video games have to be fun," Bogost said. "I think they need to be given the opportunity to bother and disturb us."

The story touches on some infamous bits of mainstream messaging, like the failed ending of Balance of Power and the gay men in SimCopter. While it's an interesting primer on the subject, the author picked a strange way to wrap things up, essentially arguing that games don't play a bigger role in American life because they are just a form of escapism.

The answer may lie, in part, in the industry's past. Because it developed along with a generation that was bombarded from every direction with the latest news, there may be a reason why video gaming focuses on fantasy.

"Other media have at times decided the way to address all those things is to delve into them," said Sawyer. "And maybe gaming, at least right now, is meant to be escapist."

I find it odd because it's widely accepted that using fantasy or fiction in literature, television and movies to mask the reality of what you are trying to deal with is a great way to tackle an issue free of the preconceived notions most people carry around with them. Brian Crecente

Creators put politics into video games [AP]

• Johnny Wilson and Noah Falstein talked about using pieces of older games—conversational interaction, for example—as building blocks to design newer games for everyone. They also touched on ethics and point of view, putting you in the shoes of other people and giving you insight as to what their thought processes were.
• Eric Zimmerman, James Paul Gee and Katie Salen discussed kid's modifying and creating simple games as a form of media literacy. Making kids think about interactions between various elements, possibly with a game they sketched out that put you in a game designer's shoes.
• Nick deKanter, Andrea Lauer and Kurt Squire presented the idea that putting history in context with WWII games helped certain kids significantly improve their understanding of geography and history.

More after the jump.

• Jack Emmert (of City of Heroes/Villains fame) pontificated on designing for human behavior in games. He mentioned a fear of talking to other people when going online, which hinders grouping in MMORPGs.
• Mia Consalvo conversed on cheating on both online and offline games. She came up with various groups of cheaters, and classified them into purists (everything's cheating), code is law (it's in the code already so it's not cheating), and cheaters (you can't cheat a machine, only other people).

Jason Chen

Day 1 [Water Cooler Games]

Day 2 [Water Cooler Games]

Documentary games aficionado Ian Bogost has unearthed an interesting mod that uses Medal of Honor: Allied Assault to create the Paris Riots.

In the game, the player takes on the role of police responding to the rioting in the suburbs of Paris. A very interesting concept, that is still very much in its early stages. Bogost points out that all that is available so far is a very basic demo. Make sure to check out this trailer as well. Brian Crecente

Have a Paris Riot [Water Cooler Games]

Back in February, Watercooler Games reported on the Centers for Disease Control's anti-ad campaign titled "Give Your Thumbs a Rest, Play for Real."

Well, Ian Bogost just got back from talking about games for health at the CDC in Atlanta, and they're saying they had nothing to do with the ad campaign that had their logo slapped on it.

Despite the denial, Bogost points out that the campaign can be traced back to ad agency Saatchi & Saatchi, who did run a $125 million publicity campaign for the CDC back in 2002. Odd. Brian Crecente

CDC doesn't villify games, gamers? [Watercooler Games]

I just finished up a story for the Rocky about upcoming computer game Left Behind: Eternal Forces and how it fits into the whole Agenda Gaming movement.

Essentially, the game sort of falls in the grey area between game for fun and games that are designed to push an agenda. That's because while it does profess to have an ideology that it is pushing, it doesn't really go far enough to push it. For instance, the prayer in the game, which revive units' flagging "spirit", is essentially generic. Georgia Tech Prof. Ian Bogost explains it best:

"It could be Islamic or Judaic," he said. "Why didn't they make a game where you live that life (of an unbeliever) and then you discover at the Rapture what side you end up on? "The fear that I have is that they are confused about whether they are making a game about this perspective or if it's a game with a Christian skin." ... "My guess is that they didn't want to go over the top with the religion for fear people would reject the game," he said. "If there is an agenda piece inside the game it's the idea of spirit and the power of prayer. The mechanics of the game are trying to make an argument about the way the world works."

To make matters more complicated, the people behind the game are sort of backing away from classifying the game as a true agenda title.

"Do we have a full-blown political agenda? No. What we are really trying to do is make a fun game," said Left Behind Games associate producer Greg Bauman. "We are a for-profit company, but we have a ministry heart."

But no matter how you slice it, the game will likely be one of the first major computer or video game designed to push a specific agenda and whether you agree with the agenda or not, it can't help but lend some credibility to computer and video games as legitimate means of communicating about important issues. Brian Crecente

Video Game Evangalism [Rocky Mountain News]

Stow the pitchforks, turns out all of that talk about Left Behind: Eternal Forces being a disguised hate-game is a bunch of crap. I just spent a few hours meeting with some of the Left Behind Games folks about their religion-themed real-time strategy title, and while it's chockfull of subtle Christian messaging and even some overt proselytizing, it's not at all about running around killing heathens and metrosexuals.

The plan is for the game to include 40 missions based loosely on the goings-on of the third, fourth and fifth books of the Left Behind series. Essentially, you start the game, which is set in New York City, with a third of the population ascended to heaven and the rest of the planet divided into three groups: the Tribulation Force (good guys), the Global Community Peacekeepers (bad guys) and neutral, undecided people.

Unlike with most RTS titles, the units in Eternal Forces are individual people instead of clusters or squads of people.

Greg Bauman, marketing manager and associate producer for the game, said that each of these people have their own life and faith back-stories. All said, there are 350 or so stories written for the characters in the game, Bauman said.

A character's attributes include both health and spirit. To take out a Global Community Peacekeepers, lead by the Antichrist, you can either kill them or convert them. While killing them takes them out of the picture, you lose one point from your score and the unit you have doing the killing loses some of their spirit. If you convert the person, they join your side and you gain two points.

Conversions are done by pumping up a person's spirit score to above 60. If a person's spirit drops below 40 they join the bad guys, anything in between and the person is neutral. You convert a person by preaching at them (or bad-mouthing them) with special units. Bauman said that your units' spirt drops over time if left unattended, so you have to baby-sit them You also have to look out for your units' health and food needs.

Once you convert a person to your army, you can train them to become one of several different classes, like a medic, soldier or builder. Each of these units can be upgraded. Training and resources are garnered through buildings. Since the game takes place in New York City, you don't actually build new structures, but convert them to your needs with builder units.

If you strip the religion out of the game, you're left with a real-time strategy title with some very interesting twists in it. First is the concept that killing affects armies differently.

Because killing a person lowers a unit's spirit value, doing so can hurt a Tribulation soldier, but help a Global Community Peacekeeper.

To help balance this out, Left Behind Games threw in demons.

The computer-controlled demons appear if the GCP player's spirit remains low for too long. Of course, to recruit and maintain GCP units you need to keep your spirit low. So a demon is bound to pop up eventually. Initially, this may seem like a good thing, because the first thing a demon does it attack the Tribulation units. But once they're gone it tears into the GCP units as well and it's nearly impossible to kill them. The best way to deal with a demon is to use preachers, which of course the GCP forces don't have.

Kind of a cool concept.

I also find the concept of spiritual warfare very interesting. As Bauman explains it, if pulled off correctly it will add a new level of strategy to the game. Powerfully spirited units will be able to quickly convert well-armed bad guys. Conversely, the very spiritual characters tend to move slower and are very bad at physical combat so they can be sniped by soldiers.

There's no way for me to say if this game, taken outside of its bible-thumping, is fun. I've always believed that you can't review an RTS without spending a considerable amount of time with it. This genre is all about careful balance and nuance. But from what I saw, the game offers decent graphics, but may be a bit too shallow to fully engage hard-core strategy gamers.

While I think the mechanics are interesting, this is one of those games, like most RTS, that will live or die online.

It's only in the online portion of the game, which supports up to eight players, that you can play the bad guys and it is online where people will spend most of their time with the game, Bauman says.

I also talked to Bauman and Jeffrey Frichner, president of the developer, about some of the deeper implications of the game. I applaud the effort of any game designer to inject deeper meaning in a game, but at the same time it's easy to wonder just what sort of messages they will include.

Bauman says the goal of the game is threefold: To entertain, to get people to think about God and to get people to talk about God. The game, which has plenty of death, but no blood, is geared toward gamers 13 to 34, he said, adding that pre-sales at stores like Gamestop have been "good." (The game is shipping with a number of different SKUs. Some will include a free bible, others a free copy of the first book and still others cheat codes.)

I asked them how they choose who to classify as the "bad guys" of the game, while writing their back stories. Did they have "bad" characters with back stories that described the person as being gay or maybe having had an abortion?

Bauman said no, they didn't.

The idea, he said, was to develop archetypes that people could identify with. I had him click on a bad guy I selected randomly in the game. Reading through the five or six paragraph-long life story, the guy came off as a workaholic who just didn't have time for religion. His faith story described how he joined the Global Community Peacekeepers. The guy saw the group as a movement that hoped to bring peace to the world through unification and just wanted to start out with them on the ground floor.

Bauman said that most of the "bad guy" life stories were that innocuous.

While the game has a very obvious message it's pushing, the version I saw didn't really beat your over the head with it. The only scripture in the game comes in the form of occasional power-ups. You find a scroll, read a line of scripture and an angel appears to bestow increased spirituality or some other buff.

Between each mission there is also a page that pops up with a Christian message and some Christian music. The one I saw talked about the second-coming and how it's real. The screen does have a button on it that lets you skip right back to gameplay.

Both Frichner and Bauman say they see video games as a new vehicle, a newly discovered art form that can be used to spread their particular message. It's funny hearing a group, often associated with being anti-games, defending video games the same way companies like Electronic Arts and Ubisoft have been doing for years.

This is the sort of game that players need to embrace, not for the message or even for the gameplay, but because it helps evelop the detractors which is the obvious and inevitable outcome to any new media cultural backlash.

Sure the game is a quick, exploitive knock-off of the 110th minute of Sunday's World Cup championship, in which French soccer captain Zinedine "Les Bleus" Zidane was ejected from the game for head butting Materazzi's chest, knocking him flat on his ass, but it is sort of addictive in a Space Invaders sort of way. Brian Crecente

Zidane Game [Wonderland]

Schizoporotica [