Several weeks ago, Henry Jenkins started a new blog to coincide with the release of his forthcoming book, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. I find his work smart, original, and accessible, and since Jenkins often defends the kinds of pursuits I enjoy, such as gaming, I've been following his blog steadily.

Over the course of two days, Jenkins recently posted two essays on comic books and U.S. foreign policy that I think most comic book bloggers and fans would want to read. They are based on a chapter Jenkins contributed to a book called Terror, Culture, Politics: Rethinking 9/11, and he has promised a third part to the series will be coming soon.

Jenkins posted the essays partially in response to an article published in the political journal The American Prospect comparing the actions of the Bush Administration to the Green Lantern Corps. In this article, author Matthew Yglesias claims that Bush and his cohorts have a "comic book view of how international relations works."

Jenkins's essays demonstrate that the attitudes expressed in comic books after 9/11 regarding U.S. foreign policy are more sophisticated and more progressive than those of the Bush administration. In Jenkins's first essay, I was fascinated by his precise reporting of how the major comic book publishers and individuals within the industry were affected by 9/11 based on their physical proximity to ground zero.

It was also refreshing to read Jenkins's account of how mainstream and independent publishers collaborated and were influenced by each other in the period after 9/11. That's what I like about Jenkins's work--although he writes about popular culture topics that are often discussed in the media, his approach is always a nonobvious one. If you're interested in comics, games, fan fiction, or fandom, you should really check out his blog and his other work as well.

I was browsing GameSetWatch last week and came across a post about an academic study being conducted on gay and lesbian gamers. There was a link to GaymerSurvey.org where gay and lesbian video gamers can participate in the study by answering a survey.

Although it is a long survey, I found it extremely interesting to take, mostly because it revealed to me how very low my expectations are when it come to seeing gay and lesbian characters in games. Then again, since a lot of my activity within video games involves crashing into things at high speeds, spraying goop on enormous carnivorous plants, and collecting wood resources, maybe it's just not that relevant.

On second thought, I take that back. Collecting wood resources is probably relevant. In fact, if was given an in-game choice to assign a group of townspeople, a clan of orcs, or a bunch of dykes the task of collecting wood, I'd go with the gay girls every time. My people excel at axe-related tasks.

I've always been intrigued by gamers' stories about the connection between video games and depression. Typically, a specific game title comes to be associated in the gamer's mind with depression, or a period of intense gaming activity coincides with a bout of depression. Although the association that forms between gaming and depression can be a negative one, my sense is that the role that video games play in depression is therapeutic.

I heard a pair of stories on NPR a short time ago that seemed to confirm this belief. One was about the changes that take place in the brain during a gaming session, the other was about the use of video games as a tool for pain management. Interestingly, what seems to making gaming useful for pain management is it's interactive component, as opposed to, say, it's content. Other art forms, like film or music or fiction, may be consoling because of what they convey, but in games the key element seems to be how it is conveyed. At one point, NPR labels the "how" part "distraction," but I think it would be more accurate to call it a specific type of focus.

Although it's reviews have been mixed, I'm attracted to the idea behind Trapt, a PS2 game that appeared in the U.S. earlier this year. You play as an evil queen (already sounds good, yes?) in a medieval European setting. Your goal in the game is to avenge yourself on your enemies by killing them. The story apparently provides background information on each of your targets so you can have a full understanding of why each of them must go. To accomplish your killings, you have a castle full of items right out of an old Vincent Price movie--pendulum blades, walls of spikes, a wheel, a cannon--that you must assemble into death traps. The whole point is to make the nastiest trap possible and then lure your enemies into it. One reviewer said Trapt was "like a gothic horror version of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon." Many reviews mention the fact that the game is poorly translated into English from the original Japanese. Of course, for fans of Engrish, this may only add to the game's charms.

I've written before about the fantastic artwork on Magic: The Gathering Cards. Now someone's mocked up an amazing parody set of Magic cards based on U.S. politics. I've checked the site over the last few days and, as is the case with authentic Magic cards, the size of the deck just seems to keep growing. What's incredible about this deck is how well matched the play rules are to the graphic in each card. It seems like you could actually play a game with this deck.

I chose to show the Rumsfeld monster here because he's the one member of the Bush line-up who elicits a "person you ove to hate" feeling in me. The rest of them I just hate. I don't know if it's Rummy's ties to the Nixon administration, his poetic leanings, or his eerie typological resemblance to Robert McNamara, but at least he's an interesting villain.

I've been trying to get my friend Joe interested in video games but it's been a slow process. Awhile ago he bought a copy of the Sims for PC, so that's a start, but I'd like to see him get excited about console gaming as well. Since Joe is interested in all things Italian, I've tried mentioning Mario games often, hoping this would convince him to buy a GameCube. Now I think I've found the perfect lure for Joe. While reading Joystick, I found a reference to this Japanese fan comic featuring Mario and Luigi as Super Bears. If this doesn't spark his interest, nothing will.

I like games that are kind of strange, so I was really excited to read the feature "These Games Are Out There" in the latest Electronic Gaming Monthly. It was a preview of the expected sleeper titles coming out over the next few months, based on their atypical storylines and play mode. One of the games that intrigued me was Total Overdose, a shooter that takes place in Mexico.

According to the official web site, the game involves a drug trade plot and will have a soundtrack of Mexican hip-hop. There's only one female character, Angel, but she's billed as a "hard ass 'tom boy'" type, so I'm hoping she's playable and not just a love interest. Based on the web site, the game looks like it has a lot of style.

I enjoyed watching the ABC mini-series Empire, which aired recently on ABC. I noticed a number of watchers criticized the series for its historical inaccuracy. I get the point, but it seems weak sport to pick on a gladiator flick. I mean, Ben Hur is subtitled "A Story of the Christ," but that's not really what one remembers, is it? We remember it for the arena, the chariots, the blistering homosexual subtext.

Anyway, I watched Empire primarily because I was led astray by a TV reviewer that promised me a lesbian scene during the Roman orgy in episode 3. I think there may have been about 10 seconds of that, and even now I'm not really certain if I ever saw anything. But that's okay with me, because I liked the series even without it. There was something fun about its schizophrenic movement back and forth between lowbrow gladitorial combat and a middlebrow political plot.

By sheer coincidence, I happened to be playing Gladius on my GameCube at the time the series was on, so I was really excited when Empire made use of various gladiatorial classes, such as the secutor, a very quick-moving fighter type that I was using in my game. At one point in the series, the two lead characters, Augustus and Tyrannus, become captives at a notorious gladiator prison called Arkham. Now there's historical accuracy for you! I laughed myself to pieces over that.

In a few weeks, I plan on watching the HBO mini-series, Rome. I just discovered its being co-produced by the BBC, which can only be a good thing as far as I'm concerned.

My eyes bugged out the other day while reading an interview with game designer Cliff Bleszinski in Electronic Gaming Monthly. The designer was talking about his intent in creating the forthcoming XBOX 360 game, Gears of War:

'You have these two guys that are engaging in this dance of death where it's almost like the prom date where the room melts away and it's just the two them focusing on each other,' says Bleszinski. 'Except instead of trying to have a nice moment of romance, they're trying to kill each other.'

Ugh. I had thought this death-obsessed homosocial thematic had been tapped out years ago, by Hemingway (pick a novel) and Norman Mailer ("The Homosexual Villain"), and all that crowd. Maybe this guy should make Women in Love into a video game; I'm sure the naked wrestling scene would translate very well.

All this fucked-up homosexual bogeyman stuff is coming back these days. Everything hatefully old is Bushy and new again.

I love DIY stuff generally and DIY art stuff in particular. Lately, I've found a lot of DIY comics links for the artistically impaired. For example, there's a new Mac program called Comic Life that lets you easily create comics from photographs. Over at Mac Merc, there's a tutorial on achieving a "comics art look" from photographs using Photoshop. Via Boing-Boing, I found two interesting community-oriented web sites: one allows you to create and share comic strips online and another uses game screenshots to create comics.

The game site seems like an interesting extension of the "fan media" movement, in which fans use a commercial property such as a TV series as a jumping-off point for fiction, movies, songs, and now comics based on but extending the original premise. I just read through the archive of The L Ward, a site that uses comic strips based on screen shots from The L Word to comment on the series. I imagine programs like Comic Life are going to make this type of fan media much more prevalent.

There is often much hand-wringing in gaming circles over the role of women in video games. Now, at last, it seems we can fret over the appearance of lesbians in video games, as they are increasingly cropping up in titles of all sorts.

A few years ago, Fear Effect introduced lesbian characters in the popular tall brunette/shorter blonde mold established in action duo Xena, Warrior Princess and her faithful girlfriend and sidekick, Gabrielle, Queen of the Amazons. Taking inspiration from the much loved hot tub scenes of the Xena TV series, Kessen III introduces a female/female jacuzzi scene, as shown in the screenshot here. Note once again the brunette/blonde combination. This scene appears to be more of an interlude than the main action of the story, but if you're looking for main action, you may wish to take a look at Playboy, the Mansion. Although this game has been panned for its boring gameplay, it does feature even more girl plus girl hottubbing. It's a representation of lesbians I think we can all be proud of; after all, we lesbians are a clean people, and it's high time the world noticed it.

While it's not explicitly lesbian, I'm being intrigued by the female characters in Rumble Roses. I know female wrestling is kind of debasing but their outfits are just so cute. Call it a guilty pleasure. Well, I guess they're all guilty pleasures. But until Orlando or The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is turned into a video game, we'll just have to work with what we're given.

Further proof that video games are the new film: the Hollywood Bowl is hosting a program called Video Games Live on July 6. According to the schedule listing, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra will perform themes from a wide range of video games, including Tron, Tomb Raider, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Halo. Like the L.A. Phil's earlier performance of Final Fantasy game music,the program will incorporate video footage and laser light sequences.

For some time, the Bowl has held movie soundtrack programs and special movie screenings with live orchestra accompaniment. Perhaps we'll see game music programs become a regular season feature in the years ahead.

Via Dr. Menlo, I traced my way back to a post at Grand Text Auto on when video games are going to have their Citizen Kane moment. (By happy circumstance, the Cute Little Red-Headed Girlfriend and I just watched Citizen Kane this past weekend on a two-disc special edition DVD.)

I tend to think games have already had their Citizen Kane moment, to judge by the diversity and quality of game offerings these days. I should also point out that just because an industry produces Citizen Kane doesn't mean that some 60 years later it won't be primarily producing Son of the Mask and Van Helsing.

It seems like there was a fruitful discussion about this, which tended down two tracks: first, that the Citizen Kane moment wasn't all that (I'm sure David Fiore would agree), and second, that artistic development in games is following a more fractured and fitful course than film, but the artistic output is nonetheless significant.

I'm not an expert in video game history, so I can't point to a single moment where a Kane-like threshold was reached. It's simply an impression. I was pushed towards this view by the novel Lucky Wander Boy by D.B. Weiss. The book jacket contains a blurb asserting that the novel does for games what The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay does for comics.

I was mightily skeptical when I first started reading Lucky Wander Boy's stripped down narrative that it could match the artistry of Chabon's work. But I was mislead by the differing prose styles. Whereas Chabon's work is thickly intertwined with the sights and sounds of New York, Lucky Wander Boy take it's stylistic cues primarily from Tokyo. Once I adjusted to its pared-down aesthetic, I found it to be just as remarkable a book as Kavalier & Clay.

Perhaps that is the direction in which the real difficulty lies. There is still a widespread belief that there is something disreputable about popular culture, whatever form it takes. Currently, there are more people who are willing to expect great things from film, as opposed to comics or games. That doesn't mean, however, that the great moments aren't there in comics or games, if one is open to appreciating them.

I haven't been following Major League Gaming, the new pro gaming tour, but I can't say I won't be a spectator in the future. Especially after I read in the latest Electronic Gaming Monthly that one of the top stars of the League is a 14-year-old girl who goes by the gaming handle "Xena." I guess that name just goes with manual dexterity.

The Cute Little Red-Headed Girlfriend surprised me with a gift of the original Candyland board game, which has a wonderful graphic map at the core of its gameplay. It was such a relief to know that the original version was still being made, even if it's being marketed as a "vintage" item to oldsters like me.

I first became aware that the Candyland board had changed after a child asked me to play the game and I eagerly responded "yes." Only then did I discover that the game board I fondly remembered, with its lollypops and gumdrops, had been licensed to include name brand candies like Reeses' pieces and Mars bars.

It never ends does it? I mean the colonization of living--oops, I mean unbranded-- spaces. Just the other day I believe I mentioned my gravestone and what I would write on it. Now there's a space that is ripe for branding. If I'm ever really hard up for cash I'll have to remember that--maybe I could auction off the area in advance to some company, like 1-800-Flowers.com. That would be what the advertisers call a good fit.