Atkinson, who was elected to Parliament in 1989, announced his decision to step down from his position Monday morning in Australia, saying he wants to be there to watch his son grow up and attend the boy’s soccer games.

The decision comes on the heel of a string of embarrassments and the increasingly loud call by gamers for the politician to step down.

The reason Atkinson is so hated by gamers in Australia is because he has blocked a change in the nation’s rating system that would allow the inclusion of a 18+ rating for games. The result has been a number of violent games being banned in the country.

I’ll let Luke explain:

The actual cause of Australia’s current situation can be traced back decades, to the time ratings for video games were first introduced. Because at the time games were so simple, childish and crude (they were, after all, still considered “toys”), it was decided that the maximum rating they’d need was MA15+. A mistake, then but an innocent one.

Fast forward to this decade, and suddenly games are incredibly realistic. The Xbox 360, PS3 and PC can depict scenes of shocking violence, and a maturing development scene means sex and drugs now feature prominently in video games as well. Games aren’t just meeting the MA15+ rating, they’re often exceeding it.

So, it’s time for a law change, then! Should be simple enough. Australia has a number of international developers lobbying the government, it’s a billion-dollar market, it’s a free country. Except…to amend the classification laws, all six of Australia’s state Attorneys-General need to unanimously agree to the change.

Five of them do, and have been for some time now. They’re reasonable people, who realise that adults should be free to choose their own adult forms of entertainment. But one – South Australia’s Michael Atkinson – does not.

Except… to amend the classification laws, all six of Australia’s state Attorneys-General need to unanimously agree to the change.

Five of them do, and have been for some time now. They’re reasonable people, who realise that adults should be free to choose their own adult forms of entertainment. But one – South Australia’s Michael Atkinson – does not.

With Atkinson stepping down in 2014 the key will be to make sure that his replacement isn’t as extremely conservative as the Atkinson. Hopefully the voters and the lobbyists will make sure of that.

Fingers crossed for sensible game ratings in Australia soon!

Update: I’ve tweaked the lead of the story to reflect what appears to be Atkinson’s decision to immediately step down from his role of Attorney General for the state, while maintaining his position in Parliament till 2014. It is not clear when the position will be filled in any of the current news covering Atkinson’s decision.

Attorney General Michael Atkinson to Quit Front Bench Adelaide Now [Thanks everyone]

The Excalibur booth at CES was packed with a cornucopia of chintzy handheld games, wooden chessboards, mini air hockey tables and wooden puzzles. But what really caught our eye was their line up of Vibrating Football tables.

Sure, the Excalibur folks didn’t exactly know how to play the game and were a little hazy on the storied history of electric football, but who cares?

Check out this video to see a match between Mike and I in action.

“One of the things for us that was really important and we’re clearly seeing it on PC games — and coming across to consoles — is basically having a social experience of some sort,” Dragon age’s online producer Fernando Melo told Kotaku in a phone interview late last week.

“That has traditionally been the domain of a multiplayer experience.”

Not anymore, according to BioWare.

The company wants its solo adventurers to converge, to see each other’s stories in words and screenshots. And all of this is supposed to happen automatically as soon as a player saves the game for the first time.

The PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions of Dragon Age: Origins will all connect to Bioware’s new “Social” website, which will collect data from player’s games. The type of data gathered differs between the console and PC versions, but all will share some features. Players of any version of Dragon Age will be able to link their copy of of the game to BioWare’s site. The Social site requires users to create a free account. Once the game and the site are linked, a record of the player’s accomplishments in the game and the status of their ever-evolving character will appear on the Social site.

The most basic manifestation of that appears in the player’s character screen. Below, you can see the character I started on the Xbox 360 version of Dragon Age this morning (Or log on and check it out, if you prefer). His face, portrait, items and attributes all reflect the choices I’ve made for him as of the last time the game saved:

Sharing stats and updating an online avatar version of your character isn’t itself a feature that would amaze avid users of something like the Halo-tracking Bungie.net. But Melo and his team have more elaborate plans than that.

“One of the things we started to look at was the way you could share your story,” Melo said. “That really ties to the core of the game. The game radically challenges based on the decisions you’re making along the way and the party members you have with you. We were trying to figure out how to create these water-cooler moments that people could talk about without spoiling it for people…we wanted to have a way that complements that instead of random [forum] threads.”

To help players share their stories, the data-tracking will also snatch details on what the player has accomplished in the game. Those details will be listed as the character’s adventure log on the Social site.

Melo hopes that a future iteration of the service will present the narrative accomplishments as if they were chronicled in a personal journal, which is a far cry from the team’s earlier scuttled concept to have player’s characters tweet their accomplishments for the world to see.

The event-tracking isn’t live yet, but BioWare provided this screenshot taken from the game’s internal servers, to show how the basic launch version will work. Each event is supposed to be expandable, providing more text to explain how it fits into the character’s adventure:

For console gamers the networking and sharing ends there. But PC players will have one more element pulled into their online chronicle: screenshots. Dragon Age will automatically pull an in-game screenshot for any major achievement the player has accomplished, including boss kills. (Tests of this on the console produced unacceptable slowdown, Melo said). The PC version will also support the manual uploading of screenshots. These features are intended to make the player-character’s chronicle more vivid. BioWare provided a sample of how this will look as well.

Melo said he expects player’s chronicles on the Social site to be radically different. And he hopes players will look at each other’s and be excited by the differences. “You’ll have the ability to see a friends’ character and go, ‘That’s a cool helmet, how the hell did you get that?’ Or ‘You completed this quest and I didn’t even see that.’” The joy will be discovering that these nooks and crannies even exist. Melo said that some are deeply hidden, such as a sequence that gets a player thrown in jail if they fail at a certain kind of combat — and then have 52 ways to extricate themselves from the predicament.

Players should expect all of these tracking and sharing systems to change over the weeks and months following Dragon Age’s release. Melo’s team will take over most of the work related to Dragon Age: Origins following the game’s release and plan to support and improve the game’s features as part of BioWare’s commitment to offer two years’ worth of downloadable content. One example of a possible patch, he offered, could be the eventual integration of a web browser into the console versions, which would allow players to access the Social site from their Xbox 360 or PS3.

Every experiment has its exploded test tubes, of course. The character-tweets-his-adventures idea didn’t work, in part, because Melo’s team realised that players backtracking via earlier save files would wind up with character Twitter feeds that listed events out of time sequence. Plus, the tweeting could have gotten out of hand, which is what the Uncharted 2 developers discovered before the game was even released to many people.

“There is definitely a danger of spamming to the point where [people] just get turned off by it,” Melo said. “What we realised is that it’s kind of an odd catch-22. If the game is super successful, chances are you’re going to annoy people.” BioWare’s solution has been to have data shared through the company’s Social site, so that the many updates a player might be exposed to regarding your friends’ Dragon Age characters would appear only on a site the player opted to join and visit. Players can opt out of any of these Social features.

The Dragon Age connectivity plan doesn’t shun Twitter, though. One of the concepts BioWare is testing but won’t have ready for launch involves larger community-driven events. Melo offered an example of the full-player body of Dragon Age being challenged to kill a set number of enemies in a finite period of time. That might be tweeted.

BioWare also nixed early plans to provide branches for a single player’s adventures, demonstrating the different ways a gamer may have had executed their adventure. User testing indicated that that was too confusing. The more streamlined version, Melo said, will only display a player’s character as of their most recent save. So, if a player goes back to an earlier save file and plays from there and then saves, their character on the Social site will reflect that moment in time.

Game developers who connect their players like this may get a happier consumer out of this, but it also seems like such a project could have been engineered to cultivate a more honest one. Anti-piracy isn’t directly the drive, though, Melo said. “We wanted to make this very clear this is not a DRM solution. The win was taking a playbook from Valve by adding additional value for players…Our benefit is more indirect in terms of feeding the community and getting them engaged with Dragon Age as a franchise.” And happier customers, he noted, are an effective added sales force.

Solo playing of Dragon Age need not feel so solo thanks to all that Melo and his team have planned. With luck, BioWare has finally figured out how best to get players of its famously branching decision-filled games exposed to the multitude of variations within, without consulting a guidebook. And if they can pull it often without annoying anyone through Twitter, that’s even better.

Said Melo: “This is the wild west we’re in the middle of trying to figure out.”

“Aiva’s Story” tells the story of a young Asmodian warrior named Aiva, which seems completely appropriate given the name of the issue. Aiva has vowed vengeance against the Elyos who killed her family during a raid, and the comic tells the story of this quest for revenge through the artwork of Neil Googe and the words of David Noonan and Ricardo Sanchez.

The limited-edition comic will be given away free to folks who purchase the game at GameStop (US only) later this month, with a limited number of copies also available to visitors to NCsoft’s booth at PAX 09 this weekend.

I like the idea of delving more into the fiction of Aion via a comic, but a limited-edition one-shot? That will never do. Full series please.

When you come upon Baabara, the town’s resident sheep, you’re greeted with a racial epithet. The word is used repeatedly in your conversation with the sheep.

“I almost forgot about you, N—-a” “So got any juicy gossip for me, N—-a?” “Just thinking about it gets me all excited, N—-a.”

The word, written with a tilda over the N and an accent over the A, apparently popped up in the game because the person who was playing it, most likely a Nintendo employee, customised the greeting of the critter to include the word. One of the draws of the original DS title was that the text speech of the game’s inhabitants can be customised.

The sheep was first discovered by MTV’s Stephen Totilo, who reported on it over on Multiplayer. I was able to track the sheep down on the version sent me by Nintendo and verified that she’s just as mouthy in my version.

It appears that Nintendo copied the save for the game to multiple copies of Wild Word and then sent it out to game writers. The copy came with a letter explaining that content had been unlocked so writers could check out how moving stuff from the DS Animal Crossing title to the recently released Wii version worked.

We’ve contacted Nintendo for comment and will update when they reply.

Nintendo Plays a Game for Me, Includes Slur [Multiplayer]