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"You aren't men. You are stunted adolescents." - Heather Chaplin, reporter., to game developers everywhere.

That's the gist of Chaplin's talk that was part of a series of journalists' rants delivered this morning at the Game Developers Conference (I gave one too. Mine was about the quality of writing about games... more on that later.) Chaplin has co-authored the book "Smartbomb," a well-reviewed survey of the gaming industry. She knows the big players and has hung out with top designers like Cliff Bleszinski and Will Wright. She singled Bleszinski out in her talk, saying she liked him, but that she was distressed by how juvenile most major games are. She dismissed top games as "power fantasies" and charged the games industry with neoteny. Look that one up.

She said game developers need to stop using the youth of the gaming medium as an excuse. At the same age of their medium, Chaplin said, movies had had Fritz Lang and were on the verge of Citizen Kane. Rock n roll had Bob Dylan and the Beatles. With games? She said she enjoys "Gears of War," but she's not impressed with the field.

The game's producer tells us how to make the most of our assassin skills in "Wanted: Weapons of Fate." Read more...

I got to play two of Gameloft's DSi offerings, "American Pop Star: Road to Celebrity" and "Real Soccer 2009." The thing I wanted to know most was how these two DSi versions of existing games make use of the DSi functionality. I was told that "American Pop Star" lets players take their own photos with the DSi camera that will appear throughout the game, like on magazine covers (pictured). Meanwhile "Real Soccer 2009" takes the DSi photos and can display them on the soccer ball, the giant stadium screen, a team flag or as a player's face. It seems that a lot of DSi titles will let players take photos that appear in the game, but it'd be nice to see more innovative ways of integrating the DSi camera function.

During the Experimental Gameplay Sessions yesterday, developer Jenova Chen revealed several features that his team tried and then removed from the PS3 downloadable game "Flower."

They removed:

• Timers, which they thought might help motivate the player
• Desert terrain, which would cost any players who flew over it some petals
• Spells, which were part of a system that allowed the player to gain improved flight abilities
• Orbs, into which players were going to deposit petals in order to unlock checkpoints

Chen and the rest of the team at ThatGameCompany discovered that these traditional, video-game-style features had their players saying things like "f---" and "s--t" while they played. Those weren't the reactions he wanted to evoke. So, to ensure the game presented a rare sensation of calm and harmony, the features listed above were removed.

Something happy and gentle prevailed.

I got my hands on an early Xbox 360 version of this summer's "Batman: Arkham Asylum" video game yesterday and wound up thinking about the influence of the great "Bioshock." Read more...

More than 60% of you who voted in our poll yesterday want Infinity Ward's next game to include the "Call of Duty" name in the title, outnumbering those who think the development studio's project should be called just "Modern Warfare 2." While the game's teaser trailer does not include the "CoD" name, a representative for the game's publisher, Activision, won't say what the game's name will be.

An Activision spokesperson told me in an e-mail: "All I can share at this time is that Modern Warfare has taken on such a life of its own, it has become our focus now. At this point, it's too early to release additional details."

As of 4pm ET yesterday, I officially became a successful video game reporter. That's the hour when Kotaku posted a video interview with video game parody group Mega 64, a video that included a member of Mega 64 briefly pretending to be me. The moment occurs near 10:20 mark of Kotaku's Mega 64 interview. It's not the funniest thing ever, but I'm not complaining. They also do Kotaku's Brian Crecente and Luke Plunkett as well as "N-Gage" Croal.

I'm sitting in a huge hall at the Game Developers Conference, trying to explain to you the wild ideas being shown at the Experimental Gameplay Sessions. I'll keep updating this post with new ideas until the session ends or my head hurts too much. Read more...

Above is a quote Hideo Kojima ended his keynote presentation with. Below is also one of his favorite quotes from scientist Robert H. Goddard. Read more...

In his keynote presentation, Hideo Kojima explained that "Metal Gear" came to be because he was trying to make a combat game for the MSX2. Here are some slides that explain: Read more...