Screen Play has said many times that the strength of this blog is its passionate and articulate community.

As we all know, other forums are not so lucky, with the anonymity of the internet often bringing out the worst in people, as explored last week in Anthony Murphy's amusing rant.

Today we have one former Your Turn PS3 winner responding to another, with Dylan Foulcher providing a more positive follow-up to Anthony's diatribe.

Click below to read Dylan's thoughts on online identity.

You are not terrible

I wanted to respond to some of the issues raised in Anthony Murphy's amusing rant about the evils of 'whiney nerd rage'. In the discussion that followed Anthony's piece a recurring theme was the idea that anonymity on the internet causes people to throw all sense of social decency out the window and become, for want of a better word, a**holes.

The idea that anonymity causes otherwise decent people to transform into an uncouth mob of volatile twelve year olds with foul mouths is depressing. Accurate, but depressing.

But I think this problem is easily solved. How? Simple - give internet users an identity. The most obvious example I can think of is Facebook. Users are forced to use their own identity, and a Facebook profile is essentially an online snapshot of you as a person. For this reason people treat each other cordially, not wanting to sully their good names on a vast social network.

Often the tone of a blog or website will affect the kind identity posters adopt. Take Screen Play, for example, which is predominantly devoid of the kind of childish antics that swamp most mainstream forums. How has this been achieved? Well, Jason has created a place that encourages discussion and expression of ideas, and discourages temper tantrums and name calling. There are many other forums and websites out there were the opposite is encouraged, by virtue of the people who run them.

But it's also important to note that identity plays a big part in Screen Play's success. The Screen Play community is relatively small, and most posters are interested in expressing themselves and creating an identity with which to interact with other users. People's identities, and the reputations they've built up, on Screenplay are a part of what make their comments worth reading. The brilliant "Your Turn" initiative takes this even further, allowing people's identities to be further fleshed out by giving them the spotlight for the day.

The further you move away from anonymity, the nicer, the less terrible, people become.

In a way, I think the New Xbox Experience looks to have similar goals. If any online environment needs a dose of identity for its oft-abusive users, it's Xbox Live. The Avatars, whilst blatantly ripped from possibly influenced by Nintendo's Mii concept, really help to give each gamer an online personality. Sony's Home, whenever it's eventually released, also seems to be about giving players an online personal space and identity.

This move towards giving players distinct identities is a great thing for online communities, and for gaming in general. It could be a genuine solution to help people be nicer to each other.

What positives or negatives do you see coming out of this trend? Does giving yourself an online identity affect the way you behave online?

- Dylan Foulcher

Screen Play readers can submit articles or ideas for consideration in Your Turn using the email address screenplayblog@gmail.com. The best blog post each month as judged by Jason Hill will win a PlayStation 3 console from Sony Computer Entertainment worth $699. The next Your Turn prize winner will be announced on November 28. Only Australian residents are eligible and the judge's decision is final.

The argument is fairly simple really. People are going to cut expenditure during the upcoming recession, and lesiure spending is going to get hit hard. People will spend less money drinking, eating out, watching sport, going to Disneyland etc because they simply can't afford it any more. MMOs will get hit thanks to the same thing, because they're actually getting quite expensive now. When I last fired up an MMO (Age of Conan), I was paying about £11-12 a month for the priviledge, tax inclusive. At the time, it was about $24 or 16 Euros. Plenty of cash then, approaching 40p a day. Given I'm now a fairly busy person and I might only play a couple of hours every couple of days during the week, I'd really have to pack the time in at weekends to make that worthwhile. At the end of the month, if I'd not played much, I'd probably pack my subscription in. I resent feeling forced to play a game simply because I'm paying for it, more than anything else. It shouldn't feel like a chore.

On the flip side, though, even £12 a month isn't much compared to a trip to a theme park or a night out on the town. Hell, it's barely even enough to cover a trip to the cinema if you include transport into the bargain. If you've got the time spare, MMO gaming is actually a very cost-effective method of entertainment. It was when I was a student, certainly. But that's the crux of the issue: the people who have less time to play are those most likely to quit their subscriptions. This is for two reasons - firstly, they're likely to be the ones who have jobs and thus other financial committments, so they'll have reason to be frightened of the credit crunch. Secondly, as the maths above has demonstrated, playing an MMO makes much less financial sense for them.

This means that we're likely to see the MMO-playing demographic swing towards people with a lot of time and few financial commitments, and that only suggests one stratum of society to me. Kids. They don't care about the credit crunch, so long as their pocket money still hits $15 a month. They don't care that they're paying out $0.50 a day, because to them it represents good value for money. And this is good news for the MMO developers out there, because it means we're highly unlikely to see many of the major MMOs fail.

It's less good news for the genre as a whole, because much of the interest in playing an MMO comes from the social aspect. I'm not saying all teenagers who play MMOs are illiterate douchebags, far from it (there were several 15-16 year olds in my WoW guild who seemed pretty switched on), but there is certainly a higher proportion of them in the population than in any other age range. The less mature people there are around to dilute them, the more unbearable they become and thus the less enjoyable playing an MMO will become.

I also think that the games hit hardest will not be the ageing games, apparently on their last legs but still somehow tottering along (EQ1, UO, perhaps EVE/Vanguard), but games like Age of Conan and Warhammer Online. The older, more hardcore games only have hardcore fans left, and those guys aren't likely to give up playing for anything short of armageddon. The newer games have a more diverse subscriber base and will take heavier losses because of it. WoW certainly has enough people to keep it chugging along happily, and I'd imagine WAR will be fine too. But a relatively new game like Age of Conan (where subscribers are still relatively thin on the ground but not yet whittled down to a truly devoted core) is probably going to find itself facing hard times, and I expect to see it marginalised in the next six months or so.

LittleBigPlanet has been critically acclaimed and sold quite well, but the PlayStation 3's big holiday exclusive has not exactly set the world on fire. Sony is aware of this, and has claimed that at any other time of the year, LBP would have been a chart topper. Damn those other videogames, damn them for existing!

"We're really pleased with the initial reaction to LittleBigPlanet - it has been our highest scoring game ever I believe with a Metacritic score of 95 and a huge list of 10/10s or 100 per cent scores," explains Sony's David Wilson. "We are also pleased with its commercial performance. In other times of the year it would be a clear number one - so you have to put the chart in context. This is an incredibly volatile time of year and the chart reflects that - November 7 saw 47 titles released on that one day alone including many big hitters with Christmas number one aspirations. Look at the chart this week - the top four are all brand new entries."

So, too many new games, that's LittleBigPlanet's problem. Sony isn't unhappy with the game's performance, however, claiming it has "broken the trend" of innovative and critically acclaimed games selling poorly.

"LittleBigPlanet has broken this stereotype by not only being brilliant and original but also by selling really well on a global basis," Wilson explains. "LittleBigPlanet is breaking many preconceptions. There are some games that are hardcore experiences that the kudos lies in getting it first. LittleBigPlanet is excellent on day one but even better as time goes by."

I still think it's a shame for LBP and the PS3 that it wasn't this massive blockbuster. That said, it's obviously doing well and will likely become a huge franchise as time goes by. You can't complain about that.

Wii owners will not be receiving additional Jimi Hendrix tracks for “Guitar Hero: World Tour,” an Activision Blizzard representative has confirmed to MTV Multiplayer.

“Due to technical or licensing restrictions, the DLC offerings will not be the same for every console platform,” explained the representative. “For example, certain artists prefer to keep the integrity of the track pack rather than releasing singles and the Wii’s infrastructure only allows us the ability to release single songs as DLC.”

We learned about this technical limitation a few weeks back from Harmonix. The Wii version of “Rock Band 2″ will not feature price-reduced bundle packs because Nintendo does not allow “duplicate” content on the Wii Store.

In this case, licensing restrictions from Jimi Hendrix’s people mean Activision Blizzard must offer the music as a “track pack” and not singles. The restriction, combined with Nintendo’s rules, mean Wii players won’t see the music.

This isn’t a new trend. It’s just new to music games. Similar licensing restrictions have stopped some artists from joining iTunes.

“The development team is committed to offering Wii fans worldwide as much variety of DLC as possible on a regular basis,” continued the spokesperson.

This could be a problem for “Rock Band 2,” too. We’ll keep watching.

[Photo Credit: Andy Henderson]

Related Posts
‘Guitar Hero: World Tour’ Readying Raconteurs, Jimi Hendrix Download Packs
Activision Considering Subscription Service For User-Generated ‘Guitar Hero’ Music
‘Guitar Hero: World Tour’ Sells More On Wii Than On Any Other Platform

Tokyo gaming giant Square Enix is creating a development house in El Segundo, California to craft an "action-oriented game based for an original IP," reports Gamasutra.

Job listings on the career section of the company's U.S. website reveal several open roles at the new studio including an Xbox 360 software engineer, product manager and 3-D artist. Additional listings reveal that the company is seeking individuals with Xbox 360 and Wii development experience.

This move continues the Final Fantasycreator's recent push into the burgeoning North American gaming market, a trend revealed by the firm's announcement of a publishing deal to bring Gas Powered Games' Supreme Commander 2to market.

Image courtesy Square Enix

Square Building U.S. Development Studio[Gamasutra]