Who would have thought that a public chat channel in a game could expose your kids to discussions about sex, politics and racism. Well, if your teenagers are playing games like World of Warcraft or Aion, chances are they're subject to a regular onslaught of these topics.

And believe you me, some of these discussions deteriorate fast and can get pretty personal. Intricate details of sexual encounters, banter about which basketball team to support and why it's not appropriate to call someone a 'Jew' are some of the topics I've encountered while playing. And that's the mild stuff.

Thankfully, most games allow you to block out a certain chat channel if it's bothering you. You can also turn on filters that filter out inappropriate words. Some games however, won't allow you to block the main public chat channel which is usually where these discussions take place.

I always like to keep track of clever ideas and images, especially related to video games. This new shirt design from Teextile Epics is incredibly clever in its tribute to game characters and games of the past. I count 10 different games represented. Can you name them all?

Welcome to the first edition of Experience Points, courtesy of artist Scott Johnson. A new comic will be posted every Monday. If you want to get all of the Experience Points articles and comics in one list, just click the Experience Points filter tag at the end of the story. Enjoy!

GameCulture is pleased to present the first installment of a two-part tour of game culture in Brazil from Divide by Zero Games founder James Portnow.  Today, James walks us through the development and academic scene; tomorrow he'll introduce us to the gamers and explain how Brazil is an important waypoint for the future of gaming.

By James Portnow

As gamers, we rarely get opportunities to do something for others, especially when it supports a worthwhile charity that looks after the interests of children. All of this could very well be changing with organizations such as OneBigGame.

OneBigGame is organized by volunteers and is setup to develop and create video games which they publish for charity. So from a gamer's perspective, what this means is that if you purchase a game that is published under the OneBigGame banner, your money will be given to a charity supported by the organisation. The organisation's motto is "Play, so others can can" and it's as simple as that. So buy a game and save a life.

OneBigGame was founded by Martin de Ronde who began in the industry 10 years ago. He then founded his own development studio in 1998 which was then sold to Lost Boys Games. After being renamed to 'Guerilla Games' in 2003, Martin was then commercial director and part of the team that created the PS2 game 'Killzone' for Sony Computer Entertainment. After moving on to Media Republic, Martin then founded OneBigGame in 2006.

The first game released by OneBigGame called 'Chime' is now available for download via Xbox Live for 400 Microsoft points. I will be downloading this and getting that much more out of my gaming knowing that my money will be going towards a worthy cause.

So gamers, if you ever wanted an opportunity to turn the tide on all those negative stereotypes gamers keep getting slapped with, this is a step in the right direction.

You can check out OneBigGame here: www.onebiggame.org and Chime here: www.chimegame.com.

It's unfortunate to hear that Turbine co-founder Johnny Monsarrat (Asheron's Call) is at the center of a rather unpleasant story.

According to local news reports, police arrested Monsarrat, 41, last week after discovering more than 30 underage drinkers at his Boston-area apartment. One young woman was reportedly so intoxicated that she was later taken to a Cambridge Hospital for evaluation.

Police reports describe a pretty grim scene. Arriving in response to complaints about a loud party, officers noted some broken beer bottles outside and found Monsarrat's two-story apartment packed with what appeared to be 25-30 teenagers, many of whom were attempting to hide alcohol. After spending a few minutes trying to find an adult, Monsarrat came down from the second floor and told police it was his apartment and his party but denied there was any alcohol.

Cops asked Monsarrat to clear out the party, but Monsarrat allegedly became argumentative and refused. Reportedly, when police asked some of the partyers for ID, several said they didn't have any, since they were in high school.

At that point, it appears, the officers heard a female screaming from the second floor. After wading through a kitchen stacked with "alcohol bottles everywhere in open view, clearly accessible to all," police found a young woman on the floor, hysterically screaming and crying. Friends of the woman reportedly told police that she was "depressed" and had been drinking.

RPG pioneer Richard Garriott has chimed in on the Obama administration's plans to stimulate the commercial spaceflight industry.

Over the next five years, administration proposals would spend $6 billion on the effort to boost space tourism. Industry execs are optimistic, envisioning space hotels and trips to the moon by 2020. In addition to creating around 5000 jobs, it's hoped that commercial spaceflight will help NASA avoid paying billions of dollars to get astronauts to the international space station. The space agency is retiring its shuttle fleet this year, and it pays about $50 million per seat to the Russians for a roundtrip ride to the space station.

But Richard Garriott, who dropped $30 million of his own to hop a Russian Soyuz into orbit, thinks American space industry optimists are way off base on a key issue: safety.

"I think that for people to say that we here in the U.S. have done a great job on safety with the old way is just wrong," Garriott told Space.com, adding that, compared to the space shuttle, the Russian Soyuz has a "100-fold difference" in its safety record.

Since the space shuttle's debut in 1981, NASA has suffered two disasters that took the lives of 14 astronauts.

The guys behind Lionsgate Entertainment’s GAMER, which just launched on Blu-ray Disc and DVD, have a videogame history beyond the Crank films. Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, who co-wrote and co-directed all three films, also worked on a concept for a Grand Theft Auto videogame movie after Crank became a breakout international hit. Neveldine talks about his own gaming background and divulges why GTA hasn’t yet made it to the big screen in this exclusive interview.

What videogames did you play growing up?

I played, Pac-man, Asteroids, Sinistar. Sinistar was my favorite game.

Have you stuck with games over the years?

I didn’t stick with it. Towards the end of Atari and Nintendo Super Mario Bros. I was a player and that was it. I didn’t follow it. My brother did, but I didn’t. He is a radiologist and he looks at 100,000 images a day and plays videogames all night.

Can you talk about how you got involved in a film that immerse the audience in a future videogame culture?

Yeah. It is kind of funny, we had this thought about live human videogames after watching reality TV and people wanting to be so involved in other people’s lives. I thought maybe it’s just not going to stop and we are going to get to the point we do in the film. I mean we are already manipulating people and if given the chance, we want to control people and maybe just take that leap and get to that world (in film) where that is happening. And we had some influences -- studios, the Internet, reading certain things about the end of the world and the age of technology  and that stuff. At the end of the day it was a movie we wanted to be a little bit of warning, but mostly have fun and get off on the violence and menace of it all. 

The life of a startup in the video game industry can be full of many potholes and pitfalls. There will be mistakes and second-guessing. But through it all, the hope is that the effort will bring success and a return on investment for the owners trying to build a dream.

In the case of Curt Schilling, former Red Sox starting pitcher, the road for his gaming startup 38 Studios has had its share of ups and downs. Schilling funded the studio himself and so far has been unable to entice other investors into his company, despite having some prominent members of a development team creating a massively multiplayer online game codenamed Copernicus, and purchasing startegy gaming studio Big Huge Games from THQ last year.

Schilling and 38 Studios are part of a recently published case study by Harvard Business School professor Noam Wasserman, who teaches the class Founders' Dilemmas at the school. The study reveals many of the issues that Schilling has faced since 38 Studios was founded in 2006, according to an article on Boston.com.

Some points from the study:

South Australian Attorney General Michael Atkinson, widely known in the game community for blocking R18+ ratings for videogames, recently backed a new law that makes it a crime to post anonymous political comments during election periods...and then he backed down amid the ensuing outcry.

As of January 6, 2010, it became illegal to post political comments about state elections unless the commenter provides their full name and postal code. Local media reports said the law applies to blogs and media sites, and may also apply to social networks like Twitter and Facebook.

Initially heated in his defense of the law, Atkinson said

There is no impinging on freedom of speech, people are free to say what they wish as themselves, not as somebody else...[It's really about] the right to know who's making a comment during an election period...It will only apply to newspapers and extensions of newspapers.

But since newspapers commonly solicit reader comments, incorporate blogs and engage social media such as Facebook and Twitter, the law has a potentially broad reach.

Just how far that reach extends, however, is a question that will likely go unanswered. An overwhelming outpouring of popular disdain for the law has put Atkinson into full retreat:

From the feedback we've received through [Aussie news site] AdelaideNow, the blogging generation believes that the law...is unduly restrictive. I have listened...I will immediately after the election move to repeal the law retrospectively.

Atkinson said that until that time, he will not enforce the law, which requires sites to hand over the names and postal codes of commenters or face fines.

When you see many TV and movie franchises getting made into video games, you can only hope that one of your favorites will also get the treatment, and hopefully in a proper fashion. If you are a Dr. Who fan, your wait may finally be over.

BBC Worldwide has revealed that they are in talks to create a Dr. Who game for consoles, but the details are still sketchy, according to an article in Play.tm:

"We're having a lot of interesting discussions for a variety of ideas around Doctor Who that are complementary to each rather than in competition with each other - boxed product console games, virtual worlds and other experiences," offers BBC multimedia head Dave Anderson. "The deals we are looking at are in different spaces, probably looking at overlapping but different audiences and are certainly delivering a different kind of experience. The Doctor Who audience, who love that show, want to have different experiences around it and it has a huge shelf life going back 47 years."

Fans of the series have had little to sate their videogame habit, aside from an assortment of flash games. It will be interesting to see who the BBC gets to develop the games, and just how long fans will have to wait to see the Doctor on their PS3 or Xbox 360.

Dressing up is a part of growing up. Little girls dress up in fancy clothes and boas and put on fake makeup and high heels to be like mommy. Boys dress up as soldiers to play war. Halloween carries the ritual a step further with costumes limited only by one's imagination.

The advent of video game characters has taken dress up to a whole new level with CosPlay, and Dallas Pursely at the Examiner.com scoured through DeviantArt to find some of the best CosPlay out there.

It is amazing the time and effort some people are willing to put into their passion. And we appreciate it, because it makes great fodder for posts like this.

(Image courtesy of DeviantArt)

The literary classic of Dante's Inferno, the first part of the Divine Comedy trilogy, has weathered time rather well. The story is still taught in many classic literature classes and the book is available at most retail book outlets.

However, it looks like Electronic Arts, which is already reinventing the story for its new video game, has gone a step further to come up with its own book cover for the original work, using the new Dante as the cover boy. The new cover trumpets the story as "The literary classic that inspired the epic video game From Electronic Arts."

The book cover appears to be nothing more than a huge ad for the game. The story is unchanged, although there is a new intro by the game's executive producer, Jonathan Knight, and a 16-page full color insert of artwork showing the monsters and villains.

This isn't the first time that EA has engaged in some questionable marketing tactics for the game. They staged a mock religious rally against the Dante's Inferno game at E3 last year. They also set up a web site for a bogus new religious video game called Mass: We Pray that later converted into an ad for Inferno.

The game is due out next Tuesday, and EA already has a huge ad spot purchased for the Super Bowl this Sunday. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.

The same (brilliant?) minds who plunked Flavor Flav down onto the reality scene in "The Surreal Life" — a colossal example of the hazards of unintended consequences on par with Run DMC's inadvertent Aerosmith revival back in the day — are set to debut "The Tester" on the PlayStationNetwork.

The reality game jam, which will air February 18, crams 11 gamers with high ambitions for an industry career and an equally intense lack of self-consciousness into a "Playstation paradise," where they'll compete in games and a series of appropriately humiliating challenges — human slingshots, giant hamster balls, live-action role playing — you know the drill, all in a quest for $5000 and a job as a Sony game tester.

Expect some fun interpersonal antics, scheming and the obligatory quasi-romance ("She's good looking and a gamer? Perfect!") from this cast, equal parts male and female, who are looking to leave their jobs as cheerleading coaches, theater technicians, paramedics and used car salesmen for life in the big leagues doing quality assurance for Sony. Ok, maybe that's a little snide, after all, as Sony pitches hard on the show's website, David Jaffe (like many others) got his start as a tester. We're just not sure he got his big break on the basis of being able to get inside a giant plastic sphere and maneuver it through an obstacle course.

One of the things I have learned over the years is that comics as a medium as just as much a part of culture as books, movies and games. When you can combine comics with another love, it becomes powerful to both mediums.

In the case of Experience Points, by artist Scott Johnson, he has combined his love of creating comics with his passion for videogames. The comic originally appeared on Crispy Gamer, but with the demise of the editorial side of that site, he has agreed to bring the comic to GameCulture.

The comic will run once a week on Monday, beginning Feb. 8. In the meantime, we picked Johnson's brain a bit about the comic to get fans their XP fix. Read the interview after the jump: