-Forget Wii-mote waggling, and start thinking Wii-mote wriggling. MTV Multiplayer reports that Peekaboo Pole Dancing, the company responsible for the Carmen Electra pole dancing kit, are seeking a partnership with Nintendo to work on a licensed pool dancing game for the Wii. While there’s no word yet whether the game will ever come to fruition, the Peekaboo team talks says it would be “all about fun and fitness for a new generation.” While I agree with Multiplayer that holding a Wii-mote and a pole at the same time sounds like tricky business, I’m (predictably) in support of any game that gets grandmas and other Wii target audience members sliding around like strippers. Can you say YouTube videos?

-According to Wired’s Game/Life, MarioKart Wii fails to live up to excited fanboy expectations. Bummer. Apparently dumbed down for the Wii market, it lacks battle mode, which is Chris Kohler’s biggest gripe. Personally, I have lots of fond memories of losing precious balloons through my own stupidity (”I know, I’ll shoot this shell directly into the wall in front of me. It’ll be great!”), so I too will be sad to see it go. Kohler reports that racing is still fun though–as if Mario characters on motorbikes could ever be boring.

-Maybe it’s the Star Trek: Next Generation dork in me talking, but there’s something strangely sad about Will Wheaton, isn’t there? I mean, he was a veritable engineering boy wonder. Yes, yes, that was his character on a fictional show, but still. Now apparently he’s collecting LEGO figurines of himself and getting drunk. Or something. Plus he’s 35 now. 35! Okay, I know he can’t help that, but how is he supposed to fit into his little, red spandex outfit now?

Happy weekend!

Only slightly behind the times, I’ve finally gotten around to setting up both a Heroine Sheik group and a business page on Facebook. The group is called “Video game get me hot and bothered (i.e. I heart Heroine Sheik),” and the business page is creatively titled just “Heroine Sheik.” Both are aimed at readers of this blog (yup, the one you’re reading right now) and anyone who digs sex, gender, technology and/or video games. So join!

As Gerard Jones pointed out, respectable adults with either reputations or children may be hesitant to add a group to their profile that implies that they get off on video games. Personally, I have neither a reputation to uphold (except the one for being dirty-minded and silly) nor a child, but if you’re going for the subtle approach, at least become a fan of the business page. It helps spread the word about the site. Or maybe it builds Heroine Sheik fan solidarity. Or maybe it adds to the ever-growing hoard that is Facebook. But I know it does something…

When it comes to providing you with awesome, cutting-edge sex content, you’ve got to give The Village Voice a hand. They’ve got Dan Savage’s advice column, Tristan Taormino’s sex industry insider column, and of course Click Me, a column by yours truly about sex and technology. Now the Voice site has added another awesome, well, voice to the mix: Audacia Ray, recent author of Naked on the Net: Hookups, Downloads, and Cashing in on Internet Sexploitation.

Ray, previously of $pread Magazine and still running her site Waking Vixen, has started up a sex blog called Naked City. Along with a few equally candid, equally tantalizing quest bloggers, she is covering everything from sexy men in kilts to fun new porn to how to make a bed designed for bondage. The site is a must read for anyone who’s interested in sex. Don’t deny it. If you’re hanging around here, we know where your mind is…

As of the end of April, I finished teaching here in France. My contract is up, and my hooligans will have to find someone new to torment with questions about America, guns, and pancakes. One thing I will say for my less-than-enthusiastic English students: they always perked up at the mention of video games. However, they really baffled me a few weeks ago with their “generational” gap. And I’m only two or three years older than them.

I was teaching a lesson that required students to walk up to the board one by one. However, I couldn’t figure out why they kept stopping to stare at my desk. Eventually I realized it was because I’d left out my keys. Like a proper dork, I have an Nintendo 64 controller key chain on my keys–which, sickeningly enough, matches an equally adorable like N64 Scott keeps on his. When I held it up to ask what was so fascinating, my hooligans proclaimed, “Madame, c’est vieux ça!” (the equivalent of “Wow, that’s old!”). They then proceeded to ask me what rock I’d been living under since the year 1996.

As the words “retro” and “fangirl pride” don’t make it into the French national ESL vocabulary, I let the issue go at “Si c’est vieux, moi aussi, je suis vieille” (”If it’s old, I’m old too”). Still, I was only eleven when the N64 came out, and I loved the living daylights out of that thing. Not only should these whipper snappers learn some basic math, they should have more respect for the roots of the games they play today–whether or not they played them themselves.

Wow, I feel like I should get a rocking chair and stick an handful of unwrapped lemon candies in my pocket. In my day, there was no such thing as online play, plus we walked to school uphill both ways…

Don’t worry, this isn’t a post about how Grand Theft Auto IV is racist, or even how it has racist imagery. And you were all ready with your angry comments, weren’t you?

As predicted, the latest installment in the GTA series is already stirring up controversy. Is it too violent? Is it corrupting our kids? Is it horribly sexist? The ability to sleep with prostitutes–and to kill them–is definitely back (though all online video clips have been removed). What I want to talk about isn’t the mind-numbingly overdone sex scandals associated with this wildly talked about game though. My question is simple: what does it mean that our new protagonist is white?

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas raised eyebrows with its black protagonist–in particular, it’s pairing of violence and race. While black characters are hardly unheard of in video games, they’re certainly rarer than their white counterparts. And given the inflammatory nature of GTA itself, the gun-wielding CJ couldn’t help but incite the question, “As a contemporary American, what does it mean to play a black male in a world based around violence?”

With Grand Theft Auto IV, however, the next major series release from Take-Two, we’re facing the opposite question. Instead of an African-American protagonist, we have Niko, a Serbian immigrant. Because of his nationality, he still comes weighted with stereotypes, but he is most certainly white. So what does it mean for us as players–or for the game’s designers–that our avatar has switched races?

Maybe it means nothing (as if anything ever meant nothing). After all, there are still black characters in GTA IV who are also involved in the world of crime. Maybe the race switched occurred just to mix things up, not to make players less racially uncomfortable–or even suspect. Readers who’ve been playing the new game, any thoughts on how it feels to play this time around?

-Who doesn’t like jumping to their death while wearing a latex body suit? Feministe brings us this handy write-up of indie PC game “Mighty Jill Off,” in which a queen a queen’s servant in BDSM gear has to leap back up to power, avoiding painful obstacles. The message: gaming’s inherent masochism. “Hemmed in by the demands of an almost arbitrary system of constraints and rules, you willingly submit in search of an elusive and transitory experience of ‘fun.’” See, gamers, we’re all subs at heart.

-Personally, I’ll be bringing voluntary pain upon myself in the coming days by heading up the Women in Games International’s annual fund raiser. In all seriousness, I’m really psyched to be getting off my butt and actually working with an awesome organization like WIGI–instead of just writing about it. Now who’d like to hand over some cash? Huh? Huh?

-And in unrelated, though downright impressive news, Wonderland reports that there are now more than 100 virtual worlds specifically oriented at players under the age of eighteen. That’s a lot of Club Penguins, people. Uncomfortable as it may, it’s also all the more reason for researchers to head into those world and observe first hand whether they really are as sexually “safe” as they’re supposed to be. Also, it’s an excuse to player Connect Four with nine-year-olds.

Happy Weekend!