There are two types of people when it comes to the games-as-art debate: those who spend too much time and energy arguing one way or another, and those who ignore it altogether and simply create games that are art. Jenova Chen and thatgamecompany belong firmly in the second category, and after playing Flower to completion on the PS3, we can confirm that they have given us another game to talk about, puzzle over, and enjoy.

In Flower you control the wind, causing a trail of flower petals to fly around each level, gathering more petals to itself by touching flowers, which makes them blossom. Touch a group of flowers and a splash of color spreads out across the land. These transformations are oddly satisfying, as if you’re painting the landscape with a heavenly brush. The music also works with the graphics to create a soothing, evocative mood for the game. These aesthetic issues are only part of the story, however.

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Today I decided to conduct an experiment. I started calling people I knew and asking if they had one or more videogames in the house. Then I asked if they breast-fed their children. To my great shock, most answered “yes” to both. One couple I contacted switched to formula after their child’s birth, and told me that they didn’t play videogames. The data, based on my first round of calls, was conclusive: If you play videogames, you are much more likely to breast-feed your children.

You’re probably ready to shoot five thousand holes in my argument. For one, I only called people I knew—we’re talking about a small sampling of individuals who happen to be friends with someone who writes about games for a living. Second, my friends are firmly in their 20s and 30s, which means they grew up playing games. I could have asked them almost anything and linked it with playing games. I did my job though, and you clicked on the headline. You may comment on this story, as well. It’s a good way to get readers, this tactic of linking a popular topic on a tech Web site to any other controversial topic.

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It has become popular to say that the gaming industry has become recession-proof, simply because the overall sales for 2008 are up year over year…but those numbers only tell part of the story. Other sources are starting to report some troubling trends in gaming sales, not the least of which is the plummeting price of used games. These trends could lead to some troubling times for gaming in 2009.

Video Game Price Charts tracks the value of used games over a variety of sites such as Amazon.com (AMZN) and eBay (EBAY), the so-called “gray market” for games. These are people selling games directly to other people, which means no one is setting an artificial price such as used-game stores like GameStop. The data isn’t pretty: Prices of used games took a beating in the end of the year, as the chart below illustrates.

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Jack Thompson is a master of self-promotion. The Florida resident has made a career out of talking to anyone who will listen about the evils of video gaming, the violent ideas and passions that gaming puts into the minds and hearts of children, and the soulless industry that cranks out these terrible games. Whenever there is a tragedy he’s there to jump in front of the camera and find a tenuous link between real-world violence and gaming. The legal system finally decided the man went too far, however, and has made it official: Thompson has been disbarred.

This is the culmination of a 2007 case brought against Thompson by the Florida Bar covering a number of complaints about his professional conduct.

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The Sony Video Store on the PlayStation Network is filled with a good selection of movies, and you can’t beat the convenience of renting or even buying movies from your couch and watching them on your big screen with your PlayStation 3. Renting movies is a joy on the system–although it would be nice to have longer than 24 hours to watch the content–but what happens when you buy a movie? As one Ars reader found out, and Sony confirmed for us, you have to be careful about what happens to your system once it’s filled with video content: You have one download, one redownload, and that’s it.

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Spore, after more than 10 years of development time, is finally available for the PC and Mac. The game comes from the mind of the talented Will Wright, the man who gave us The Sims and the original SimCity titles. No matter what people think about the actual game play, the story now centers around the DRM scheme EA built into the title, and a grassroots movement has begun to tell gamers just how bad the DRM sucks. The method? Bombing the comments on Amazon.com.

Right now the game has 222 customer reviews, with 194 of them giving the game one star. The game also has nine five-star reviews, two of which were written in 2006, while the other reviews spend significant amounts of time complaining about the one-star reviews. The game’s rating sits at 1.5 stars as of this writing.

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