Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Rob has spotted this handsomely crafted NES-themed Duck Hunt lamp -- now that's a conversation piece! Link, Discuss on Boing Boing Gadgets

I admit it: I have no idea what this "Full-Automatic Mahjong Table" actually does, but the name is pretty evocative. I have a vision of a million tiny magnets on servos in the bowels of the table that auto-drag the tiles into place.

Automatic Mahjong table adopts the working principle of electricity, light and magnetism, and it is controlled by microcomputer programs. It can effectively achieve the automatic shuffling and dealing of Poker tiles, and automatic dice tossing in a quick and fair way, with stable performance, long period of non-malfunction, and adding entertainment interests. It used two diffentely colors Mahjong Tiles with magnetic.

Link (via Cribcandy)

After hinting that the new Dungeons and Dragons license would be aimed at phasing out the older open licenses, Wizards of the Coast have published more details suggesting that this won't be embodied in the license itself (though they haven't published the license or its terms of use yet):

Q. Do I have to give up my right to publish 3.5 OGL products in order to publish 4e compatible products?

A. No. Publishers are free to print product lines under either the OGL or 4E GSL. We would love to see our industry colleagues convert their entire product offerings to 4E, as we are doing, but we do not expect or require entire companies to convert to the new edition.

Link (Thanks, Michael!)

See also: Sleazy proposed new Dungeons and Dragons license seeks to poison open gaming systems

Joi Ito tells Boing Boing about an online game by human rights organization Breakthrough, called ICED ("I Can End Deportation"). The object of the game is to become a US Citizen. Joi says,

It's a game for kids teaching them about their rights and trying to stop abusive anti-due-process stuff the INS is doing. It's a amazing story and a great site.

From the website...

ICED puts you in the shoes of an immigrant to illustrate how unfair immigration laws deny due process and violate human rights. These laws affect all immigrants: legal residents, those fleeing persecution, students and undocumented people.

Today on Boing Boing tv, a sneak peek inside TOKYOLOGY, a new documentary exploring contemporary Japanese pop-culture hosted by Carrie Ann Inaba. Oh, what adventures await: sneak behind the scenes at a Japanese Rock TV show that pretends it's shot in Los Angeles, cruise Harajuku, go clubbing with goth girls in Shinjuku, shop for shoes with Lolitas, experience the madness of the Tokyo Anime Fair, visit a video game company, browse the streets of Akihabara, and meet anime creator Yoshitoshi Abe.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion and downloadable video.

DVDs are available in retail stores and online, tokyology.tv has details. (Special thanks to Tokyology co-producers Felix and Julian Mack of Nightjar.)

Eleanor sez,

Games for Change, the non-profit devoted to promoting, well, games for change, will hold their fifth annual festival in New York City from June 2-4. Keynote speakers are Henry Jenkins and Jim Gee and the closing keynote is the Honorable Justice Sandra Day O'Connor.

The first day of the festival will be a free, one-day workshop. The recipient of a MacArthur grant, the workshop is a soup-to-nuts tutorial for non-profits, covering everything from why you'd make a game for change, to design, and through funding and press strategies. While the workshop is free, seating is limited and those who wish to attend must fill out a simple online application.

Link (Thanks, Eleanor!)

UPDATE, 630pm PT: He beat the world record! Still playing. - XJ

UPDATE, 9:00pm PT: Wow, okay, they finally stopped. Much screaming and champagne. - XJ

Following up on the post I made yesterday about a marathon attempt to set a world record for Grand Theft Auto gameplay (it's all happening right next door to Boing Boing tv, at DECA studios) -- bleary-eyed and sleep-depped Bush League GM/Executive Producer Allison Kingsley says, between caffeine slurps...

We're getting close! Jim, our dedicated Bushleaguer, is in his 23rd hour of playing GTA IV for the world record. It was a long, long night but he's nearing the 24th hour. The good news is he's doing surprisingly well, the bad news (in his words) after all this time he's only slept with one hooker.

Other favorite stats:

25.27% of the game completed

34 missions passed

started 23 fires

killed 10 people with bare hands

shot to death 31 times

265.46 is the longest jump distance

1 kill with a molotov cocktail

$50.00 most spent on a date (and although not a big spender he did score 5 times)

38,188 spent on health care

...and the stat he's particularly proud of? 0 times cheated.

Link to ongoing live video and chat; tweets here, G4 just did an interview here. Some quick iphone snaps I took of the ongoing madness are above, below, and here.

Previously on Boing Boing:
* GTA IV world record attempt tonight, next door to BBtv
* Grand Theft Are You Fcking Kidding Me

Susannah Breslin has a post up today about the overwrought reactions of shock 'n' horror over the sex 'n' violence in just-released Grand Theft Auto IV.

After a video of the Ladies of Liberty City began circulating around, in which men drive around, pick up sex workers and/or drive over them, shoot prostitutes standing on street corners, and get some freaky-ass, legs-in-the-air, booty-shaking lap dances, everyone got all up in arms over it.

The girls at Feministing weren't having it: "It is no question that GTA is merely reflective of the bigger misogyny embedded in capitalist patriarchy, but the question is why is a game that depicts such violence towards women so popular?" (Jesus Christ, if this is what degrees in gender studies hath wrought, polysyllabic bloggers still carping about the patriarchy, please fucking stop handing them out.)

Jack Thompson nearly had a heart attack over it. (To wit: "Grand Theft Auto IV is the gravest assault upon children in this country since polio. We now have vaccines for that virus... The 'vaccine' that must be administered by the United States government to deal with this virtual virus of violence and sexual depravity is criminal prosecutions of those who have conspired to do this.")

And Rockstar got a helluva lot richer. (See: "Record Sales Expected For Grand Theft Auto IV.")

Link

Previously on BB:
* GTA IV world record attempt tonight, next door to BBtv

bushleague.tv is a yet-to-be-launched internet video show produced right next door to where we make Boing Boing tv, at the studios of internet video firm DECA. The Bush League people are pretty crazy, and they're fun neighbors to have.

Anyway, tonight at at 5pm LA time, they -- specifically, this one guy on the show named Jim -- will attempt to break a gaming world record by playing the new edition of Grand Theft Auto (GTA IV) for over 25 consecutive hours. That's a lot of whores and cars! I understand they've even hired a real-life nurse to stand by in case the guy like, dies or whatever.

A live-cast video feed (and twitter updates) will be at bushleague.tv. I hear a bunch of friends from G4 TV will be in the house. Allison Kingsley from Bush League bought a ton of flowers to counteract the anticipated olfactory menace of eau de wargamer (I am so not kidding).

There's a teaser about their show on the site now, and the live feed will start promptly at 5pm. Bush League is an entertainment site aimed mostly at dudes that launches next week, on May 8th.

The fun-loving gamers at the Unreal Tournament forum have recreated Super Mario Bros as a rockin' UT2D level. Link

Boing Boing tv visits New York Comic Con, the largest comics convention on the Eastern seaboard, and we find games, geeks, and graphic novels galore. Our guide through the event's board game realms is Dr. Gregory Wilson, author and fantasy fiction professor at St. John's University of New York, who teaches us little-known tools for game quality evaluation. "You can tell this one is awesome because of the weight of the box -- it's probably about 15 pounds," he says as we pass one title. "This one takes two hours just to set up! Clear evidence that it, too, is awesome."

Part two of today's episode is a little alternate reality game of our own design -- we like to call it "Count the Cosplayer."

Link to Boing Boing tv post, with discussion and downloadable video.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

BONUS AWESOMENESS: In related news, Paddy Johnson of Art Fag City blog says: "I set up a small online quiz asking people to label unidentified visitors as either art fair or comic-con attendees. There are a few surprises in there, which keeps it interesting."

Brian sez,

Wizards of the Coast, a subsidiary of Hasbro, is releasing a new license with the upcoming fourth edition of Dungeons of Dragons. Publishers can create compatible D&D products, but only if the companies no longer publish any games which are distributed via the Open Gaming License.

This would be like saying that developers could not run programs on Vista if they publish -any- programs under a GNU license. Keeping up with the D&D 4th edition "GSL" license situation might be important, because it could very well be a precedent.

Update: The license itself has not been released, but the linked article below contains links to message-board postings from senior Wizards of the Coast employees that seem to validate this view of the license.

Link (Thanks, Brian!)

Andy Baio's been slipped a hard drive containing the whole network share from Infocom, creators of the legendary text-adventure game Zork and The Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy; he's mining the drive's many treasures and today he's published a long account of the abortivr Milliways game, a sequel to H2G2 set in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe:

1. It seems natural to include a scene in the restaurant, Milliways. Could be a bit of fun: strange parties, unctuous compere, self-introducing food. Perhaps there's an object there that you need to get. (It could be a SPORK, a spoon with sort of forky tines on the end. Or would that be a FOON?) It could be a vehicle from the car park -- Marvin has the keys. If you manage to re-enter Milliways at another time (oops! on another occasion), you will not meet yourself, "because of the embarrassment that usually causes." What about a visit to the Big Bang Burger Bar?

2. Given point 1, you must have a means (or several meanses) of time travel. In fact time travel instead of space travel could be the primary method of changing scene. In the original, the party got to Milliways by accident: in the radio version, a "hyperspatial field generator" overheated; in the book version, Zaphod's great-granddaddy screwed up the works of Eddie, the Heart of Gold computer. Maybe your trip to Milliways would require info from an anti-piracy device in the game package. Once at the restaurant, you can steal a timeship and go anywhen you want.

3. Given point 2, it seems natural for the "best ending" of the game to be your arrival on Earth before it's destroyed, which is the ending of both the first radio series and the second (namesake) book. The original route to this ending was an accidental landing on Golgafrincham Ark B, with its cargo of telephone sanitizers, marketing consultants, etc. (the ancestors of Earth's humans!). I rather like this bit, and hope we can work it into the game.

4. Okay, so what about the beginning of the game? The easy answer: take up the story where the "Hitchhiker's" game left off, namely the arrival on Magrathea. But in the original this arrival is followed by a travelogue of Magrathea and a flashback to the Deep Thought v. philosophers' union story (including the introduction of the "42" joke) and the joke about the true nature of mice. All funny bits, but I have a hard time envisioning how they can be made into interesting interactive versions. Perhaps you could time-travel to Deep Thought and interact with it yourself. The Magrathean catalog of planets on Sens-O-Tape could be useful.

Link

DS Fanboy (an offshoot of gaming blog Joystiq) interviews a dude who's using Pokémon as a smoking cessation aid.

Q: How does it work? Walk us through the process.

A: I decided that every time that I wanted a cigarette, I would turn on my DS and play some Pokémon. But the thing about going from two packs a day to cold turkey is that at first, you always want a cigarette. So the first three days, I did nothing but play Pokémon non-stop. My routine was to sleep extra late (because if I'm not awake, I'm not craving a smoke), play Pokémon for about 8 hours with breaks to stretch and eat, read Pokémon walkthroughs, F.A.Q.s, strategies, and websites, and then sleep. Experience has shown me from previous attempts to quit smoking that the hardest thing is to be around other smokers. Unfortunately for me, every single one of my friends that I see on a regular basis are smokers. So for those first few days, I went into seclusion, locking myself in my room and not answering my phone. After the initial push, it just required the willpower to keep playing Pokémon instead of smoking.

Link

Over on Boing Boing Gadgets, our Rob's cooked up Super Blockquote, a Flash version of Breakout in which you operate the little paddle in order to smash the blockquoted words of corporate shills. Sheer genius! Link, Discuss on Boing Boing Gadgets

Continuing in this week's "Best of BBtv" retrospective, after a whopping 6 months of existence, we revisit a popular episode in which...

Mark checks out a 15-times-larger-than-life Atari joystick replica by Jason Torchinsky, on display at Felt Club XL. Then, 8-bit help for those suffering from projectile dysfunction disorder.

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion and downloadable video. If you're in LA this Thursday, Machine Project is hosting an event where you can check out this cool creation for yourself!

Continuing in our week-long retrospective of viewer favorites on Boing Boing tv (we're a big honkin' six monfs old now!), a look back at this epic Lego time-lapse from Boing Boing Gadgets editor Joel Johnson:

Here are several evenings of my life condensed into 3:38 of time lapse footage as I assemble the "Ultimate Collectors Millennium Falcon" LEGO set, the largest yet sold, with over five thousand individual elements.

My thanks to Matt Goodell for cutting me a great deal on this set. It was even better than new, since he even sorted out all the pieces for me. Thanks also to Judson "Cicada" Cowan for letting me use the track "Earth's Assault on the Enemy A.I.," one of my favorite tracks of 2007. Finally, thanks to Brian Lam and Jesus Diaz of Gizmodo who had the idea first but were kind enough to give me permission to run my version before theirs to celebrate the 50th anniversary. Thanks, everyone!

I captured one frame out of every 150. It's a great set; much more fun to put together than the giant Star Destroyer. Far fewer repetitive sections. Now the ultimate question: keep it on my shelf to scare potential dates, sell it, or press its parts into service to build more ships of my own design?

(Don't miss: My snazzy sweatpants with the hole in the knee, then my realization that I have a hole in the knee after, like, a day of filming.)

Link to Boing Boing tv post with discussion and downloadable video.

This week marks 6 months since Boing Boing tv was inserted into earth's atmosphere by alien insurgents. To celebrate, we're looking back at the "best of BBtv" as chosen by you, our viewers. Today we revisit a pre-dotcom-crash edition of the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, through the eyes of the one human on earth capable of matching E3's hyperkinetic chaos with ample frenzy of his own.

In this BBtv episode, "comedy terrorist" Tim E. Woodsman high-kicks, dry-humps and generally freaks the hell out all over the LA Convention Center. Press access rules changed forever after this incident. E3 isn't huge and awesome anymore, either, so there's not much left to bum rush anyway.

This episode was cut from rediscovered footage produced for a CrapTV internet-boom-era TV pilot. Danny Diamond provided us with access to his footage vault (we pulled Bad Fairies from the same source), and BBtv's editors reassembled this short spazzfest for your nostalgic pleasure.

The crew of video guerrillas who made this happen this back in the day say: "We dedicate this to the memory of Tim E Woodsman, 1972 - 2007. We miss you. -- Jason, Jolon, Glasgow, Martha, Brody, Danny, Push, Tony, and everyone who made CRAPtv possible."

Link to Boing Boing tv blog post with discussion and downloadable video.

(Special thanks, Jolon Bankey, and happy birthday!!! Music: includes a clip from Klubbheads).

This clever lad has arrayed a long row of bottles partially filled with liquid so that they play the theme from Super Mario Bros. when they are tapped in order; then he affixed a tapper to a remote-control car and drove it down the row, making for an unforgettable musical experience! Link (Thanks, Kyle!)

Today on Boing Boing Gadgets Rob sipped a new variety of Bawls that is root beer-flavored; we spied a concept ring that heats up once a year to remind you of anniversaries; gave the Sony VAIO TZ subnotebook a review, crapware and all; found a long-term review of the SPOT Satellite Messenger emergency beacon; admonished you about the tiny treasures found in our Flickr groups; uncovered a plastic helmet for baseball caps; questioned HP's hazy connection between its new workstations and DreamWorks; pondered some glow-in-the-dark wallpaper; tried to help Rob boost his Wi-Fi while he thought about taxes; considered how long it might take for a company selling Hackintoshes to get crushed under Apple's heel (apparently, not long, as their site is kaput); bowed our head and accepted our fate as servents of a tabletop kaiju miniatures game; discovered the diminutive son of a nose hair trimmer and a pepper mill; found an easy way for you to waste fifty large on skewered junker cars; pined for a motorized, remote-control paintball turret for our very own; looked at Jeff Atwood's numbers on extending laptop battery life (no DVDs, soldier!); simultaneously lusted after the new Sharp/Willcom D4 UMPC while wondering which engineer from Psion was sacrificed on a windy, Japanese mountaintop; discovered that sticking a tube of radium in your eye isn't as harmful as it may at first seem; and noticed that Hasbro has finally seen the light and will be issuing an updated, action-figure-scale version of that old favorite, the big ol' Millenium Falcon. Then some deals and retro links (including insect/bunny men hybrids?)

Torley sez, "My esteemed colleague, Joshua Linden, had the audacity and ingenuity to get Second Life streaming to an Apple ][+, and while masochistic due to slow-loading, it's pretty awesome to watch and listen to him explain how he did it. Sheer geeky awesomeness. Link (Thanks, Torley!)

Dave and his wife spent last weekend in Varanasi, the holy Hindu city, and discovered that it was chock-a-block with Invaders, the tile-based Space Invader graffiti/street art icons: "These were all over Varanasi: paintings on the ghats, mosaics in the passageways. With twisting alleys, crumbling stone structures, and wandering Sadhus coming at us from every direction, Varanasi feels like it hasn’t changed in two hundred years. Which made these paintings and mosaics all the more incongruous." Link (Thanks, Dave!)

I love Wikipedia's chart of the video game Quake and its many descendants unto the nth generation. Link (via Wonderland)

Avatar Machine, by designer Marc Owens, is a wearable device that simulates the experience of third-person gaming environments.

By wearing this costume and head-mounted camera with VR goggles, a user can view themselves as a sort of virtual character while moving around and interacting in the real world.

Owens created Avatar Machine to explore whether such a device would grant users "a diminished sense of social responsibility (...) and demonstrate behaviors normally reserved for the gaming environment." In other words, turn them into instant board trolls.

Owens, 26, is a design student at the Royal College of Art, and lives in East London. An earlier version of this experiment from Owens circulated around the web in 2007.

In part one of today's Boing Boing tv episode, we premiere an all-new experiment with Avatar Machine -- live beta testing conducted in 2008, in the Harajuku area of Tokyo. Here, the user (Owens) flirts with Harajuku hotties, then almost gets his ass kicked (for real!) by some Japanese rockabilly gangster dudes.

In part two of today's show, Xeni speaks with Owens over a Skype video connection, live from his studio in East London.

Link to Boing Boing tv episode, with discussion and downloadable video. (special thanks to Susannah Breslin)

Deviantart's ~ryo007 has published a set of plans to make your own papercraft Super Nintendo Entertainment System, with a tiny cartridge! Link (via Engadget)

Just a reminder, guys: we'll be hosting our first IRC event in #boingboing in 30 minutes, at 1pm EST. The game is a variant of the popular Mafia/Werewolf social game called Pre-Cogs versus Replicants.

If you want to come and observe, jump on an IRC Freenode server and join #boingboing, or just click this link to use a Java IRC client. If you want to play, check out the description and rules in our official announcement thread, then join the channel, register your nick (/msg NickServ register [choose password]) and then message John Brownlee that you want to play (/msg Brownlee I want to play!)

Hope to see you there!