The Supreme Court today released its opinion regarding California’s attempt to ban the sale of so-called violent video games to those under 18. My company, Vindicia, filed an amicus brief in the case, Brown v. Entertainment Merchant’s Association, to make sure the Court was aware of the ramifications of the California law in the digital gaming world.

The decision is being widely reported as 7-2, which is true enough on the merits of this law. But looking closer, the decision is really 5-4 when it comes to the question of whether the First Amendment categorically protects the sale of video games to minors.

As I noted in a blog post after attending oral arguments in the case, Justice Alito and Chief Justice Roberts both seemed willing to allow states an ability to restrict the sale of violent video games. The Chief Justice seemed to miss the point that Postal 2, the game in question in the case, appears designed specifically to make white middle-aged conservative fathers like him angry. Justice Alito’s concurrence, with which the Chief agreed (bringing the two additional votes in the 7-2 vote), argues that some other law that better defines “violent” could pass constitutional muster.

Justice Thomas wrote a dissent in which he continues to take the position that kids really don’t have any free speech rights as an originalist matter. The flip side being that game creators have no right to sell to them if they’re under 18 (and as an original matter, probably under 21). Justice Scalia rightly points out in the majority opinion that Justice Thomas’s theory may support a system where parents could put their kids on a state-wide “do not sell video games to” list, but Scalia asserted that game makers’ free speech rights are violated when all kids are banned from buying their games.

Justice Breyer continues simply to believe that everything is a balancing test, regardless of the fundamental enumerated right in question, and that therefore judges should be allowed to use political arguments about what is best for society to balance laws against their harms. I’m reminded of Justice Scalia in another recent opinion replying to an almost identical Breyer argument with, “the very enumeration of the right takes out of the hands of government—even the Third Branch of Government—the power to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the right is really worth insisting upon.”

Today’s decision is good news in that the Supreme Court has found that states attempting to severely restrict the sales of video games have been going about it using unconstitutional methods. What’s still frightening is that we appear to be only one vote away from a state finding a way to restrict sales of video games to minors. Luckily, most of the methods that legislatures who really just don’t like video games would want to use would fail other constitutional tests. However, the “do not sell” list concept combined with the existing rating system does leave open a path for legislation that may not burden video game makers much. (That concept, however, faces the difficulty of the changes the digital revolution is bringing to the game industry’s business models, as we outlined in our Amicus brief.)

For adults, this opinion reaffirms something many of us knew. The fact that some people don’t like the content of video games is no basis for curtailing or choking them off at what many consider to be the beginning of a revolution in creativity, realism, and storytelling.

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Score another one for the “She-E-Os,” the Boston-area support network for female chief executives. And more specifically for Sarah McIlroy, a member of the group.

McIlroy’s startup, Salem, MA-based FashionPlaytes, said today it has raised an additional $4 million, bringing its Series A round to $5.8 million. New investor Fairhaven Capital led the round and was joined by existing investors New Atlantic Ventures, LaunchCapital, and Golden Seeds. FashionPlaytes announced its initial venture financing in August 2009 and opened its site to the public shortly thereafter.

The site is targeted at girls aged five to 12, and lets them use a game-like interface to design custom clothing—sleep sets, skirts, dresses, jackets, you name it—in different combinations. McIlroy and her team are working on building an online community so that consumers can interact and talk about their designs and fashion. Since late last year, the company says, some 200,000 unique garments have been created on the site using more than 6 million possible design combinations.

“We’ve been able to prove out there’s a nice business here,” McIlroy says. “It’s a far cry from where we were two years ago, trying to put a prototype out to market.”

The new financing, though not huge, is a good sign for consumer-focused Internet startups in the Boston area—and perhaps the East Coast more broadly. FashionPlaytes is part of a “mass customization” trend that eventually could alter the economics of the fashion industry, empower clothing buyers, and give rise to new e-commerce success stories. A few other fashion-related tech companies with Boston-area ties include Blank Label, Spreadshirt, and thredUP.

Fairhaven principal Rudina Seseri calls FashionPlaytes “the first to bridge the gap … Next Page »

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After you’ve saved rock and roll, what do you do for an encore? OK, Harmonix Music Systems’ chief executive Alex Rigopulos might disagree with that premise, but it’s a valid question for his company. The answer, for now, seems to be Rock Band 3, the newest release in the hit videogame franchise, which will roll out on October 26 in North America (for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii, and Nintendo DS).

Harmonix is the Cambridge, MA-based company behind the best-selling music videogames Guitar Hero, Guitar Hero II, and the billion-dollar Rock Band franchise. Its games are often credited with helping bands get wide distribution, as well as getting consumers to experience and participate in rock music in a new way—and pay for it. The company was founded in 1995 by Rigopulos and fellow MIT Media Lab alum Eran Egozy, who is chief technical officer. Harmonix toiled in relative obscurity for a decade until its breakout hit Guitar Hero was released in 2005.

That’s when life changed for Rigopulos and his team, who went from being heads-down gaming and music geeks to hobnobbing with rock stars eager to get a piece of the action. In late 2006, Harmonix was acquired by MTV Networks (part of Viacom) for $175 million plus earnouts. But with the economic recession hitting videogames and entertainment particularly hard, you have to wonder if the success of music-playing games is a fad. (The latest Guitar Hero, a competing game released this week by Activision, has been met with mixed reviews.)

So I asked Rigopulos (left) about how crucial the new Rock Band game is to the future of Harmonix, and how it fits into the broader evolution of gaming. Not surprisingly, he called Rock Band 3 “a big leap forward” for the franchise. He touched on how it bridges the gap between music games and real musicianship (partly to address haters like me who rarely play the game).

Rigopulos also talked about the company’s next big release: Dance Central, an immersive dance game for Xbox 360 with Kinect (Microsoft’s Project Natal)—which uses a camera system to track full-body movements—due out in November. Lastly, he gave his top advice to entrepreneurs and first-time CEOs, and relayed a personal story about an encounter with a true legend of rock and roll. [Disclosure: The author is in a band with Harmonix senior software developer Dan Schmidt and Rigopulos’s brother, Chris. Their band, Honest Bob & the Factory-to-Dealer Incentives, has songs in Harmonix games.]

Here’s a transcript of our e-mail Q&A:

Xconomy: Can you highlight in your own words what’s new and unique in Rock Band 3, and what you’re personally most excited about?

Alex Rigopulos: First of all, there’s a new instrument: the keyboard. This is important partly because it adds new gameplay, but also because it makes a whole universe of keyboard-focused music suddenly relevant to the platform. For example, the Doors are making their videogame debut … Next Page »

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For many Seattleites, Labor Day weekend is a time to take refuge in the outdoors. Some 50,000 people will spend the holiday weekend wandering around the Seattle Center grounds listening to live music, cooling off in the International fountain, and filling up on $5 elephant ears (for those of you who’ve missed the phenomenon, these are essentially slabs of fried dough dipped in cinnamon and sugar) at the city’s largest music festival, Bumbershoot. Those wanting to avoid the crowds, the parking lot that will become of Lower Queen Anne, and the high ticket prices, will spend the weekend elsewhere—hiking, barbequing, boating, or participating in some other summertime activity, most likely—a last sunny hurrah before fall arrives, and the gray skies creep back into the city.

And then there is Seattle’s self-proclaimed ‘geek’ population. The techies of the Pacific Northwest will spend their three-day holiday participating in another local tradition—the Penny Arcade Expo (PAX). Over the years, PAX has become one of the biggest trade shows in North America, if not the biggest, come video and computer games. The conference, which kicked off this morning in downtown Seattle, will draw tens of thousands of techies and video game enthusiasts to the Washington State Convention and Trade Center over the course of the weekend for countless game exhibitions, demos, panel discussions, tournaments, concerts, and parties.

The three-day conference, like last year, was sold out before opening. But for those of you who reserved your badge early, here’s a look at my top 10 most interesting sessions. (These predictions are purely subjective, and based entirely on what piques my particular gaming interests.)

—The Myth of the Gamer Girl: True Demographic or Anthropological Hooha? (Friday, 12:00 pm)

This panel will dissect the myth of the girl gamer, and attempts to answer the question of whether or not there is something unique about women who play video games, or if the distinction is “just a bunch of hogwash” being sold by game marketers.

—Movin’ on Up: How to make It (Or Not) in Videogames Journalism (Friday, 4:30 pm)

In this session experts will “drop knowledge” on videogame website owners and aspiring gaming journalists on how to get game writing noticed by “the right people,” and get started in the world of videogames reporting.

—Of Dice and Men: The Play (Friday, 7:30 pm)

Get ready to laugh until your abdomen hurts, and wind up brought to your knees, with tears streaming out of your eyes at this play about “friendship, what it means to be grown-up, and why gaming matters.”

—Raising Geek Generation 2.0: Roll For Parenting Ability (Saturday, 11 am)

Talk gaming-meets-parenting shop with Wired.com’s GeekDad blog and other geeky parents, to share stories and give advice on to how to raise your kid to be a geek like you. One of the many questions to be tackled at this geek-tastic panel: “How can I control my disgust if my child tells me he likes Jar Jar?”

—Game Writing & Rabid Badger Combat (Saturday, 1:30 pm)

“Do you want to be a game writer? Do you like single handedly fighting rabid badgers while building a miniature version of the Eiffel Tower in a glass bottle? If you answered yes … Next Page »

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Everyone has their own green environmental “a-ha” moment. Maybe it’s seeing birds drowning in oil, or paying $4 a gallon for gas, or reading about the plastic trash heap the size of Texas swirling around in the Pacific Ocean. For Susan Hunt Stevens, it was discovering her young son had serious food and environmental allergies, which prompted her to examine which ingredients and toxins were causing the health problems.

Her discovery came back in 2007, and it roughly coincided with Stevens and her family moving into a 19th-century Victorian home outside of Boston. So, in part to create a better living environment for her family, she decided to do a major “green renovation.” This effort has included generating electricity from waste energy (boiled water), using light-emitting diodes and compact fluorescent lamps for lighting, buying energy-saving appliances and plywood cabinetry made without formaldehyde glues, insulating the roof with healthy spray foam, installing bamboo shades and cork floors, using low-flow faucets and toilets, composting kitchen waste, and so on.

Along the way, Stevens decided to blog about the experience. She knows a thing or two about online media and consumer marketing, having been a longtime senior executive with The New York Times and Boston Globe, where she oversaw the news site Boston.com, among other things. [Disclosure: Stevens joined Xconomy’s board of directors last month---Eds.]

But when she originally started blogging about green issues, she got questions from readers about the industry that she couldn’t answer. That started her on the road to taking classes at the Boston Architectural College, where she learned cutting-edge green design.

Stevens is now the founder and CEO of Practically Green, a stealthy Web startup based in Boston that combines many of the things she has done in her career. I sat down with her last week to talk about the company and its significance to green sustainability issues, online business models, and technology trends like social networking and videogame mechanics.

The first thing to know about Practically Green is that it’s not just another “green content” site, or how-to blog about sustainability and the environment. Instead, think of it as being like Foursquare or FarmVille for the green lifestyle, mixed with WeightWatchers.com in terms of accessibility and support networks. And throw in a little Amazon.com and TripAdvisor for consumer reviews and e-commerce. The site uses social networks, gaming mechanics, and expert content to help consumers figure out “how green” they are, find reputable green products and services, and connect with other like-minded people so as to stay motivated to live a greener lifestyle. The big idea is to help consumers lead healthier lives, while also aiding the environment—and saving on their electric bill.

It’s also an intriguing example of the “gamification” trend we’ve been reporting on lately, whereby consumer websites and companies are trying to boost traffic, engagement, and customer loyalty … Next Page »

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Even if you were a coach in the National Football League, you’d never get a chance to test your tactics on the field against famous coaches like Brian Billick, Bill Cowher, Jimmy Johnson, Tom Landry, or Dan Reeves—because they’re all retired (and Landry is deceased). But that’s exactly what players will be able to do online at Quick Hit, the football strategy game to be launched next month by the Foxborough, MA, startup of the same name.

As I explained in my profile of Quick Hit back in May, the company’s game is a free, advertising-supported football simulator where players act as coaches, assembling a team of athletes with a variety of skills and choosing plays for them to run against the opposing team—which might be coached by another player, or might be an AI (a software program or “artificial intelligence,” in gamer lingo). Quick Hit announced today that in single-player mode, players will have the option of playing against AIs customized to recreate the styles of Billick, Johnson, Landry, and Reeves. (The company had already signed Cowher, the former Pittsburgh Steelers coach who is now a CBS Sports analyst, as its “head coach.”)

The upgrade is meant to benefit players, but it’s also a kind of insurance policy, says Jeff Anderson, the startup’s CEO. Quick Hit will exit its private beta testing phase and open up to the public on September 9, one day before the Steelers face the Tennessee Titans on opening day of the real NFL season. Quick Hit has no way to predict whether the lobby area, where players meet up to start one-on-one games, will be empty or full. So having interesting AIs to play against will give visitors something to do right away.

“Frankly, too, there are times when a player doesn’t want to play another player and feel that competitive pressure, but just practice against an AI,” says Anderson. “That way you can train up your players and get some new skills.” A points system built into Quick Hit rewards players for various accomplishments. Defeating the NFL AIs, who are all part of the game’s highest difficulty setting, will bring “much larger bonuses,” Anderson says, meaning the player’s team will be in stronger shape for the next game.

The decision to add the new AIs came only a couple of months ago, despite the fact that the clock on the company’s beta testing was rapidly winding down. “We had Bill Cowher up at our offices doing some voice recording, and after the heavy lifting we sat him down and asked him if he wanted to play a game with us,” says Anderson. “Not only did he have fun, but what was fascinating to us was how he would look at the plays—more like an expert chess player, linking players to create a winning strategy. Clearly, this man has spent his life and his entire craft focused on this art. We realized how fun it was to … Next Page »

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38 Studios, the Maynard, MA-based online gaming company founded by Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling, said today that former CEO Brett Close has resigned, and that Jennifer MacLean, formerly the startup’s senior vice president of business development, has been appointed as his successor. Close has led development of 38 Studios’ massively multiplayer online fantasy game property, code named Project Copernicus, since 2007. He said in a statement that “I’ve had the privilege of building 38 Studios to become an established force of IP creation and entertainment…I leave with confidence in the future success of the company and have no doubt its products will excite gamers worldwide.” Schilling praised incoming CEO MacLean, who joined 38 Studios from Comcast in March 2008, as “a deserving and extraordinary member of the 38 Studios team.” The company said MacLean is chairwoman emeritus of the Independent Game Developers Association, and that she was named by gaming site Gamasutra as one of the “Top 20 Women in Games.”

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Video game aficionados are notoriously hard to impress, but in its official press conference Monday at the E3 conference, Microsoft revealed two new developments that cracked the shell of some of even the most cynical gamers.

—Xbox Live already allows users to play games with each other around the world, but soon they will be able to do much more than that as Microsoft is integrating both Facebook and Twitter, two of the largest social media outlets, into its videogame system. Other gaming systems like the Wii and PlayStation 3 have limited types of communication possible between users, but soon Xbox 360 players will be able to use screenshots as pictures on Facebook, announce their status on Twitter, and invite people to play on either, even if the person invited isn’t currently playing Xbox.

—Natal might be a nonsense word to most people (unless you speak Portuguese, in which case it means Christmas), but Microsoft may change that with a new motion-capture technology for Xbox 360 that doesn’t require you to hold a remote or wear special gear. The system, which looks like a slim bar placed near the console, uses a 3-D camera (and includes a microphone) to follow a user’s movements precisely, recreating them on the screen. Needless to say, this is a big step for video games. If the commercial version works as well as the video demonstration, the possibilities for games, exercise programs, and even movies are enormous.

Lazy gamers who prefer sitting on a couch with only the movement of their thumbs to indicate life may have been upset, but haven’t bothered to complain.

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There’s a company in Foxborough, MA, not two miles away from the New England Patriots’ Gillette Stadium, where a crew of veteran online game developers is putting the finishing touches on a potentially groundbreaking new game about football.

Now, I can tell you all about why the venture-funded startup, Quick Hit, is likely to dazzle the sports gaming world with its genre-busting title when it debuts this fall. I can explain how it combines elements drawn from fantasy-driven role-playing games, online casual games, console games, and even TV sports. But I have to disclose something up front: I don’t know jack about football. I can’t tell you the difference between a wide receiver and a tight end, or between an offsides penalty and a yellow card. (Or is that soccer?) So please listen carefully while I explain what’s so interesting about Quick Hit—but when it comes to the football stuff, don’t ask me to vouch for the details.

The core team at Quick Hit—which, until January, was called Play Hard Sports—includes CEO Jeffrey Anderson, vice president of product Aatish Salvi, producer Geoff Scott, and general counsel Kelli O’Donnell, who all left Westwood, MA-based Turbine in 2008. Turbine is famous for building massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) based on the Dungeons & Dragons and Lord of the Rings brands. To play a Turbine game, you fork over $10 to $20 for the initial software download, plus a $10 per month subscription fee.

Quick Hit’s football game, which is in its beta-testing phase now and will be opened to the public on September 9, is a very different animal. It’s part of an emerging category of “lightweight games” that are less expensive, processor-intensive, and time-consuming than console games or MMORPGs, but more immersive, socially interactive, and graphically rich than online casual games like Bejeweled.

A few of Quick Hit's leading players. L to R: Geoff Scott (producer), Jeffrey Anderson (CEO), Brandon Justice (director of design)

Anderson says he’d been thinking about the need to lower the cost barrier to gamers even before leaving Turbine. “I became concerned about what the future would hold for the MMORPG business,” he told me. “The price point moved a lot of consumers out of the space and made it difficult for the average or light gamer to get excited about what was going on.” But Anderson’s proposal to make Turbine’s future games free, and to turn to a combination of advertising and microtransactions for revenue, didn’t sit well with the company’s board.

So he and his small crew of believers started fresh, with a game that would have rich, high-quality interaction but a low enough price point (namely, zero) to be accessible to millions of people. To build it, they turned to Adobe’s browser-based Flash animation platform and desktop-based Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) environment. That’s the same technology underlying desktop programs like the popular Twitter clients Twhirl and Tweetdeck; it’s become the dominant way for companies to deliver “rich Internet applications” without requiring users to buy or install new software.

I got a preview of Quick Hit’s game during a visit with Anderson a couple of weeks ago. Quick Hit users–let’s call them team coaches—start out by assembling offensive and defensive lineups. (The company doesn’t have a license with the NFL, so the players and teams are entirely fictional.) Coaches then enter an online gaming lobby, where they can find other Quick Hit users to play against. Games last 20 to 25 minutes, with TV-style commercials between each quarter. Since the game is free, these ads will be one of Quick Hit’s primary revenue sources.

For each turn in the game, the coach controlling the ball picks an offensive play, and the coach on the other side of the line picks an appropriate defensive formation. (I’m skating on the very edge of my football knowledge here.) Once all the players are lined up, the software … Next Page »

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Nextcat, the Quincy, MA-based professional social networking site for musicians, filmmakers, writers, artists, and models that we profiled back in August, has added a section for video game developers. It’s good timing, as a report from the Entertainment Software Association last week revealed that Massachusetts is the nation’s fifth-leading center of videogame development, with close to 3,200 developers employed by 29 companies around the state.

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