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The “Taxidermist” add-on for Heavy Rain was given away to those who preordered the PlayStation 3 game last month. Sony said Friday that the downloadable content will go up for sale to the unwashed masses on April 1 for $5.

This bit of DLC — apparently the first chapter in an upcoming series of bite-sized bits of Heavy Rain scenarios, takes place before the events of the game. Players follow reporter Madison Paige as she investigates the Origami Killer.

In his review of Heavy Rain, Game|Life editor Chris Kohler called the ambitious murder mystery from developer Quantic Dream “a successful experiment” that pushes games in new directions. “When it’s good,” he said, “it’s good in ways that traditional games rarely touch.”

Check out the trailer (above) to get a taste of the pulse-pounding creepiness this prequel chapter promises. You’d think Madison would have learned in j-school that you never, ever go into the serial killer’s creepy house.

See Also:

• Heavy Rain Taps Real Anxieties for Massive Story
• Review: Heavy Rain's Riveting Murder Story Is Big Leap for Games
• Games: Heavy Rain Aims to Liberate Game Controls
• Heavy Rain Forces You To Make Tough Decisions
• Hands On: Heavy Rain Is No Quick-Time Event

AUSTIN, Texas — What is the deal with this “videogame journalism” thing?

At South By Southwest on Tuesday, a panel of experts and me convened to discuss this topic in front of a rapt audience. Karen Chu (PlayFirst) moderated the discussion, with me representing the “bloggers,” Matt Chandronait (Area 5) representing video production, Philip Kollar (Game Informer) speaking to podcasts and print magazines, and Carly Klocurek (UT Austin) speaking about her research into game writing.

I tried my best to get into arguments with everyone, but they were having none of it. High-quality soundboard audio of the entire panel, including the Q&A session at the end, has been made available by SXSW.

SXSW: Power-Ups & Press [direct MP3 link, right-click and save]

Photo credit: Chris Kohler, Karen Chu, Matt Chandronait, Philip Kollar, and Carly Kocurek at SXSW (James Merithew/Wired.com)

AUSTIN, Texas — Big players in the massively multiplayer online games space say they don’t need a World of Warcraft killer, as long as they can keep expanding the audience for MMOs.

On Monday at South By Southwest, a panel composed of top executives from Zynga, BioWare, Nexon and Funcom tackled several questions about the MMO genre, which now encompasses games from the free-to-play Facebook timewaster Mafia Wars all the way to BioWare’s lavish Star Wars: The Old Republic. Much of the discussion centered around incorporating the features of social games like FarmVille into the rest of the genre.

SXSW has posted high-quality audio of the panel.

“I don’t think the market necessarily requires someone to fail in order for another group to succeed,” said BioWare cofounder Ray Muzyka in response to Wired.com’s question toward the end. “When you bring in a new license, like we did with Star Wars… we know there’s millions and millions of potential players that we can bring into the fold just because of that,” he said.

“I don’t mean to be perhaps out of line, but I think I know what Ray’s team needs to do to be successful,” offered Zynga’s Eric Bethke. “I think mastering the viral channels and the social graphs… I think they need to get to the point that 250,000 or 500,000 people a day are downloading (Old Republic) on their own, just coming in from friends, and get there through science-based metrics… you have all the data in the world about why you are currently failing, and you can correct it in real-time.”

SXSW: The Great MMO Hope [direct .mp3 link, right-click and save]

Photo credit: Min Kim, Ray Muzyka, Nicolai Nickelsen and Eric Bethke share a joke during their SXSW panel (James Merithew/Wired.com)

Jamie Foxx will star in the Kane & Lynch movie, says screenwriter Kyle Ward.

The news comes via a status update on Ward’s Twitter account, which has since been deleted. “Done deal… Jamie Foxx is in,” he wrote. The scribe then clarified that Foxx has been cast as Lynch, the mentally unstable bank robber from Eidos’ 2007 co-op shooter. Bruce Willis had already been tapped to take on the role of Kane in the movie for Lionsgate.

Kane & Lynch is best known among gamers not for being a great game, but for a controversy surrounding the ouster of GameSpot critic Jeff Gerstmann after he gave it a 6/10 score. Some said that Eidos, a GameSpot advertiser, used the leverage of its ad dollars to make things uncomfortable for the writers.

A sequel titled Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is due out later this year on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

Photo: Urban World Film Festival/Flickr

See Also:

• Bruce Willis Negotiating Starring Role in Kane & Lynch Film …
• Fired GameSpot Editor Defends Kane & Lynch Review
• Video: GameSpot Editor’s Kane & Lynch Review
• UK Authorities Yank ‘Shocking’ Kane & Lynch Ads
• Filming of Kane & Lynch Movie Scheduled to Begin This Fall …

Previously on The Tester:

Star: “I think we’re in deep space [bleep].”

This week on The Tester:

Luge: “I think we’re in deep space shit.”

What can we learn from this? Well, first of all, apparently the producers of the PlayStation Network reality show are no longer bleeping out the word “shit,” which is convenient because I think I’m about to add it to my own personal vocabulary as regards these weekly recaps.

Second, a little tip for anyone who wants to make a reality show: If you’re going to feed lines to the contestants while you’re interviewing them, it’s probably best not to show two separate people saying the same scripted line.

I’m a little late with this recap of The Tester, Sony’s reality show in which 11 contestants compete for the dubious prize of a yearlong contract gig bug-testing games. Sorry about that. Each week, one of the contestants is killed by the Death Panel after undergoing ritual humiliation. Today, they shall LARP for their lives.

As always, before we watch this week’s 22-minute ad for PlayStation, first we have to watch a brief ad for… PlayStation? I’ll tell you, these “Kevin Butler” ads are as funny and clever as this show is boring and ill-conceived. But this means it only took three episodes of The Tester before Sony ran out of companies that would actually pay to advertise their products in front of it.

Anyway. A couple episodes ago, we were supposed to believe that Cyrus and Amped were totally into each other. Now it’s all about the other half of the supersecret alliance, Doc and Luge, cuddled up together in the bunk beds.

Apparently it’s a little cold in PlayStation Paradise, which is Sony’s Orwellian doublespeak name for the garage that the remaining seven contestants live inside, because Luge and Amped are bundled up in blankets as they read this week’s challenge.

The seven are sent to a nearby park, where host Meredith Molinari and the Death Panel await them. But those aren’t all the new friends they’ll meet today. Four people who look pretty much like the cast of that fan-made Legend of Zelda YouTube movie run out from the forest and proceed to act out a scene that makes the Zelda YouTube movie look like Olivier’s Hamlet.

“What you’ve just witnessed,” says MM once it is mercifully over, “is called live action role-play, or LARP.” No, Mere, what we have just witnessed is a skit. Live-action role playing games are games, with rules and goals and stuff. This is college improv.

“To be a great game tester, you must possess a healthy imagination and the ability to thrive in any situation,” Molinari says. I usually joke about these water-thin excuses for each challenge, the specious reasoning as to why performing like a circus clown and debasing oneself is a valid job interview strategy. But MM got it right on the money with this one. When the “winner” of The Tester is deep into month five of trying to crash Move Party’s options menu, they’ll need a vibrant, colorful imagination to help them pretend they’re somewhere else.

But before they can start firing pretend lightning bolts, we meet this week’s panel of judges, which has now traded in God of War designer David Jaffe for PlayStation Home producer Katherine De León.

“Hitestersgreattobehere,” she says, with a look of visible anguish on her face that says it is not great to be there. She’ll have her chance to shine soon enough, as we already know.

Luge and Nauseous are randomly selected as team captains, and Luge gets to pick her first LARP partner. If you’ve been paying attention to this show (and Lord knows I have), you know that Luge, Amped, Cyrus and Doc are in a supersecret alliance and that Doc is the funniest, most entertaining person left in the garage since Barmy…

…oh, poor Barmy. You’d have thrived in this challenge. You’d have led your team to victory with your +10 Brain of Crazy. I’m so sorry.

Anyway, Doc is the obvious pick here, so obvious that even the show points it out, and so of course Luge goes with Star. You know, Star? The one girl who always sits in the back? With the hoodie pulled up over her face? With the piercings? Who never says anything? Boy, when I think “extrovert,” I think Star.

Nauseous, who is not trying to commit career suicide, immediately picks Doc, “without a doubt the craziest guy in here.” Luge picks Cyrus, and that puts Amped and Big D on the other team.

Big D says he’s in trouble this week and needs to step it up. The team starts planning their medieval fantasy skit. Meanwhile, on the other side, Luge and her dream team of quiet shy LARPers are all sitting around looking at each other hoping that one of the other two will say something. Slowly, a plan starts to come together: Mall Cops In Space.

I’ll spare you the details. Star walks around in her Space Hoodie, too over it to even bother putting on a costume, not saying much of anything. Everybody else runs around aimlessly, not quite sure what the plot of their skit is. This has happened to me. I tried out for college improv once, freshman year. It was pretty much this awkward, only Sony was nice enough to not film it.

“It was like watching Waiting For Space Guffman,” says Doc. Okay, that’s it. Doc, you win the whole show. Congratulations. I don’t even care if the producers fed you that line and they have footage of everybody else saying it, too. I needed nothing more at this moment than a Christopher Guest reference. If thinking about Christopher Guest can make filling out the census fun, it might even work for The Tester.

As Best In Space Show concludes, Katherine De León hangs her head. If she was any more over it, she’d be Star.

Hopefully Nauseous and his barbarians can impress the Panel. They don’t impress Star, who points out that the medieval LARP has liberally borrowed plot elements from the demonstration skit. Star does not think that Sony will be impressed by such blatant copying. Little does she know.

The barbarians LARP like champs. Luge curses. The panel sends them all back to PlayStation Paradise while they deliberate. Doc and Luge strategize before going in front of the judges, pointing out that “it’s our four to their three.” He doesn’t mean the teams in the challenge, the actual way that the contestants have been divided. He means the four members of the supersecret alliance versus the other three jokers who didn’t even have the sense to form an alliance in a show that has nothing to do with alliances.

The Death Panel puts on a good show in terms of pretending that they are actually having trouble deciding which team won the challenge. In some ways, it is the best LARP of the day.

Doc, Big D, Amped and Nauseous win, meaning that Luge, Cyrus and Star are up for elimination.

Okay, let’s get to the throat-ripping. We’ve been shown Katherine De León’s icy, clinical vivisection of some poor sap since before The Tester even got rolling, and now it’s time to watch the entire thing.

“Star, you were the worst performer of everyone today. By a mile. You failed because you couldn’t pull it together,” she says. Taste the delicious schadenfreude. It’s over all too soon. Her days are clearly numbered.

The panel then decides that Luge will go home. Wait, what?

Outside, Doc continues the tradition of one person crying at the end of every show by breaking down as he thinks about his lost hot friend.

NEXT WEEK: The would-be testers play a round of trivia, the closest thing to a videogame this show’s challenges have gotten so far. Nauseous wears a very nice sweater.

<< The Tester: Episode 3 | The Tester: Episode 4 | The Tester: Episode 5 >>

A recent study suggests that the introduction of a videogame console to a household can negatively effect early childhood academic achievement in boys.

The experiment was conducted by Robert Weis and Brittany C. Cerankosky, psychological scientists from Denton University. They surveyed families with boys between the ages of 6 and 9 who were considering buying videogame consoles for their kids. Half of the kids got machines, and the other half didn’t.

The study showed that videogames became an immediate distraction, with the gamers spending less time studying and more time playing games. The gamer kids scored significantly lower on reading and writing tests after only four months.

Of course, this is a lesson that any college student who has fallen under the spell of World of Warcraft could tell you in a heartbeat: Games are way more fun than homework. But Cerankosky and Weis find this problem particularly troublesome for young gamers. Children who have difficulty with language at a young age have a hard time picking up more difficult concepts later on, they say. And the distraction of videogames could exacerbate the problem.

Game on? Video-game ownership may interfere with young boys’ academic functioning [Physorg]

Image courtesy Nintendo

See Also:

• Bigger Brains Make Better Gamers, Study Says
• Study: Roomies With Videogames Lower College Students' GPAs
• 170 Million Americans Play Videogames, Study Finds
• Study: Games Boost Brainpower in Elderly
• Violent Video Games Under Attack

SAN FRANCISCO — OnLive, the streaming games-on-demand service, will launch on June 17 for $15/month, the company announced Wednesday at Game Developers Conference.

Only the PC and Mac versions of the service are launching on the 17th — the tiny box that connects to your television won’t launch until later this year. And what will that $15/month get you? Access to OnLive’s service, but no games — those will have to be purchased separately. I’d rant about this but Bill Harris over at Dubious Quality is already all over it, and why duplicate the same level of bafflement:

What happens if you decide to leave the service? I’m pretty sure that you’ll be hearing a giant flushing sound in regards to the games you “bought.” So you didn’t buy anything, really, except a rental with no expiration.

Well, no expiration until you stop paying $15 a month. …

To me, you can try the rental model (monthly fee) or you can try the purchase model, but what you absolutely cannot try is the $15 A Month For Not A Damn Thing model.

I think this idea is OnLifeSupport until further notice.

I subscribe to Netflix for the streaming service. I’m paying about $10 for thousands of movies. I don’t have to pay separately for each of those. I don’t know why I’d pay $15 every month for nothing. OnLive’s technology sounds like it’ll work, but I’m struggling to understand the benefit of a monthly bill that doesn’t have a bunch of content included with it. After a year of playing OnLive, you’ve spent enough that you could have just bought a used Xbox 360.

Image courtesy OnLive

SAN FRANCISCO — Big-name videogame designers are thinking small.

Creators of legendary games of the ’80s and ’90s like Sinistar and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade are increasingly working on social games like those found on Facebook, largely because the development of popular time-wasters like FarmVille closely mirrors the creative process that drove the early days of gaming: small teams, short production schedules and more creative autonomy for designers.

“It feels to me like 1981 or 1982,” said designer Brenda Brathwaite at a Game Developers Conference panel here Tuesday afternoon. Brathwaite worked on the classic Wizardry role-playing games and is now creative director at San Francisco social media company Slide. “I remember, early in my career we would make a game in six months. I love the idea of just putting a game together with a small group of people. I can’t imagine anything I’d rather do.”

As videogame hardware has gotten more powerful and gamers’ expectations of quality have grown, game budgets have ballooned in recent years. One estimate pegged Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’s budget at between $40 million and $50 million. Meanwhile, social game companies are reaching millions of users with games designed by small teams, sometimes in a matter of weeks.

For gamers, having designers with so much experience working on social games is bound to bring higher levels of quality. David Crane, the creator of classic Activision games like Pitfall!, is doing iPhone apps. Ultima creator Richard Garriott is turning his attention to Facebook with a high-end game platform called Portalarium.

“It’s becoming acceptable to make smaller games again,” said game designer Eskil Steenberg, one of the developers at the conference who is talking about the move away from big-budget games. “We used to be at a point where everything went triple-A, but now indie scenes and all these kind of games are taking off, and it lets you work alone.”

Steenberg is at GDC showing off a work in progress called Love, a one-man project on which he is artist, programmer and designer all in one. He says he savors working on the smallest of small teams.

“There’s no office politics,” he said. “You don’t have to communicate with anybody about anything.”

A bit extreme, perhaps, not to mention impossible for anyone who doesn’t have Steenberg’s many talents. But the designers at GDC who are gravitating toward small teams share many of his feelings.

Steve Meretzky, who created cult classic text adventures like Zork Zero: The Revenge of Megaboz and Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, took a job with social game publisher Playdom in 2008 after becoming frustrated with how even smaller, casual games were becoming bloated. He spent two years working on the game World of Zoo, and in that time it was only two-thirds finished. “Working really, really long years to get a single product done … (was) a pace of game development that was a lot less satisfying,” he said.

Noah Falstein, who began his career working on the Atari 2600 and created the classic arcade shooter Sinistar, said that he had a “feeling of being increasingly detached” as game design got more complicated. “GDC was getting really depressing for me because everybody was talking about these $20 [million to] $30 million games,” he said.

Falstein was depressed not only because bigger teams made game design a more fractured creative process, but also because the big budgets brought significant risk aversion.

“Nobody wants to (take risks) on the gameplay side,” he said. “You end up with World War II first-person shooters and science fiction first-person shooters. With this new explosion, there’s a much smaller monetary risk…. It suddenly frees you up to be much more creative.”

Since social game design brings with it new challenges — connecting players to their friends is as important as the game itself — it’s not as if these industry veterans are resting on their laurels. And that’s why experience is so important in this emerging medium, argued Falstein: When you’ve been creating games since Atari’s heyday, you’re used to having to learn and adapt to rapidly changing technology just to keep your head above water.

“It does take a certain level of experience,” he said.

Photo: Left to right: Noah Falstein, Brian Reynolds, Brenda Brathwaite and Steve Meretzky speak Tuesday afternoon at Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.
Jon Snyder/Wired.com

See Also:

• I Want It Now! The Fierce Urgency of Videogaming's Future
• John Carmack to Recieve Lifetime Achievement Award at GDC
• Pitfall! Creator David Crane Is Named Videogame Pioneer
• Hands-On With Tokyo Game Show's Hottest New Games

John Carmack, co-founder of id Software, will be honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2010 Game Developers Choice Awards. Carmack will recieve the award at the Game Developers Conference on March 11 in San Francisco.

Carmack, who co-founded id in 1991, was a pioneer of 3-D graphics and first-person shooters, instrumental in the creation of beloved gaming franchises Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein. He was selected for the award by a panel of game industry veterans.

Previous recipients of the award include Sid Meier, Shigeru Miyamoto and Will Wright. Wright will be on hand at GDC to present the award to Carmack.

Photo: Hachimaki/Flickr

See Also:

• Wired 4.08: The Egos at Id
• Wired 11.05: Prepare to Meet Thy Doom
• John Carmack Promises 'Graphical Tour de Force' on iPhone
• Doom Rocket Man Preps for Liftoff
• Orcs & Elves Contest: Win A Nintendo DS Signed By John Carmack