Sunday, March 11, 2012

News and Events - 12 Mar 2012




jandrews@foodsafetynews.com (James Andrews
09.03.2012 12:59:07
When Maria Higginbotham couldn't find the usual dog treats she buys at her local Target store back in early January, she decided to instead buy some brand-name chicken jerky dog treats for Bandit, her 3-year-old rat terrier. 

Four days later, Bandit collapsed on the floor.

He was soon experiencing bloody diarrhea, and by the time Higginbotham and her mother got him to his veterinarian, his organs were shutting down. His liver showed that he had eaten something toxic. Certain that Bandit's inexplicable illness had already become too severe, the veterinarian suggested putting him down, and Higginbotham's mother and son agreed. 

But she refused, and after nearly $4,000 in medical bills and three weeks of intensive nursing that included in-home I.V. care, Bandit recovered. The vet could not conclusively link the chicken jerky to the illness, but Higginbotham said he thought it could be the cause.

Bandit.jpg Bandit's puppyish spark has come back, but Higginbotham remains anxious, feeling an overwhelming sense of helplessness over what she might be feeding her dog.

At the opposite corner of the country, in Eastern Florida, Danielle Kinard-Friedman's story did not end as well. Two weeks ago, Millie, her 18-month-old yellow Labrador, began vomiting bile after weeks of growing progressively more lethargic.

When Millie wouldn't eat anything, Kinard-Friedman took her to a vet. Blood tests revealed that Millie was experiencing kidney failure, and so she spent a week in an emergency pet clinic receiving intensive treatment that eventually proved futile. She was put down this past Sunday.

It was Millie's vet who asked Kinard-Friedman if she had been feeding her dog chicken jerky treats. She had. In fact, she had just started buying the treats -- under a different brand-name from Bandit's -- two months prior.

The vet then asked a more alarming question: Was the chicken from China? She had no idea, but she checked the label as soon as she got home. It was. When Higginbotham checked her treats, she found the same thing. Their vets could not prove anything, but both suspected the treats had sickened the dogs.

Higginbotham and Kinard-Friedman have now joined thousands of pet owners speaking out on the Internet and asking the government to force a recall of chicken jerky dog treats made from Chinese chicken. Concerns over the issue first arose in 2007, when the U.S. Food and Drug Administration began receiving reports of sickened dogs, all with the apparent common denominator of chicken jerky treats from China.

Since then, the FDA has performed hundreds of tests on chicken jerky samples and has not yet found any contaminant to explain the illnesses. 

Regardless, the movement has continued to gain significant momentum. In the past month, it even got the attention of Ohio's Sen. Sherrod Brown and Rep. Dennis Kucinich after Ohio resident Candace Thaxton contacted them about two of her dogs who fell ill.

Until a cause is uncovered, owners and lawmakers say they will continue requesting that the FDA make the issue a priority, while the 15 companies implicated by consumers see no empirical evidence to justify recalling their products.

Congressmen and FDA sink their teeth in

On February 7, Brown brought the issue to the Senate floor, saying he had urged the Food and Drug Administration to accelerate its investigation into these chicken jerky treats -- found under multiple brand names but all sourced from China -- that appeared to be sickening dogs across the country. Two weeks later, the senator held a press conference and issued a news release again urging the FDA to act swiftly.

Back on Nov. 18, 2011, the FDA cautioned consumers that chicken jerky dog treats from China may be associated with a rising number of dog illnesses. This followed earlier warnings of the same issue in September 2007 and December 2008. After a drop in 2009 and 2010, reports of dog illnesses have spiked once again.



The November 2011 FDA notice warned dog owners who purchased chicken jerky to monitor their pets for decreased appetite, decreased activity, vomiting, diarrhea (including bloody , increased urination or increased water consumption. If any of those symptoms worsen or last more than 24 hours, owners should bring their dog to a vet, the notice said. Blood tests could indicate kidney failure, while urine tests might indicate Fanconi Syndrome, a disorder that results in nutrients normally absorbed into the bloodstream instead being released through urine.

On Wednesday, an FDA spokesperson confirmed to Food Safety News that the agency has recently received more than 600 reports from dog owners who say their pets have fallen ill because of jerky products made from Chinese chicken.

Since the issue first arose in September 2007, the FDA has run numerous chemical and microbial tests on Chinese chicken jerky samples in search of a contaminant. Though the agency said it could not conclude anything from the test results, the details remained under wraps until March 1, when an FDA document describing tests dating back to 2007 was sent to Kucinich's office. According to a Kucinich aid, the congressman "took them to task" at a briefing in order to get the information.

The one-page document outlines 241 tests for potential contaminants and 130 tests with pending results, none of which conclusively link the jerky to contaminants at dangerous levels. The 2012 tests with results still pending, however, are searching for heavy metals. 

The Kucinich aid and many pet owners said they hope those latest tests might finally link the treats to a toxic substance and resolve the mystery of their pets' problems. The FDA has stated repeatedly that it will continue to actively investigate the issue.

According to the FDA, at least one Australian chicken jerky manufacturer has issued a recall of its products made from Chinese chicken, calling the move a precautionary measure.

The manufacturer may be mindful of March 2007, when hundreds of pet illnesses linked to melamine-contaminated Chinese ingredients prompted the recall of thousands of pet food products in the U.S., Europe and South Africa. In the U.S., the FDA received thousands of reports of dogs and cats dying from kidney failure, but confirmed very few cases.

More consumers come forward, but pet food industry says they're not to blame

A month ago, the private Facebook group called "Animal Parents Against Pet Treats Made in China!" had roughly 100 members. Today, the number has exploded to more than 2,500. One petition demanding the ban of jerky treats from China has acquired more than 3,000 signatures.

Ginger.jpg Susan Rhodes created another petition on March 3. She has asked the FDA to recall the jerky treats after she found that her dog, Ginger, had suffered permanent kidney damage and was losing weight at an alarming rate. Rhodes said she had been feeding the treats to Ginger  for the past two years. Days after creating the petition, she has racked up more than 300 signatures from dog owners reporting similar diagnoses.

Media coverage and word of mouth have brought a tidal wave of attention to the manufacturers of these treats. Some of the snowballing coverage, however, might lead some pet owners to incorrectly blame other health problems on the treats, said Kurt Gallagher, spokesperson for the Pet Food Institute, an industry education and public relations resource.

"Pet food companies want to make safe, nutritious products. It's their top priority," Gallagher told Food Safety News. "When everyone's talking about something like this, I think there's heightened awareness and sensitivity for pet owners looking for it."

Gallagher recommended pet owners take any sick pets to a vet to get a clinical opinion before diagnosing any issues themselves. If the vet considers pointing a finger at a certain food, the owners should contact the food manufacturer. Food companies should be tracking their complaints and looking for patterns and problems within their food supply, he said.

Pet owners have been quick to amass lists of jerky manufacturers sourcing their chicken from China. Rhodes' petition, for example, names 15 such companies.

A spokesperson for a dog treat company at the center of the furor reiterated that the FDA's testing has not found any contaminants and so his company has no reason to believe their product has sickened dogs. The company has a comprehensive food safety system at their Chinese facilities, he said, including quality control inspectors who monitor for safety. 

He added that his company appreciated hearing from concerned customers, and emphasized that anecdotal evidence, however pervasive, does not prove causation.



"Obviously, we take food safety very seriously," he said. "Millions of dogs enjoy our products without ever getting sick."



Multiple pet owners have told Food Safety News that the spokesperson's company has backed away from its original intention to offer customers small monetary settlements for harm their jerky might have caused pets. According to sources, once the complaints reached a certain volume, spokespeople for the company told customers that providing any settlements would be an admission of guilt.

Made in "America"?

Blogger Mollie Morrissette has been following the chicken jerky developments for more than a year on her website, Poisoned Pets. She said that the issue has reached a sort of tipping point in the last month, with more and more pet owners speaking up about sick dogs.

"I get letters every day from broken-hearted pet parents -- people who had to put down their beloved family dog or five month-old puppy," she said. "They all fed their dogs chicken jerky."

One issue frustrating pet owners, Morrissette said, is that many of these dog treat packages boast that they are made in the U.S., though the fine print on the package often reveals that the chicken actually comes from China, where a cultural preference for dark meat makes for cheap white meat. Sarge.jpg

These "country of origin" claims are made possible by laws that say that once an ingredient is "substantially" altered in a given country, the resulting food can be considered a product of that country. These alterations can include cooking, mixing or otherwise reprocessing the ingredients in some way.

Just as oranges from Brazil can be turned into Canadian orange juice, chicken jerky from China can be reprocessed and repackaged in the U.S. to become a U.S. product. This can trick consumers into a false sense of security about the safety of their pet's food, Morrissette said.

Higginbotham said that the brand of jerky she bought for Bandit claimed to be "Proudly manufactured by an American company." Kinard-Friedman believed the same thing about the jerky she fed to Millie.

Morrissette said that pet owners feel helpless as they wait for some sort of justice on behalf of their pet, and she criticized the FDA for what she saw as a lack of urgency in investigating the illnesses.

"A lot of these pet parents are just wringing their hands, hoping the FDA will find some sort of answer," she said. "If this was [potentially contaminated] baby formula, we would have had the answer when it started five years ago. It would all get pulled off the shelves out of caution as soon as anyone suspected it might be contaminated."
  Owners say they won't back down until they have an answer

Candace Thaxton, the woman who spurred Senator Brown and Congressman Kucinich into action, has more than one dog motivating her to uncover that answer.

In November 2011, when her 10-year-old pug, Chansey, started urinating unusually often and refusing to eat, Thaxton assumed they were just signs that the dog was getting old.



Chansey's health quickly deteriorated. At a vet appointment, Thaxton learned that the dog's kidneys had shut down and she would need intensive medical treatment to recover, if it was possible at all. Thinking their dog had naturally reached end of her life, the Thaxtons chose to have her put down.

Within weeks, the family had adopted a mixed-breed "pixie" puppy named Penny, who earned a pristine bill of health at her first vet appointment. 

Right around Christmas Day, Thaxton ran out of the treats that came with Penny when she was adopted, so she started feeding her Chansey's leftover treats: chicken jerky. Chansey had never eaten jerky until weeks before she grew sick. She died with her first bag half-finished.

In the weeks that followed, Penny started urinating more than usual. After New Year's Day, Thaxton saw a news story online about the FDA's warning for chicken jerky made from China. She checked her bag of treats, which said it was from South Carolina.

Then she noticed the text over the barcode: "Made In China."

Thaxton stopped feeding her the treats, but Penny started vomiting. When the vet saw her, she showed all the same symptoms as Chansey.

Chansey.jpg"Her kidneys were worse than Chansey's," Thaxton said.

Penny went on 24-hour surveillance at an emergency pet clinic. She recovered a week later, but Thaxton was just getting started.

"Candace went to bat," Morrissette said. "She's the driving force behind all of this, all the publicity."

Thaxton filed two complaints with the treat manufacturer -- one for Chansey, one for Penny. It looked like she was going to at least get a settlement amount to cover part of her $3,000 vet bill, but the company eventually rescinded as more complaints began to pour in, Thaxton said.

Even before the settlement talks broke down, Thaxton's story had run on two local news channels. When she was ultimately refused payment, Thaxton promised the company she would take the issue national within the week.

"By Friday night, Congressman Kucinich had written a letter to the FDA. By Monday, I had a press conference with Senator Brown," she said. "We've had two more conferences since then. I talked to Inside Edition. I told them I was going to be the one who pushed. I'm not stopping now."

Like Thaxton, other pet owners seem determined to keep the pressure on FDA to find answers and hold any guilty party responsible. For many, a sense of uncertainty, frustration, and even guilt, lingers.

"Pets are part of your family. When they die, you lose a family member," Higginbotham said. "I'm dealing with a lot of guilt over this. I'm the one who feeds my dog and is supposed to make sure he's safe and healthy. How do I do that if I can't even trust his food?"

-------

Photo captions, from top to bottom:



- Bandit, Maria Higginbotham's dog

- Ginger, Susan Rhodes' dog

- Sarge, Ray Parker's dog. Sarge, a seven year-old chow-corgi mix, fell ill soon after eating a single chicken jerky dog treat, Parker said. After nearly two weeks of clinical treatment, including intensive critical care, Sarge was put down.

- Chansey, Candace Thaxton's dog






08.03.2012 19:45:31
Prices of drugs used widely by older adults showed an increase of 26 percent from 2005 to 2009, according to a new report issued by AARP.







10.03.2012 2:01:23

Look out Hollywood, the video game industry is hot on your heels, poaching your talent and raking in the money. And one game has led the way…

The fastest-selling cultural product in history was created by people you've probably never heard of. While this year's Oscars honoured films in which the movie business sweetly congratulates itself on its own birth –
The Artist,
Hugo – the most dollar-hoovering entertainment release ever is not a film, still less an album; it's a video game. Coming out last autumn,
Modern Warfare 3 – a blockbuster military shooter made by a Californian game studio called
Infinity Ward – took just 16 days to gross $1bn, beating by one day the previous record set by a film about
blue people in space. And it wasn't a freak accident. Global annual sales of video games now dwarf cinema box-office and recorded music: in 2010, games grossed $56bn, film tickets $32bn and music $23bn. (The film industry as a whole still made more, at $87bn. Even social games on Facebook are enormous business:
Zynga, the firm behind
Farmville and
Words With Friends, is responsible for 12% of Facebook's revenue. Hollywood is old-school now. And one company in particular has played a pivotal role in this media revolution over the past decade:
Rockstar Games.

Rockstar's banner
Grand Theft Auto series has sold a total of 117m copies. And it's a cute irony of cultural globalisation that the most convincing digital simulation of New York yet made was built by a gang of Scots. In 2008, the $1bn-grossing video game Grand Theft Auto IV recreated in spectacular fidelity Manhattan and its environs as the setting for the adventures of Niko Bellic, an eastern European migrant intent on upward social mobility in the criminal underworld. Later this year, Grand Theft Auto V – whose
recently released teaser trailer has, like that for a hotly anticipated film, already attracted millions of views and countless pages of badly spelled fan speculation on the internet – will move the action to a virtual Los Angeles. Yet all the main episodes in this monster fun franchise are created in the UK by Rockstar North, an Edinburgh-based studio that began as a plucky startup in the bedroom-coding home-computer revolution of the 1980s.

Once upon a time, Rockstar North was
DMA Design, founded in 1988 by a group of friends in Dundee. Their first big hit was
Lemmings, a puzzle game in which you guide a troupe of the suicidally trusting furry creatures through a series of sadistically booby-trapped levels. Lemmings became a guilty hit in offices around the country, and with sequels and spin-offs had by the early 1990s sold more than 20m. But the cartoonish violence of squished lemmings transmuted into something much edgier when DMA brought out their next game, Grand Theft Auto.

The first GTA began production in 1995 under the working title Race'n'Chase. At first you could play either a policeman or a criminal, but the team soon realised that enforcing the law was not as much fun as breaking it.
Dave Jones, one of DMA's founders, now explains: "It was just so much more fun doing all the crazy wrong stuff. There was no way we could get as much fun from being the good guys. Eventually, we just dropped the two-sided approach and fully embraced the dark side." Visually, GTA was essentially a cartoon, with a vantage point like that of the satellite view of streets you get today in
Google Maps. You drove your car around the city grid, stopping off at payphones to receive instructions – rob this bank, destroy that vehicle – and mowing down cops or civilian pedestrians, whose tiny pixilated forms would squelch bloodily under your tyres. Bonus points were awarded for killing an entire orange-robed conga line of Hare Krishnas.

Max Clifford was hired to advise on the PR for the game's 1997 release. Cannily, he advised DMA to feed the tabloids the most outrageous details possible. "It was scary and impressive how he laid out his plan to manipulate the media and the politicians," Jones says. "It culminated in a two-hour feature on breakfast TV debating the game. At this point, the politicians lambasting the game had not even seen it – I think they were disappointed when they did, given the cartoony look." The tabloids duly issued calls to ban this sick filth, the British Police Federation said it was "sick, deluded and beneath contempt", and the game became a hit. Grand Theft Auto the countercultural phenomenon was born.

At the time, DMA's games were published by BMG Interactive, a London division of the German music group, where a young Brit called
Sam Houser took a close interest. When
I talked to him on the release of Grand Theft Auto II in 1999, Houser was bullish about the controversy over the first game. He recalled talking to the New York Police Department, who apparently didn't mind that youngsters were killing cops in GTA: "Well, you know what?" he recalled them saying. "There's a lot of people out there trying to kill cops, and we'd rather they did it in your game than on the street."

Houser is now president of the New York-based game-publishing powerhouse Rockstar Games, which he
co-founded in 1998 with his brother Dan, among others. DMA Design became its wholly owned subsidiary Rockstar North, one of several Rockstar studios around the world. (
Max Payne 3, due out in May, is created by Rockstar Vancouver. And Houser himself has been the GTA games' executive producer since the third outing, 2001's
Grand Theft Auto III, which was a technical revolution for the series – it no longer offered a flat, aerial vista of the city, but a perspectival, street-level point of view. The carjacking, shooting and running-over was close-up and visceral, and yet the game was also very funny, and had a rare depth beneath the lurid mischief. "It is a beautifully designed game with glorious cascading systems," says
Ste Curran, creative director at British game studio Echo Peak and host of the video games radio show
One Life Left. "The location is fun – it looks like a city, feels like a playground – and events unfold differently on every replay. That's what keeps the game interesting."

And then, of course, there are the prostitutes. Invite one of GTA III's streetwalkers into your stolen car, and in exchange for some cash you would regain some of your "health", after a chaste interlude of bouncing suspension. One designer, however, who tried beating the prostitute to death immediately after the transaction, got his money back and kept the health increase: win-win. GTA III was released on 
another wave of controversy about how it was the game in which you killed prostitutes. Some commentators pointed out mildly that you didn't have to kill prostitutes; but the designers did make it possible – as they did not, for example, make it possible to rescue kittens stuck up trees. But then, that wouldn't have fit with the game's swaggering aesthetic, what Curran describes as its "perfectly pitched Molotov cocktail of pop culture and grimy, streetwise theft and thuggery". An employee at the time, who spoke on condition of anonymity, remembers that while the atmosphere within Rockstar was playful ("table-tennis tables and beanbags and toys on the desk and all that kind of Generation Y stuff" , the top people were also "very driven". Their laudable "passion for the games" also led to office shouting matches and a "face-time culture", with people routinely expected to "stay late even if they'd finished their work".

The next game in the series,
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002 , was a milestone in Houser's ambition to make "cinematic" video games. Stylistically, it was a loving tribute to the film
Scarface and the
1980s TV series Miami Vice.
Ray Liotta,
Peter Fonda and
Dennis Hopper were cast as voice-actors. Vice City was the first successful "period" video game, showing that the medium had become mature enough to riff on a concrete historical period rather than a pseudo-Tolkein alt-middle ages or a quasi-Blade Runner sci-fi future. Dave Jones, one of GTA's original creators, had left DMA after the release of the second game ("It was not my company any more" , and is now a creative director working with several studios. So what does he think of how Rockstar brought up his baby? "I thought it was great," he enthuses. "GTA III, and especially Vice City, for me were the pinnacles of the series. They kept a lot of the non-serious side of the game, which I personally still feel is the best treatment for it."

The sequel that followed, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (2004 , was less whimsically amusing, but even more provocative, set as it was among drug and prostitution gangs in LA during the 1990s. It was progressive in having a black lead character, almost unheard of in video games at the time. But San Andreas also became the most notorious game yet of the series. During the game's development, as a new book on the history of the GTA games,
David Kushner's Jacked, relates, Houser had been pushing hard to feature porny scenes, including representations of "blowjobs", "dildo sex" and "whipping". He was eventually convinced by his partners that this would be commercial suicide, since big retailers such as Wal-Mart would refuse to stock it. Right before the game's launch, the offending parts from the game's complex code were hastily "wrapped": they would never appear when you played the game, but they were still there, deep in the data on the discs. Inevitably, an enterprising hacker discovered them and released on to the internet
a software patch to let other players unlock them, too. This became known as the "hot coffee" modification – so called because in the deleted scenes the main character's girlfriend invites him into her house for "coffee". Moralists on both sides of the Atlantic went apoplectic.

Rockstar's anonymous employee vividly recalls the epic all-nighter when Rockstar was scrambling to re-release a new version of San Andreas purged of the sex scenes: "Pretty much the entire company got pulled in to help with the testing process in order to get a new version of the game out as quickly as possible to appease the American censors. That meant we had to work round the clock in shifts, sleeping on sofas to sustain us through the night so we could shoot imaginary gangsters and hoodlums in the head."

When
Bobby Kotick, the amiable CEO of rival major publishers
Activision Blizzard, was asked at a 2008 industry conference whether games had to be as violent as Grand Theft Auto, he defended Rockstar. "Fifty per cent of the audience that plays games is over the age of 18," he pointed out. "We're a broad-based medium today, we're going to appeal to the broadest possible consumer base, and you're going to see all sorts of product, and that's going to include gratuitously violent product." In any case, violent games have only ever been one part of the wider video-game story. As well as the
Call Of Duty series of military shooters (which includes the Modern Warfare sub-brand , Activision Blizzard also publishes the hugely successful elf-bothering online roleplayer
World Of Warcraft. Just as with films, different video games are made for different audiences. Another big publisher,
EA, meanwhile, produces popular sports games featuring snowboarding or football and the life-simulation game
The Sims.

Rockstar, in particular, wants its games to be taken as seriously as films are. It certainly pours a comparable level of resources into production, pushing games into what Ste Curran terms a "mega-budget era". For GTA IV, say, the budget was around $100m, it took three years to create, and used a cast of 861 actors speaking 80,000 lines of dialogue. Large video-game productions now have staff (like permanent film crews numbering in the hundreds; they commission symphonic musical scores, and continue to poach Hollywood talent. (The actor
Mark Hamill, once a fresh-faced Luke Skywalker, has been
playing a blinder as the Joker in the recent Batman games. A new mini-wave of noir-ish detective games, such as the French designer David Cage's
Heavy Rain or Rockstar's own
LA Noire, is pushing the technique of "motion capture" to new heights, recording actors' facial expressions as they speak and then applying those movements to digitally created physiognomies. (This is how
Gollum in the Lord Of The Rings films was created. For the moment this has the effect of driving video games even further into what some digital aestheticians call "Uncanny Valley", a strange no-man's-land where the more realistic an artificial person looks, the eerier its niggling departures from reality feel. But David Cage, for one, has predicted that fully "photo-realistic" video-game characters will be possible in around six years' time.

So what kinds of pseudo-films are today's most successful video games? If the immensely slick Call Of Duty series were a film director, it would be
Michael Bay, all deafening destruction and comedy geopolitics. (The last two Modern Warfare games were predicated on the notion of the Russians mounting a land-based invasion of the US and Europe. If Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto series were a film director, it would be
Martin Scorsese – or at least that's who it really wants to be – but it takes more than an obsessive fan's line-by-line recall of GoodFellas to make art.
Reviewing GTA IV for the Wall Street Journal in 2008, the novelist Junot Diaz, a long-time fan, ridiculed the media hype that had compared it favourably to Coppola's The Godfather. "Like the pulps that are part of its narrative DNA," he wrote, "GTA IV operates in broad strokes, crude characterization and over-the-top stereotypes."

"Video games tell stories badly," says the game designer and critic
Ian Bogost, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. (He designed the Facebook game
Cow Clicker, a satire on Farmville-style games that itself became a surprise hit. Even so, Bogost says, bad game stories are "charming", and perhaps even necessarily bad: "Maybe video games are meant to help us shed our obsession with storytelling, show us all the things between the story, like wandering around virtual space and exploring it like virtual tourists."

Virtual tourism is, indeed, the aspect of the Grand Theft Auto games that has been much more influential for the medium as a whole than their gangster-movie envy. They made popular and compelling an "open-world" style. If you want to progress through the game's scripted narrative, you must accept specific missions of telegenic spatter-mayhem; but that is not all you can do. Instead, you may just wander around and soak up the sights, which these days are impressive. That video games now provide a place where you can go to relax is itself a sign of their rapidly burgeoning capacity for rich simulation. "We have all been born 100 years too early," Dave Jones laments wryly. "I would love to build and play in the kind of environments we see in movies like
The Matrix and
Inception." But, he notes, we are still in "the stone age of gaming technology". Jones's own most recent project,
APBReloaded, is like a networked GTA: the other people in the city are not scripted, artificial characters, but human beings playing over the internet. His vision for the future is like this, only more so: "I want to be playing in an even more realistic GTA-style environment," Jones says, "with 1,000 other real players in the city." And so the impish simulation of antisocial behaviour promises to become ever more sociable.

You may not have experienced a Grand Theft Auto game yourself, but you can hardly pass the day in a modern city without seeing someone playing a video game on their laptop or smartphone. And Rockstar have had a crucial role in gaining mass cultural acceptance for the medium ever since they inspired other game-makers, according to Ste Curran, to emulate GTA's "potent, lucrative blend of mainstream cool and commercial success". Now video games have indeed become as mainstream as music and the movies. We live in an age of ambient play. And perhaps it is not just a coincidence that the recent video-game trend of repurposing cities as zones of anarchic fun has coincided with developments in the wealthy real world such as
urban riots and 
the Occupy movement. If so, roll on Grand Theft Auto V: we can still reclaim the virtual streets, if not the real ones.

• Steven Poole is the author of
Trigger Happy: The Inner Life of Videogames (Fourth Estate, ?7.99 .



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