Oh come on, you've thought it too.

In case you missed it in the headline, this video might be a little bit unsafe for most workplaces. "Come on, boss! It's not like he actually puts the metal penis in his mouth!" is not an argument anyone wants to have to put forth in an exit interview.

For more sick and twisted video game comedy, follow the link to Dorkly.com.

Next month's release of the Wii U marks the end of the GameCube's distinctive controller as a method for manipulating Nintendo games, but the color-coded buttons and sticks will always remain a method for making well-dressed attractive people look as if they are playing video games and not just smiling vacantly into a camera.

It's been a while since we've visited the world of Fake Gamers, those pretty people playing at playing games in the pristine world of stock photography. Fake Gamer of the Week is no more, but that doesn't mean we can't visit our pretty friends now and again, marveling at their sublime disconnection from everything we hold dear.

We once held the GameCube controller dear. That yellow C-stick, the red and green A and B buttons—it's an incredibly distinctive piece of gaming equipment. Those striking colors are likely why photographers love putting it in the hands of people that probably have no idea what it is.

Whether they're attractive men not playing video games...

...attractive women not playing video games...

...or a group of young men eating popcorn and jostling playfully while staring at someone taking a photo, it's impossible to be unhappy while not playing a game with a GameCube controller.

See? Here comes the smile. Thanks, GameCube controller.

Photo credit: Nieto Angel | Stockfresh

What do people really know about how video games get made? Sure, today's players know that games get designed, drawn, produced and tested. That's more than their forebears. Still, the idea of what drives people to make games—other than the fact that it seems like a fun thing to do—remains one that continues to feel frustratingly out of reach. We generally understand how performers' personalities inform their film-making, writing and music creation. But what part of a person's soul goes into a video game?

There have been books like Masters of Doom, Smartbomb and Extra Lives, which all chart the arcs of careers and histories inside the video game industry. But, Austin Grossman's new novel might be the most illuminating effort at answering that question yet. That's because Grossman writes from his own personal experience of having helped build the worlds of games like Ultima Underworld II, Thief: Deadly Shadows and Dishonored.

"YOU is a novel about games and game development," Grossman told me during a phone conversation two weeks ago. "The central characters met each other in an Intro to Programming class in 1983 in high school. One night, they had a long, rambling conversation about Tron and virtual reality and it winds up with them collectively asking ‘Will we ever be able to make the ultimate game?' "

"That's what I thought about constantly in 1983," Grossman confessed. "I saw Tron. I thought to myself, ‘Is there going to be a game that's going to be like D&D but where we get to go inside it, and it's just all real and we can do whatever we want?' And I would think to myself, " ‘Is that going to be possible one day?' " In the book, they decide to do it."

"They decide, " ‘OK, we're going to take a vow that our lives are going to be about getting to this ideal.' Which is a nonsense ideal. Four of them continue on with this and start a new game company. And the fifth guy graduates from high school and breaks away, thinking like, ‘Why do I need that stuff?' The novel actually starts in 1998, where the fifth guy who broke away and went to law school comes back, and says, ‘Hi, I want to work at your game company.' He finds out what happened to them, as they decided to push as far as they could toward making the perfect ultimate game. He gets a job there as a designer, discovers a weird bug and starts to dig into the past while learning the trade of game design. The main character learns about one of the original four friends' death and gets caught up in a mystery around a hidden technology that one of them made before he died, which might be the key to the holodeck technology. But, really, it comes to grips with what the real passion of game development is."

Grossman thinks that there's more than a desire for money or relative amounts of fame in the hearts of the people who become game designers. "The big question is, ‘What are we all trying to do when we make games?' What is the animating vision that's pushing us so hard to push the technology forward every year to create this medium? If you go to E3 every year, the technology leaps forward at a frightening rate. This novel is set in 1998 which is right around when graphics and accelerator cards are taking over the look of games. It was one of those scary jumps."

"I remember Doom," Grossman reminisced. "Suddenly everything had sort of bloom lighting on it. Everything had levels of detail. Everything got specular. I thought to myself, ‘Man, this is about as real as games could possibly get.' " But it keeps jumping forward. And it makes me wonder why are we trying to make another world that we can go into? So, as the main character finds out what happened to his friends and what their stories were, you start to wonder if there is a dark side of what they're all trying to do, like with the Manhattan Project. It's my way of working out why the best minds of my generation tried do this ridiculous yet compelling thing of making video games."

I thought it a bit paradoxical that Grossman spent part of his time working on Dishonored—in an environment where he has to be really spare and economical with words and language—while, at the same time, writing a novel where he has free reign to sprawl all over the page. I asked him if there was there a big of cognitive dissonance moving from one thing to another within the same time frame. "I do notice the contrast. I wouldn't even say cognitive dissonance, though. I would say, "This is where we get to let it all hang out." During the day, I've got to count my words. When I switch to the book, it's ‘No more haiku. No more tweets.' Too much language does not belong in games, but that doesn't mean that I don't love to work with it. I just sort of figured out where in my life I would get to do what. I could afford to be spare in games because I know that later on I'll get to do whatever I feel like doing."

And, it's not just the people who already play games that Grossman is trying to reach with YOU. "One of the purposes of this book is to try to open that world [of game development] to non-gamers," he explained. His last novel, 2007's Soon I Will Be Invincible deconstructed the psychological forces and emotional baggage that drove a set of super-powered heroes and villains to become costumed characters. Grossman says that he wants to do something similar in YOU. "Games are really interesting and tons of people make them," Grossman said. "Yet it hasn't been talked about in a very satisfying way. Why are people doing when they play games for hours and hours and hours out of their day? What are they feeling? What's driving the people who play and make games? It's a really human experience and I want to write about it in a way that felt satisfying and truthful."

"I feel like there are a lot of emotions bound up in games," Grossman continued, "but the majority don't have names." Something unique comes from the mix of the familiar—anger, fear, exhiliration—and with the experience of interactive control. "You go and sit down and play and three hours later you get up and what happened? You don't remember what happened. It's just time that got sent away. Where did it get sent away to? What's happening in your mind?"

Talking to Grossman, I compared it to my own experience playing Shadow of the Colossus. I did things for reasons that weren't always clear , driven partly by the scripted narrative but also by this unnamable urge that I had to follow. "I was playing and I was, like, ‘Ouch, this game is making me feel things that I didn't really quite know I could feel this intensely. And I have no idea how they do it,' " said Grossman, thinking back to his own time with the PS2 classic. "My job with the book is try and capture some of that and make it intelligible. Try and get gamers and gaming to feel human rather than an addiction."

Anyone who gets really depressed about how that broad sensationalistic brushstrokes that misrepresent video games will find things to like about YOU. I asked Grossman about why he thinks those interpretations linger. "Partly, I think it's a lack of a vocabulary," he answered. "People don't know how to talk about the experience. They compare it to addiction or they compare it to God I don't know what else. Video games get cast as a dirty secret or just something degenerate or reptilian unless you know better. But, you know what? Millions of people do know better. I just want to put that down into words."

This image for the 3DS/WiiU-exclusive Scribblenauts Unlimited was teased by GameStop today. Who are they graying out?

My first guess regarding the silhouette on the right: Epona, from Zelda. And on the left? Isn't that Princess Peach's crown? I guess she's with Mario and Luigi.

Or I'm completely wrong.

Thoughts? Photoshops?

In a year filled with addictive action-RPGs with names like Diablo, Borderlands, and Torchlight, it might seem insane for another contender to jump into the fray. But the people behind Path of Exile don't mind a little insanity.

This December, Path of Exile will officially enter open beta and what the team is calling a soft launch. It's an ambitious game, a hack-n-slash RPG that blends the skill-driven lootfest of Diablo II with the materia-based character customization of Final Fantasy VII. And it's totally free to play.

But why do we need another action-RPG? Between Diablo III this May and Torchlight II this September, there are plenty of options for PC gamers looking to scratch that itch to click-click-click til the wee hours of morning. Where does Path of Exile fit in?

"I would say that Path of Exile is a game for people who care about intelligent character builds in action-RPGs," producer Chris Wilson told me during a recent Skype interview. He also told me about Act III, a major expansion to the game that will launch later this year. (More on that later.)

I'd asked him to pitch his game to a player who was maybe burnt out on Diablo or still addicted to Torchlight. Why should we play Path of Exile? How does it stand out from the pack?

"One of the key things is having a secure online economy," he said. "Our first design goal was to get that in place, because that way we're not just a single-player action-RPG. People can actually form an online community around it and care about their characters and items, in comparison to, for example, Torchlight II which has peer-to-player multiplayer, which has all the advantages of multiplayer but not as much security as having dedicated servers, where the character is stored on the server."

Torchlight II, which received glowing reviews when it was released last month, maintains a completely open environment. You can mod or cheat all you want; there's no security or DRM to get in your way.

In contrast, Path of Exile has a closed system because it's built around competition, Wilson says. It's designed for "hardcore" players. Which makes it sort of different than Diablo III too.

"With regard to Diablo III, I'm very impressed with the level of polish that Blizzard has on the game," he said. "We're quite different, though, in terms of, the character customization we have available is both a little more complicated and a little more unforgiving than a game like Diablo III.

"So to give an example, we have a passive skill tree which you'll see in game, that has I think 1,315 nodes. And the player travels through this tree as they level up their characters. We don't allow them to respec their choices very easily. We feel it's important that locking them into their choices means they'll feel more ownership with their character."

Wilson compares it to Magic: The Gathering in the sense that it's all about customization. You'll roam around the world, collecting skills in the form of gems not unlike Final Fantasy VII's materia. Like in Square's seminal role-playing game, you can blend and combine Path of Exile's gems to create crazy combinations. You can build attacks that split into multiple projectiles, passive fire traps, totems that summon minions for you, and all sorts of other interesting things, Wilson says. "We've seen some really wacky builds come out of the community."

The Path of Exile

In late 2006, a group of four friends in New Zealand got together and decided to make a game. They were playing a lot of Diablo II and EverQuest, so they thought maybe it could be sort of like those. But more hardcore. More tailored for people who like to spend a lot of time hacking, tweaking, and thinking.

"Our basic goal was to make an action-RPG that we would want to play," Wilson said. "We're pretty hardcore gamers... Although we've tried hard to make it approachable for new gamers, it's designed to make the hardcore gamers feel special."

So they poured in all their life savings—"Which is a great idea, it turns out," Wilson quipped—and started working. After a couple of years they started "fundraising from rich friends," Wilson told me.

"What do you mean by 'rich friends'?" I asked.

"Friends who have lots of money," Wilson said.

Well then. In September of 2010, they took Path of Exile to the west coast and started showing it off to journalists and fans at PAX Prime in Seattle. They started building up a community of interested fans—maybe 12-13,000, Wilson estimates—and then selected 10 or 20 of "the best, most intelligent" ones to join their closed alpha and help tailor the game.

About a year later, Wilson and the team launched a closed beta. Dreaming up creative ways to invite new people, they came up with a brilliant strategy: set up a timer on the Path of Exile website that would randomly invite a new forum member every five minutes.

"The community goes crazy over the fact that people are invited randomly," he said. "They have to wait a certain number of weeks or days to get invited... It got us a lot of discussion on various forums."

This April, Path of Exile officially opened to the public. For $10, you'd get early beta access and 10 bucks worth of credit in the game. More money would give you more credit and more rewards.

"We sold $200,000 of packs in the first long weekend," Wilson said. They're now up to $1.24 million. As of last week, they'd sold 82,240 packs (including 95 $1,000 packages).

When they launch this December, Path of Exile will be free-to-play, with optional microtransactions. Both of those terms—"free-to-play" and "microtransactions"—sound like poison to many gamers' ears these days, of course. But Wilson promises that payments will only be for things that are "convenient or cosmetic."

"Recently in the way we describe the game we always downplay the free part, giving people the expectation that they have to pay for it," Wilson said. "And it's just a nice surprise that it is free. And if I could do it all over again I would've actually put a nominal retail price on it—you know, $20 or something—just so there's an association of quality with the product. Our goal is so that you can sit down and play as much as you want... without paying anything."

(You won't be able to sell items, either: "We also understood how badly Diablo players reacted to the concept of item sales in that game," Wilson said.)

Hold on, I asked Wilson: If the game is free-to-play, won't people who dished out $10 for early access be peeved when it suddenly goes free this December?

Think of the early beta access as a bonus, Wilson told me. "You're paying $10 in microtransaction credit and to help support the development," he said. "But you're also getting a beta key."

Not an unfair deal. And development for this game has needed quite a bit of support. Today, the Path of Exile team consists of 19 people. They've been working at the game for almost six years. So I had to ask: what the hell took so long?

"It's our first game project and we're perfectionists," Wilson said, laughing. "I think part of the reason is we're kind of trying to play by our own rules, because we don't know the way a large company would do it, and we're not constrained to do it the way a smaller company would. So if we were to get say venture capital or a publisher or something, they might say, 'Do it, put 100 people on this and get it done. It's much better to get it out early.' or something.

"We're just doing what we can afford with the level of income and savings we had."

The Third Act

Act III of Path of Exile, which we can reveal exclusively on Kotaku today, will take place in the city of Sarn, pictured above. Right now, Path of Exile consists of two acts; the third will launch this December alongside the open beta. And Wilson says it will expand the game's content by an additional 50%.

Here's the full description for Act III, straight from the team at Grinding Gear Games:

You're standing at the edge of Sarn, the ruined capital of the Eternal Empire. Not so eternal now. Its citizenry is gone, taken by death and undeath in equal measures. Where hawkers shouted their bargains, ladies browsed for silks, young lovers walked hand in hand... creatures of nightmare stalk and feed. Beasts born of corruption. The restless dead, bitter and lethal. A cursed city of painful promises and preternatural peril.

This is Path of Exile, Act III: The Eternal City of Sarn

You are an exile, banished for your crimes to Wraeclast, and given a life sentence in the land of the damned. But Wraeclast wasn't always like this. It was once an empire of ten million souls, a beautiful and bountiful continent that prospered for more than a thousand years.

Something happened. A cataclysm. A corruption beyond reason. Wraeclast took itself off to bed one balmy evening and, come morning, it failed to wake. It slumbers, tossing and turning in the perpetual nightmare that enslaved it during the darkest hours.

Whether Witch, Marauder or Duelist, Templar, Ranger or Shadow, it's up to you to slice and slaughter your way through the squares, marketplaces, and abandoned homes of this necropolis...

...to answer a question.

Who murdered Wraeclast?

You're not alone in your curiosity. Others explore the twisted capital city of the Eternal Empire. The Ebony Legion has sailed from Oriath to scour Sarn for its secrets... avaricious maggots on a fecund carcass. General Gravicius plunders its tombs for wealth and power.

Piety of Theopolis harnesses corruption like a lover to her bedhead. Her lovely visage hides an imagination most monstrous.

Is everyone and everything in Sarn out to kill or maim you beyond recognition? Pretty much... with a few exceptions.

As a fellow exile, Hargan, will tell you: "Welcome to dirty, old Sarn, the metropolis of opportunity. The opportunity to make something of yourself or the opportunity to have a very messy death."

Grinding Gear's approach is really interesting. While many publishers prefer to close off their doors and keep players at a distance, the team behind Path of Exile is all about communication. They put a lot of time into their community, because that community is really all they have.

"We've put a lot of effort into engaging with the community as much as we can," Wilson said. "For a small project like us, they're the lifeblood.

"If the community gets bored and goes elsewhere, then that's all our money wasted."

What good is a drug-fueled murderous rampage if there's no one to share it with? Fuse Powered and Hothead Games' single-player mobile Tony Montana adventure game goes multiplayer today, giving players a chance to make friends, recruit friends, and rob friends.

Scarface for iOS was sort of a graphical Mafia Wars, only without the social aspect. Now it has the social aspect. You can still take over and upgrade a wide variety of businesses, engaging in nearly 100 missions along the way. It's just now you can do this while growing in power by recruiting friends to join your mafia, taking out enemies and just generally doing happy fun Tony Montana things.

Scarface multiplayer is free today on the App Store, so if you've got the urge to pretend you're snorting mountains of cocaine before going on a shooting spree, now's your chance to band together with like-minded individuals. Nothing could go wrong with this plan.

There's no more illusion that smoking isn't bad for your health. And tobacco companies are obliged to divulge the risks involved with using their products. They still want to make money, though, and resort to questionable means to market their wares to the public.

One of Big Tobacco's tactics is to lure in younger customers with flavored products, even though they're not supposed to. The anti-smoking activists at thetruth.com are firing back at this strategy with a new campaign of their own, which casts those sweet tastes as horrific monsters. I got a chance to play Flavor Monsters this weekend at New York Comic-Con and you can take a look at the mobile game in action in the video above. It's a competent blend of shooting and tower defense. You can learn more about the game and its message right here.

Valve's second set of Greenlight games includes an HD remix of The Stanley Parable, Octodad, and Miasmata.

Announced today, here's the full list of 20 new games that Valve will release on Steam in the coming months thanks to their crowdsourced Greenlight program.

Afterfall InSanity Extended Edition
AirBuccaneers
Blockscape
Contrast
Fly'n
Folk Tale
Forge
Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams (Project Giana)
Gnomoria
Interstellar Marines
Lost Story: The Last Days of Earth
Miasmata
Miner Wars 2081
NEOTOKYO
Octodad: Dadliest Catch
Perpetuum
POSTAL 2 COMPLETE
Secrets of Grindea
The Intruder
The Stanley Parable: HD Remix
Yogventures!

Electronic Arts has signed up an Emmy-winning actor to put the pedal to the metal in an upcoming film adaptation of their Need for Speed franchise.

According to today's press release, Paul will be leading a cast in a Dreamworks-produced NFS movie directed by Scott Waugh, who also helmed real-life-Navy-SEAL action movie Act of Valor. Relevant snippets from the press release follow:

"Need for Speed is one of the most action-packed entertainment experiences you can find," said Patrick Soderlund, Executive Vice President, Electronic Arts. "The newest game, ‘Need for Speed Most Wanted' and the upcoming film take the action to all new heights. Like the game series itself, the cast for the movie needs to be edgy and cool. Aaron Paul is a rising star — a great choice for the film lead. We're looking forward to announcing the rest of the actors that will bring this racing franchise to the big screen."

The film adaptation will be a fast-paced, high-octane film rooted in the tradition of the great car culture films of the 70s while being extremely faithful to the spirit of the video game franchise. In "Need for Speed," the cars are hot, the racing is intense and the story keeps players at the edge of their seat.

"Need for Speed" is one of the biggest and most successful franchises in the video game industry, having sold more than 150 million units worldwide and generating an estimated $4 billion in revenue. The next blockbuster release in the series is "Need for Speed Most Wanted" - the most socially-connected game of this generation, launching October 30, 2012.

The press release also notes that "the screenplay is based on the 'Need for Speed' series, but is not based on an individual game." There's a good chance, then, that they'll pull plot points from all the favorite Need for Speeds. Like the part when you pass cars and come in first. At the very least, at some point in the film, Paul better take part in a breakneck race while driving a winnebago.

I am relatively sure lead artist Vince Coupal doesn't say "technology called CRAP" in this first developer diary for Modern Combat 4: Zero Hour, but part of me wishes he had.

Gameloft's latest first-person shooter, coming this fall to iOS and Android, looks fine. Heck, it looks more than fine; that's pretty gorgeous. It would tickle me to no end knowing that part of the reason it looks so good is CRAP technology. Unfortunately I think he's saying CRAFT.

*checks Google*

Yep, it's CRAFT. Oh well. It'll always be CRAP to me.