I came home from work to find my sons and their friends killing a prostitute with a baseball bat.

I was horrified. They were laughing their heads off.

But they were right and I was wrong. It was funny. They were just having some taboo fun. Their reaction was super healthy, and I’m not at all worried about what they were doing.

They weren’t supposed to get hold of my copy of Grand Theft Auto. I’d hidden it away; but not very well. They’re in their early teens, and too young, I felt, for the adult pleasures of the GTA franchise.

Not only are there prostitutes in the game. You can kill them. And killing them, for a kid, is a source of amazed amusement that you can do such things. It’s like finding dad’s Playboy’s under the bed, only worse. It’s naughty. Transgressive. I still kinda regret that they played it, but I am relieved by their reaction to it.

The fact that they were squealing with delight and laughing their heads off at the ability to do something so outrageous was a very clear and gratifying affirmation of their emerging humanity. I’d have been worried if they had been silently and grimly killing off the other characters.

Oddly, it’s the non-violent games that turn them into little monsters. They got Rock Band for Christmas, and they were soon attacking each other with the plastic instruments. One of my boys smashed his brother over the head with a guitar in frustration. Wii tennis has resulted in several controllers thrown against the wall. Candy Crush induces epic rages fits. My wife and I concluded that it’s true what say: video games make kids violent.

But it’s not the content of the games that morphs them into little rage monsters. It’s the mechanics of the game. They get frustrated when a sibling screws up a song, or they are killed before the end of a level.

It’s not blasting zombies’ heads off that makes them violent. It’s frustration with the game itself, the inability to complete a task or challenge.

They encounter these same frustrations in every aspect of their lives: with homework and classmates, playing soccer or being told to brush their teeth. Frustration and rage are a normal part of our makeup. I’m consumed by it whenever I drive to Safeway.

I believe that games are an important learning environment. Better that my kids try to deal with their rage while mashing buttons now than behind the wheel of a car in a few years.

As Rob Lefebvre reports in this week’s issue, there’s a new generation of games called “empathy games” designed to help us understand other people better and hopefully make us nicer to be around.

In a roundabout way, I think GTA has a similar effect. GTA’s not Shakespeare, but it incorporates elements of good literature and cinema – complex story-lines, character development, moral choices, atmosphere, and sometimes jaw-dropping beauty.

The moral choices are gleefully the wrong moral choices, but choices they are. My daughter, the eldest of the lot, is a great example of this. When she plays GTA, she drives within the lines and stops for red lights. She gets pleasure from following the rules, not breaking them.

GTA has much more to contribute than the gleeful killing of streetwalkers. It’s a sly and fascinating satire of America, courtesy of its Scottish developers, who are obviously both amused and appalled by this country. My kids are fans of Colbert and Breaking Bad, too. They get it.

GMIC – Silicon Valley’s largest mobile internet conference – is about to get underway in just a few short weeks. Over 10,000 developers, executives, entrepreneurs and investors from all over the world will descend on San Francisco’s Moscone Center on October 21-23 to talk about all the latest changes in mobile.  Attendees will get to listen to speakers from Facebook, Qualcomm, Y-Combinator, PopCap, and many more, as well as party as hard as some Silicon Valley nerds can muster.

To hype up the conference GMIC hooked us up with two Golden Tickets (valued at $599) which we can’t wait to send to two lucky readers. But first, we just launched our awesome Cult of Mac Magazine in Newsstand a few weeks ago and would much rather promote it instead, so here’s how to enter our contest to win one of the GMIC tickets:

Note: This article originally appeared in the Newsstand magazine” target=”_blank”>Cult of Mac Newsstand issue, Game On!. Grab yourself a copy or subscribe today.

Michael Frauenhofer is an indie developer who currently lives in Pennsylvania. He and his mom made Demon Chic, a story-based, decidedly indie game available for iPad. The game focuses on three roommates trying to live life while battling monsters, giant babies, and floating heads. It’s an experience that turns the traditional idea of monster battles on its head, as the main characters all are really fighting their own inner demons.

Demon Chic is a hallucinogenic trip through the lives of three ordinary people who must learn to live with their illness, not cure it, and find some sort of fulfilling life while doing so.

This ain’t no Angry Birds sequel, folks, so buckle up.

Waking up, looking at your clock, and seeing that you’re late for work or class is one of the worst feelings in the world. In that heart-stopping instant, you feel your control over your life drop into your stomach, and all you can think about is how annoyed or mad or disappointed the people waiting on you are going to be. It’s an adrenaline-drenched nightmare of a moment in which you realize just how quickly you can put your pants on and brush your teeth, and as you bolt out the door to face your fate, you wonder why you can’t always get ready that quickly.

Gary, the hero of developer Noego’s Level 22, is caught in that situation, and the really bad news is that he’s been late to work so many times that if anyone sees him this morning, he will lose his job. So on top of the already stressful situation of being late, he has to sneak his way up to the 22nd floor without anyone seeing him.

That’s right: This is a stealth game about going to work. And it’s every bit as silly and fun as that sounds.

If you’re in the mood for an old-fashioned computer role-playing game but don’t want to go through the dark rites of hardware emulation, Gurk III is a welcome alternative.

Originally released exclusively on Google Play, the Gurk games are bare-bones RPG adventures that pit a small group of adventurers with generated stats against kobolds, goblins, and all sorts of cave-lurking baddies–kind of like the old DOS Shareware title Castle of the Winds.

Fitbit has today announced its new fitness tracker, the Force, which combines all of the features found in the original Fitbit Flex with some of the more advanced features found in the Fitbit One tracker. It costs $129.95, slightly more than the $99 Flex, and it’s available today.

Readdle has this week updated two of its most popular productivity apps for iOS, adding next-generation image processing to Scanner Pro, and a number of new features to Calendars 5. You can now enjoy much-improved scans with better legibility in the former, as well as task creation and an app icon badge in the latter.

Just like those isolated soldiers that used to be discovered from time to time thinking that WWII was still on, years after it had ended, there’s a designer hidden deep in the offices of Porsche who thinks we still need to use USB thumb drives. Yes, it looks beautiful, just like Hiroo Onoda’s doubtlessly crisply-pressed uniform, but that doesn’t make it right.

This story first appeared in our weekly newsstand publication Cult of Mac Magazine. 

Long before Apple’s “Think Different,” ad campaign, before the dot-com boom, before zany became the norm in startup culture, there was Nolan Bushnell, Pong and Atari – the company where Steve Jobs landed his first job.

Bushnell is the godfather of the think different mentality, an unconventional character who ran unconventional companies. He made it a personal mission to attract similarly creative, passionate people to help him to realize some of his ideas, which many people considered wacky at the time.

You’re probably sick of Kickstarter projects that turn your iPad or iPad mini into a giant camera, so here’s something a little different. It’s an iPad mini camera rig, but this one is actually available to buy. Now. From Amazon.

Bitdrop is an interesting new app/service for sending encrypted files to anyone over the internet, with the big advantage that the receiver doesn’t need to install anything. This is pretty good for the paranoid and careful alike, letting you share files using e-mail, but without sending them over the open internet.

Square-Enix has a great habit of porting over their worst Final Fantasy games to iOS without ever giving iPhone or iPad owners the games they really want, like Final Fantasy VI or VII.

That seems to be coming to an end, though: Square-Enix is finally releasing Final Fantasy VI, their best 16-bit Final Fantasy game for the SNES, on iOS.

If you’ve ever traveled internationally and been unlucky or unknowing enough to keep on using your smartphone’s data as if you were still in the fatherland, you’ll know that watching a single YouTube video on a foreign network can result in a few hunded dollars being added to your bill.

International roaming charges are so insane that the European Commission is actually planning to abolish them altogether. But looks like T-Mobile beat them to the punch: the uncarrier is now promising free global data in over 100 different countries, no extra charge.

In a move that’s sure to upset some third-party app developers, Microsoft is planning to launch official Remote Desktop apps for Android and iOS later this month. Like the Remote Desktop solutions for Windows and OS X, the apps will allow you to connect to your PC and control it remotely from your smartphone and tablet.

Yesterday, we saw new pictures of the silver and space gray iPad 5, and today, we see the same thing, shrunk down a spell: the iPad mini 2, in space gray and silver, natch.

Here’s a fantastic tip for iPhoneographers: did you know that you can transfer photos from your Wi-Fi-enabled SD card to your iPad while it is connected to the iPad using the camera connection kit? This amazing nugget was discovered by The iPad For Photographers author Jeff Carlson.

Want a new iPhone 5s or iPhone 5c but don’t have the dosh? If you have any smartphone that can boot up, Best Buy will be running a promotion next week where they’ll let you exchange it for $100 off a new iPhone 5c or 5s.

UPDATE: Looks like FreshPatents isn’t so fresh. Despite labeling this patent as “new,” it seems it was first published back in March. Nevertheless, it’s still a pretty interesting one, so we’ll leave it here for those who haven’t seen it before.

You don’t know the true meaning of pain until you’ve dropped your shiny new iPhone on a hard surface. If you’re lucky, it will land on its back and your case will protect it, but if you’re not, it’ll land flat on its face and you’ll need a new display. But what if there was a way of ensuring it landed on its back every time?

A new Apple patent that covers a “Protective Mechanism for an Electronic Device” describes how future iPhones and other mobile devices could have built-in motors that automatically flip them over in mid-air after they’ve been dropped to protect vulnerable areas.

Behold, the iKettle, a water-boiler that can be almost completely controlled from your iPhone while you laze around in your bed.

There isn’t much to say about Cloudpaint in the cloud other than it’s MacPaint… in your browser. That’s right – go browse to the site and enjoy the wonders of 1984-style B&W ink and square brushes.

The Brother ADS-1500W scanner is the first of a pair of wireless small office/home office scanners the company is releasing this month; the two fall between its recently redesigned portable wireless scanners and its ADS-2500W workhorse.

I remember a few tech bloggers going nuts over Vine when it hit the street back in January. I wasn’t convinced; it seemed too limiting, felt too gimmicky. Vine turned out to be a more creative tool than I’d imagined — at least for others. But the concept never really hooked me enough to want to use it.

Cameo, on the other hand, had my juices flowing almost immediately. Like Vine, Cameo shoots short, six-second HD (720p) clips that can be uploaded to Cameo’s website or shared via social media and email. Unlike Vine, multiple six second shots can be combined into a two-minute (maxiumum) clip, with light editing tools, effects and music added to the mix. And Cameo even lets you collaborate with friends.

The iMessage dot indicator lets you know when the person on the other is ignoring typing you, which can be a wonderful thing. It can also be one of the most annoying things in the world when you see someone start to type and then stop, or supposedly “type” for a long time.

Here’s a mischievous little prank you can play on unsuspecting iMessage users. Go to the website below and save the GIF to your Camera Roll. Just send it to random people and watch frustration ensue. Rinse, then repeat. You’re welcome.

Source: Infinite Text-In-Progress

The year is 2013 and we have all kinds of way to share content between mobile devices, but there still isn’t an easy, frictionless way to send money to someone wirelessly in a secure manner.

Then there’s AirDrop, Apple’s new sharing platform in iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks that’s as easy as dragging and dropping. What if something like that existed for transferring cash between different bank accounts? Simple has the answer with a new feature called MoneyDrop.

If you don’t know what the upcoming fifth-gen iPad is going to look like by now, you just haven’t been paying attention. We’ve seen leaks on leaks of both the next 10-inch iPad and the second-gen iPad mini, each of which sport a slimmer, more streamlined design.

More photos of the iPad 5 in Space Grey and Silver have surfaced, and they look great. The colors match up with the iPhone 5s color options very well, except for one glaring omission: gold.