Around a month ago, Bethesda announced a Fallout 3 (Xbox 360, PS3, PC) perk making contest, and 17,000 entries made their way into the Bethesda gaming vaults, hoping to become the next Fallout perk. Well, Bethesda has announced the winner of its Fallout 3 perk making contest, and we can certainly tell you right now... it's not us!

Find out who won after the jump!

Yes, we love our violent video games, but the truth is, we're entitled to them. Most of us gamers are over 18 after all, so we should be considered "mature" enough to handle and at the same time be entertained by all the blood, sex, and gore that we immerse ourselves in while playing our favourite games.

The problem with that, is that's all that the outside world thinks about us. Outsiders generally view the gaming sub-culture as a collection of violence addicted pre-pubescent-underage or overage-yet-still-stuck-in-the-basement, pimply anti-social avoidant, self indulgent, will never enjoy the company of the opposite sex, individuals. Despite the presence of gamer-culture/geel-culture centric websites and TV channels, a lot of old farts in power still don't "get it."

They tend to forget that a lot of gamers now-a-days aren't only young people who play games, but are people who make art, people who earn billions making games, people who have children of their own, and people who are care.

Think of this post as a collection of recent news stories that show very good examples of how we gamers should represent ourselves to the world.

Giving back to the community...

You've got to hand it to those guys from Penny-Arcade, they know how to give back to the community. They really do their best to make claims that say that gamers are know-nots or that gamers are violence addicted yahoos irrelevant. For one thing, officials of the Child's Play Charity, a gamer-focused toy drive organized by Penny Arcade, has recently announced that more than $495,000 worth of toys, games, and books on the wish lists of more than 35 participating children's hospitals have been donated as part of the gamer supported charity.

It doesn't stop there. The annual charity auction dinner of Child's Play is set to be held next week. All proceeds from the auction will be set to assist hospitals within the charity's network. This year's dinner is scheduled to take place on Wednesday December 13 in Bellevue, Washington.

Items up for bid this year include a Wii console autographed by Reggie Fils-Aime, a speaking line in Halo 3, a PS3 console, an appearance in the Penny Arcade comic strip, Penny Arcade artwork, tickets to the Halo 3 launch party, an Xbox 360, ATI Radeon video cards, collectors edition of Guildwars Nightfall, and a whole lot more.

With items like those, people will definitely bid.

Get the rest of the article after the Jump!

Last year we posted an article that the PS3 would use the next-gen High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) to support HD video output. HDMI, for the uninitated, is an industry-supported, uncompressed, all-digital audio/video interface. HDMI interfaces between any compatible digital audio/video source (e.g. PS3) and a compatible digital audio and/or video monitor. HDMI, according to industry analysts, is set to replace the Digital Visual Interface (DVI) in consumer electronics products by 2008.

At last week's Computex 2006, new info on HDMI finally emerged with a "But" and a "However." The HDMI group, composed of several companies, announced that the HDMI 1.2 will be upgraded to a new version called HDMI 1.3. 

The HDMI 1.2 specifications are:

• Support for One Bit Audio format, such as SuperAudio CD's DSD (Direct Stream Digital)
• Changes to offer better support for current and future PCs with HDMI outputs, including:
• Availability of the widely-used HDMI Type A connector for PC sources and displays with full support for PC video formats
• Ability for PC sources to use their native RGB color-space while retaining the option to support the YCbCr CE color-space
• Requirement for HDMI 1.2 and later displays to support future low-voltage (i.e., AC-coupled) sources, such as those based on PCI Express I/O technology

Meanwhile HDMI 1.3 will support a feature called "deep color" that allows devices to process and display a great number of colors. In addition, its bandwidth will be upgraded from 165MHz to 225MHz (but can go up to 450MHz if necessary). The increased bandwidth enables displays to handle 1080i at 60Hz with 36-bit RGB color or 1080p with 90Hz refresh rate with 36-bit color. The new HDMI 1.3 will also support Dolby HD and DTS-HD audio standards (v1.2 only supports Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS standards). Nice, huh?

Here comes the "But..."

Unfortunately for early adopters of the HDMI 1.2 - including the PS3 (which already supports "deep color") - the new features of HDMI 1.3 cannot be enabled by either firmware or driver upgrades. While both the Blu-ray and HD-DVD specifications call for support of "deep color," they have yet to release any statement indicating support for it or any feature of HDMI 1.3.

Here comes the "However..."

The HDMI Group said ATI and NVIDIA can readily incorporate the new HDMI 1.3 standard into GPUs and cards.