So a funny thing happened to me on the way back from L.A. I was digging through some of the magazines I picked up at E3 only to find something very odd. In the letter section of BOTH the most recent XBN (Xbox Nation) and Play they offer a letter that is not just similar, but exact. And while some people never get one letter published, this gentleman, Scott Whitmore, gets two published! This didn't sit right with the staff at Defunct Games, and I thought I'd personally show the difference between responses ... and then perhaps take a stab at cleaning this whole mess up. Let's take a look at the letter.

How many of you gamers out there are Christians???
-Scott Whitmore

A simple letter, and one that could easily have been mailed out to many, perhaps ALL of the video game magazines. However, in my best count, only two actually published Scott's letter, and I think you'll find they both had extremely different takes in their response.

Play (June 2002, issue 006): Scott, 12,133,611 at last count

XBN (Summer 2002, issue 03): If you're asking about the Xbox Nation staff, we have two snake worshippers, a reformed Holy Roller who's now an atheist who believes in God, and a guy who routinely bows down to a picture of Lorenzo Lamas. Oh, and our freelances are all voodoo shamans.

Personally I feel that religion should be taken entirely out of the video game world. Not to say that religion can't be expressed in video games, but one doesn't stand out side the movie theater asking people what God they believe in, and frankly, it's bad form to do it here, too. That's just my opinion, though.