At this point in his career, it's difficult to tell whether Sony Santa Monica creative director David Jaffe is better known for his great games or his brash behavior. The Twisted Metal series of car combat games would have been sufficient to secure Jaffe a place in the console pantheon. But upon the 2005 release of God of War , the side of Jaffe that many only saw privately--fiery, profane and uncompromising--burst into public view and never retreated into the shadows. It was as if the dark odyssey he'd survived to make his magnum opus had transformed him into his own title character; a comparison Jaffe encouraged when he drew parallels between Kratos' raging at the Gods over the Ares-induced murder of his family to the anger Jaffe himself harbored for having embarked on an insanely long and difficult development process that was keeping him away from his wife and child.

The Jaffe of 2007 continues to be outspoken and inflammatory, but he's a workaholic no more. While game director Cory Barlog, executive producer Shannon Studstill and others handle day-to-day development for the God of War series, with Jaffe in an creative oversight role, he has chosen to focus his own game directing efforts on smaller games ("pop songs," as he described them to us last year ) rather than the big-budget epics ("operas") that he's previously been identified with. As he and his team of developers at Incognito were winding down work on Jaffe's first ditty, the party game Calling All Cars, he took some time out of his schedule to answer our Team Assault questions about the extent of his involvement in God of War PSP and God of War III for PS3; why he cancelled the sure-to-have-been controversial PSP game Heartland; and the ongoing tension between his own desires as an artist to spread his wings and those of his fans who want him to keep making large-scale action games.

After completing the first God of War, you assumed the role of creative director for the entire Santa Monica studio. What does that entail? Does that cover the studio's games for Playstation Network like Blast Factor and flOw?

With our first Team Assault series of Q&As behind us, the Level Up staff can now turn its attention to other news. We first considered weighing in on the Virginia Tech shootings on Monday, before any link whatsoever to videogames had been made--Florida attorney and notorious videogame opponent Jack Thompson's rush for the cameras on Fox News notwithstanding--with a piece about the industry battening down its hatches and bracing for the inevitable "He played [Insert Game Here]" stories that would be sure to emerge. After all, a man of Cho Seung-***'s age is far more likely than not to play videogames; it would be like saying that he watched TV or listened to music, but that wouldn't prevent hordes of pundits, many of whom don't play games, from opining that [Insert Game Here] caused Cho to murder his fellow students and instructors.

Then the Washington Post, NEWSWEEK's sister company, put up an online story and blog post reporting that "several Korean youths who knew Cho Seung *** from his high school days said he was a fan of violent video games, particularly Counterstrike [sic], a hugely popular online game published by Microsoft, in which players join terrorism or counterterrorism groups and try to shoot each other using all types of guns." Our editors were now interested the reactions of developer and publisher of Counter-Strike, so we reached out to them for comment. Once again, the news overtook our reporting speed. A publicist at Microsoft, which published the Xbox version of Counter-Strike, informed us that the Washington Post had removed the reference to Counter-Strike from the print and online versions of the piece. We consulted with our editors once more, and were told to stand down on this angle unless we had confirmation that Cho played the game.

In hindsight, we're glad that we didn't weigh in on the Virginia Tech massacre sooner because we're not convinced that we had anything particularly interesting to say. Instead, we turned to some people who did. NEWSWEEK senior writer Peg Tyre, whose book "The Trouble With Boys," will be published by Crown in September 2008, wrote:

Some experts say when we push that kind of zero tolerance for violence on children we are getting it exactly wrong. Children, and particularly boys, are acutely sensitive to the violence around them. They play out violent themes to help relieve themselves of the natural fear and confusion they feel. Jane Katch, a longtime kindergarten teacher and author of "Under Dead Men's Skin: Discovering the Meaning of Children's Violent Play" (Beacon Press), says these outlets are vital. "Thinking about violence and playing about violence is not the same thing as being violent. When we tell them not to pretend to shoot things, we don't teach them not to do it, we teach them to lie." Fed up, one teacher recently told me that she'd develop her own, post-post- Columbine code: as long as everyone is laughing, then pretend shooting is OK.

You can read her piece here.