Game Makers Court ÂCasualÂ Players With Shorter, Less Lethal Fare
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The gaming industry is increasingly pursuing casual or coffee-break gamers, those who indulge in short-term play of games including puzzles, solitaire and mah-jongg.
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Makers of online role-playing games aim to attract a diverse crowd--and break out of the fantasy-medieval mold.
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Video games that have players shoot rival gang members, watch bare-breasted women and recreate the assassination of President Kennedy were criticized Tuesday by advocacy
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Sometimes gamemakers produce interesting titles that prove just as amusing to cranky adults as to less-discerning youngsters. Other times they drop the ball, hard. Game reviews of The Golden Compass and EA Playground by Chris Kohler and Lore Sj&#246;berg.
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Viedo game companies, trying to cope with declining sales, are intensifying efforts to lure women to gaming.
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MAKUHARI, Japan  - Japanese game makers, faced  with a shrinking local market and increasing competition from  overseas rivals, are pinning hopes on mobile platforms such as  handheld machines and cellphones to stir up demand.
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Dating, negotiating, fragging and making money.  Play and its consequences.
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The new unit at EA reveals a competitive move that may be anything but casual.
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By Dorsey Griffith, The Sacramento Bee, Calif.  Jun. 22--Everyone knows someone like this: The guy who sits for hours, playing video games, his heart racing as he pummels animated bad guys with controller-driven automatic weapons.
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Video game maker needs to work on its brand management.
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Tycho:   The foe revealed, Armadeaddon is now almost complete.  Monday will see the promised epilogue, so at this point you have very nearly survived the ordeal.  We have endeavored these past weeks to reward the true "enthusiast," that man or woman who, brow heavy, has faced such cruel abuse at our hand for the last seven years.  It is apparently our policy to honor such dedication one every decade.    Since it was announced a couple days ago, the revelation that MS would be actively courting the hardcore boardgame player is something I've thought about almost constantly.  It may be that you weren't aware there was such a thing as a hardcore player of boardgames if your last experience with the context was playing Sorry! with your sister when you were eight.  Things have progressed.   There's a million experiences in this space I could use to lure you in, but one company in particular - Days of Wonder has already decided to make electronic variants of their tabletop crack, so they occupy a twilight space between the worlds.  I hope they see an opportunity to take their (already completed!) games over to the 360, or that Microsoft offers them a locked case containing an unspecified amount of untraceable U.S. Currency, because I'd love to see this prescient move by MS turn into a new era.   Days of Wonder makes a game called Shadows Over Camelot that could quickly become a dangerous obsession, obscuring biological realities with a single-minded focus on grails.  Well, grail I guess.  There's just the one.    But it's a completely cooperative boardgame, so every player is working toward the same goals - fighting back invasions, questing, all of it.  Except there might be a traitor in the group, determined by a hidden draw, who tries to derail the effort.  He's not always there, but the potentiality of that nefarious force can create unbelievable social tension.    The gaming table's fixed coordinate in space is its asset and its obstacle - managing space and time is actually the primary challenge of any gaming group, as opposed to banishing necromancers, though that also ranks up there.  Boardgames are so rich in design that, when one of these gets dropped in front of them on Live, I think many gamers will be shocked at their sophistication.    My thumbs hurt.  (CW)TB out.
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Some video-game veterans plan to announce the formation of a new publisher that they hope will act as the equivalent of an independent film company for small game developers.
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Health care experts are convinced that games can help people get and stay well, but they don't agree on what's the best approach. By Noah Shachtman.
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As video games become more popular than ever, hard-core gamers and the old-school critics who represent them are becoming an ever smaller part of the audience.
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It was a little thing, a tiny moment, a mere speck of the game.
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Simplice Njoya, a University of Memphis basketball forward, sat hunched over a laptop, testing an idea first studied on Israeli fighter pilots. The premise: Skills he picks up playing a complex computer game can make him a better ball player.
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The game, in which characters with their own special moves fight other combatants, has a six button layout that allows players to throw light, medium or hard punches and kicks.