Cons in the virtual gaming world
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When virtual crime finds its way into online role-playing games, should real-world authorities step in?
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The word "gaming" is making its way onto the whiteboards of advertising conference rooms on a regular basis these days. As a proponent of this industry's viability as a communication platform for brands, I think that's great progress. We've collectively woken up to the fact that pimple-faced teenagers are not the only ones playing games (for those of you not in the know, these guys aren't even the typical game consumers anymore, nor have they been for quite a few years now).
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Dating, negotiating, fragging and making money.  Play and its consequences.
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Vendors collaborate to avoid naked avatars and other incompatibilties among virtual worlds.
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System latency can mean losses for stock traders and virtual death for online gamers. The developer of the EVE Online game hopes high-performance computing tools can save the day for its players.
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Second Life, a Web site that lets subscribers create a virtual character to interact in a fictional online environment, has run into a real world problem after hackers compromised the service's database. Personal data including names, addresses and payment information were leaked.
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Is competition to keep up with the next-gen Joneses slowly running the video-game industry into the ground?  In Game|Life.
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Six days a week, teens crowd the Blue Screen Gaming cybercafe to hunt each other down with assault rifles inside virtual computer worlds. In these video game halls, nobody gets hurt. But real-life violence has flared around some of these businesses, prompting municipal crackdowns.
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It's not just work that's being outsourced from wealthy nations to poorer ones. These days, online gamers in developing countries are being paid to earn virtual goods that wealthier players are too lazy or unskilled to win on their own. By Laila Weir.
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God games in which  players must control virtual people could be educational, says research.
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The basics of gameplay -- competing against opponents, setting records, winning prizes -- are as old as human civilization. We use game models to motivate ourselves, to answer questions and to find creative solutions. Our online lives are just twists on the videogame leader boards. For many, life itself has turned into a game.
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By Clint Cooper, Chattanooga Times/Free Press, Tenn.  Dec. 19--Talk about getting up close and personal with your video game.
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Early Internet entrepreneurs envisioned a day when consumers would devour short bites of entertainment on their computer screens delivered over the Internet by fat broadband pipes. When the companies failed, executives blamed it on ...
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Are online gaming champions the rock stars of the 21st century? Fifty million Koreans canÂt be wrong.
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When you look at gender in virtual worlds, how do you leave your biases behind? For some researchers, you don't. In Sex Drive Daily.
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Second Life, the fast-growing online  site where hundreds of thousands of people play out fantasy  lives online, has suffered a computer security breach that  exposed the real-world personal data of its users.
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Tycho:  As suggested by Gabriel's recent communique, pokemania is not only going strong but has burst, like some foul canker, and the infection has spread.  It's true that I have built a so-called "Leaf Deck," but this is because I was fairly certain they would beat me up if I didn't.  Now he's hauling in his case of Next Quest figurines each day, as I myself once hauled a tacklebox of Necrons, only I need to stress that it was more awesome when I was doing it, because Necrons are unkillable harvesters of flesh and not some kind of weird fox or living scarf.  It's absolutely fucked that I have spent almost fourteen years trying to reveal the subtle glories of table gaming, only to be cast down time and time again.  However wise my counsel, it apparently lacked that crucial munchkin component.    After I completed Half-Life 2: Episode Two - perfectly acceptable entertainment, but nowhere near the revolutions found elsewhere on the same platter - I started to wonder how they would deliver the third episode to the same platform in the next year or so.  I doubt they'll have another four games to accompany it, but who knows:  they're a bizarre company where extraordinary things happen.  Left 4 Dead, Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, and Episode 3 might look pretty nice on there together.  On the PC, of course, one simply clicks a couple times to get whatever they want, and then leverages Valve's fairly incredible community implementation to get things done.  You could accomplish all of this using only the tip of your nose.      On the Playstation 3, even with Valve's distaste for native development, there's already several precedents for direct delivery of individual titles.  On the 360, where Arcade is Microsoft's only concept for delivering titles in their entirety, the hundred and fifty meg limit falls hard around some titles, hemming them in.  But there's a weird (read: psychotic) eyelet where where larger-form product can escape: as content drops for retail titles.  I was surprised that there was no option for this in The Orange Box itself.  Now that Valve is in a position to write a game once and then compile it to different platforms, a retail release - called "Steam," and including two or three catalog titles - could be delivered as an anchor for their considerable franchise power almost in  perpetuity.  After years of fairly positive digital delivery experiences through Steam, I have to say that I found purchasing a Valve product in a retail context almost unpleasant - and not just because it entails hauling around my considerable bulk.  Retail has been a raw deal for a long time now in developer terms, and I avoid it whenever possible.  I should solicit another piece by an insider here for the post, and I know just the guy.  When he breaks down the way royalties work in the industry, you'll be surprised it isn't just Electronic Arts that's left, selling Electronic Arts games in EA branded stores.