Sentient world: war games on the grandest scale
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Sim Strife Perhaps your real life is so rich you don't have time for another.â¦
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Tycho:  There was so much news, we had to poke it with a schtick.  I'm allowed one or two puns like that a year.  At least, I hope.    The value of each leisure minute has increased exponentially since the holiday deluge began, that's not precisely news, but the games that are losing out over here are of such a high caliber that it's a little scary.  I downloaded the demo for PGR4 and loved it, in fact I still play it - I'm playing it right now, and you would be horrified if you knew how.  This said, I have no idea where I would fit this game into my life.  This is patently ridiculous - a game of this obvious polish and pedigree would command that tray for weeks at any other time of the year.  We're both in love with Zelda, but can so rarely consummate this love as bright baubles are constantly rolling in.  Gabriel doesn't even make time for nightly Halo - his evening is entirely routed to The Lion War.  When Call of Duty 4 hits on the fifth of November, I have plans to betray our collective in a similar fashion.    The time I did have yesterday wasn't even invested in the long-form retail games that I see as the core of my responsibility to you.  Every moment not devoted to Halo was soaked up by Every Extend Extra Extreme, an XBLA game I had already played on the Playstation Portable and the PC, only to find that its true calling was on the console.  Another game with a strong audio focus from the creators of Lumines and Meteos, the entire objective is to blow yourself up in such a way as to create the most casualties - I can't wait until Jack gets ahold of this one.  It has other modes, but that's the basic idea, and of course it's all very abstract.  Like other games from Q Entertainment, how much you derive from it is often a function of how open you are to its audiovisual synergies.  It's fun, but that fun is not a result of complex systems.      I also picked up Everyday Shooter for the PS3, in further dereliction of my duties, having a series of profound experiences with it that might be too strange to describe.  The game's author expresses a debt of gratitude toward Q's Mizuguchi and others, but he's accomplished something wholly his own here.  Superficially it's one of these dual analog, robotronian shooters every platform is weighed down with now.  Don't be fooled by that trope, and certainly don't think you can come to any conclusions based on screenshots.  Where Lumines or Every Extend Extra draws from electronica, a great match for their style of presentation, Everyday Shooter disarms the player with a suite of earnest, analog songs played on guitar.  At times, during the course of ordinary play, I felt as though I were interrupting him.     In gameplay terms, each level apparently plays around with the idea of chains and combinations, and I say "apparently" because I've only played two levels in - every time I die, I get sucked in by his menu.  It's just a bunch of text, but moving down or right produces a single note, and pressing left or up produces a two note chain.  Pressing a face button produces a string of four notes, and with these rude tools one can actually augment the title music quite well.  I didn't realize I was doing it at first.  When Gabriel came in perhaps fifteen minutes later, I felt as though I had been woken from a dream.
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Tycho:  With PAX coming up this weekend (!!!), we didn't really have time on Friday to invest in Virgil's Wikiscanner - that mystical oracle that takes a raw IP range and then excretes a list of that organization's Wikipedia edits.  This is the pulsing, possibly Martian device that dished up last week's awesome Electronic Arts edits.    I wasn't sure if we should feel sorry for them or not - now that EA is situated in the number two slot, does that make them the scrappy underdog? - but I quickly realized it probably doesn't matter.  They can come right out and say "Yes, we edit it all the time," mischaracterize the nature of the edits, and by the time it's on the second page the events in question never happened.  People don't remember anything these days that isn't on the first page of their feed aggregators. In any case, the entire affair is talking place  on Wikipedia.  Kudzu will grow over the propaganda soon enough.    Though time was indeed in short supply, we did fritter some portion of it pawing through ancient email headers, scraping for filth on old enemies.  Or enemies with whom we have resumed talks.  Or enemies who are now friends!  Even people I hope to make enemies in the future by my careless commentary must fall beneath the scanner's baleful eye.    Like a chugging trawler, we hauled up net after net of treasure onto the deck, sifting it on hands and knees.  I'd never expose it, of course - sparking a desperate arms race to find self-serving commentary is a conflict I'm likely to lose.  And with the deep catalogue of nemeses we've inspired worldwide (and even below the world, in the warrens of the pale Gambrya, where hate is eternal) it's not what I'd call a fabulous scenario.  For us, at least; no doubt, our foes have already begun their malevolent harvest.
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God games in which  players must control virtual people could be educational, says research.
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Tycho:  We still think about Eye of Judgment quite a bit - sometimes I will sit in silence and think about it, or think about it while I lay dormant in my charge casket.  I think about placing cards carefully on its luxurious cloth mat, smirking as distant foes are gnawed by my lizard proxies.  We are overjoyed (joymax!) that they stuck with the new concept, the card thing, as opposed to the brutally sardonic original.    I don't like constantly being pushed to pre-order things, but there is also a point (it would be easy to graph) where I'm not willing to let fate's whimsical machinery determine what I play.  So during a recent mall run I put down some money on whatever I could remember at the time - unscientifically, it was Metroid, Stranglehold, Halo, Stuntman, and Mass Effect.  This doesn't account for everything between now and November, certainly, but it kind of felt like a quiz show and I was intimidated.  Then I remembered Eye of Judgement and its manifold pleasures, endeavoring to append it, listwise.  It was at this point that "John" told us that both the game and the Playstation Eye peripheral had been cancelled.    At this assertion Gabriel stood up straight and still, like a meerkat.    "No, it wasn't," said he, quietly.  A cold quiet, like space.        When I am confronted with mere distortions of facts, I can typically slice through them to the beating truth.  But when a person says something that is flatly false, this is very disorienting for some reason and I am without my mind's full power.  Then the guy compounded things by saying they had very few preorders, and this was accompanied by a sneer, as though the number of preorders was some crucial consideration when assessing quality.  He actually thought it was funny that I wanted to buy it.    I wanted to ask him if he understood that a product not being available for preorder and a product not existing, or never being allowed to exist constituted profoundly different states, but these are the deep thoughts that occur to a person while they are tucking in at the food court and not when they are face to face with strange men at the EB.       When we returned from the store, almost as if on cue the product began to appear at online retailers - for sixty dollars.  Yes, that's correct.  The Playstation Eye peripheral plus the card game, for ten dollars more than a Sixaxis?  I won't say that I expected extortion, but I at least expected profit.  Assuming you have the Triple already in hand, they're making the Eye (and Eye of Judgment) an easy decision.    Let me take a moment to welcome PAX attendees to this year's celebration, even though it isn't especially useful to readers in Glasgow.  I hope the new venue is to your liking.   Be kind to each other, even to your defeated foes!  And be kind to your Enforcers, for they have toiled in your service.
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A number cruncher wants to use the cost of in-world oral gratification to compare virtual worlds' economies. In Game|Life.
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The military has quietly become an industry leader in video-game design, creating games to train and even recruit the soldiers of the PlayStation generation. Will virtual boot camp make combat more real or more surreal?
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You have a motorcycle, you're besieged by demons, your head is on fire. How could a video-game maker botch a winning formula like that? By Lore SjÃ¶berg.
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Game designers work to distill the magic that gives a game broad, mainstream appeal. Susan Arendt reports from the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Plus: Full GDC coverage in Game|Life.
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Readers chime in on the future of video games and the dehumanizing pace of modern life.
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The next big use for iRobot's bots: patrolling international borders.
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Editors: Shlomo Reifman and Samantha N. Wong Researchers: Joshua Brandt, Fei Mei Chan,  Andrew T. Gillies, Soo Jeong, Edward Knudsen,  Artie Kwok, John Ray and Jody Yen Programmer: Carl Subick
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As I write this article a war is going on on the battlefield of the browsers (programs for surfing the internet such as Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox).
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Imagining hundreds of outage-related micro-dramas unfolding simultaneously.
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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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Virtual drudgery comes to Second Life. In Game|Life.
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Defcon, the global nuclear war game, is available for free play this weekend.