Halo 3 – Wii – Guitar Hero – – New York Times

The showcase example is BioShock… one of the most acclaimed games of all time… Yet it failed to crack the Top 10 in sales…Similarly, the role-playing masterpiece Mass Effect, the fabulous mythology vehicle God of War II and Valve’s excellent compilation the Orange Box all failed to crack the Top 10. There is hardly a question that two years ago all of those games would have made the list. Now they have simply been crowded out of the top echelon by less intimidating fare like Guitar Hero.

And perhaps it is not a coincidence that BioShock, Mass Effect and God of War II are all purely single-player games. You can’t play any of them with friends, either over the Internet or on the couch. Nine of the 10 top-selling games of 2007 include a significant multiplayer component…

Virtual Worlds News: Sanrio Launches Hello Kitty World

Gosh, I remember when we were all talking about how huge this would be, a few years ago.

Interestingly, it’s downloadable. Perhaps because it got going a few years ago. 🙂

For Males, Video Game Rewards Are All in the Mind – washingtonpost.com

New research from Stanford scientists shows that the part of the brain associated with reward and addiction was more activated in males than in females when both genders played a game whose object was to acquire more territory.

There were relatively few areas of criticism of my book A Theory of Fun. One of them, however, was that it was sexist, in large part because I suggested that many of the core characteristics of most games were things that cognitively biased them towards systematizing minds (to use Simon Baron-Cohen’s term) — which statistically, biases them towards males.

Read More “Gender brain differences and games”

Project Horseshoe 2007’s report has been posted, and like last year, it’s full of game designy goodness. 🙂