PUBLIC MARKS with tags gaming & 2006

You get the same vibe off the most popular gaming sites in the English- speaking world, the casual game portals: EA's Pogo, Miniclip, Yahoo! Games, Microsoft's MSN Games, RealNetworks' GameHouse, Big Fish Games and many more. These lookalike sites are "portals" because they aggregate dozens or hundreds of casual games from many indie designers. Some big portals are mere front ends for faceless distributors like Oberon Media or Boonty.

The aim of the 2nd annual North American Game-On Conference (GameOn'NA 2006) is to bring together academics, researchers and games people from North America in order to exchange ideas on higher-level concepts that contribute to the field of computer gaming research.

This week we're talking to Scott Jennings, a man better known as Lum the Mad. He's just released his book Massively Multiplayer Gaming for Dummies, and we talk to him about the world-wide phenomenon that is online gaming.

Some brilliant ideas came out of gaming engineers...

Recent research has begun to elucidate the key principles of learning that well-designed games can and do embody. At the same time, the broader social significance of gaming culture has become a topic for scholarship across a diversity of fields. Games and simulations do not only reveal new worlds in the virtual realm, they also inspire new world views in the physical one. A vast range of videogames and game-related literature has found its way into curriculum, business, entertainment, and government across the country. Millions of people play, both for work and for recreation – and they participate in ongoing economic and social change as a result. As interest in videogames intensifies and the number of events dedicated to their discussion increases, it is crucial that issues of learning and the social role of games do not get lost in the equally worthy cause of industry-building.

Very few RPG series stand the test of time. Sure, a few sequels might spring up here and there over the course of a few years, but how many of them last for over a decade? I can think of a couple, like Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, Zelda, and perhaps a few others. These all have their charm and place in gaming history, to be sure. There is one franchise, however, that while not exactly a series per se, it has endured in one incarnation or another for almost fifteen years.

Mobile gaming is changing from its early days of rip-offs of classic, low-tech 2D games and ugly 3D games that are too ambitious for the platform. As a gaming platform it's gaining momentum in a big way.

A few weeks ago, there was a post on GamerGod which listed the 10 most interesting people in games 2005. While some of those who made the cut were arguably admirable, it was a hugely US-biased list

Ten years ago, Sony brought three dimensions, as well as the concept of "maturity", to the video gaming masses. And yet, when many people think back to the "PlayStation era", a hyper realistic character in a 3D landscape doesn't necessarily come to mind. Instead, they think of a flat cartoony dog that could rap.

Graphics and images have been an integral part of every game ever made -- it's a visual medium, after all. What you see is what you get. Even the most primitive games that couldn't draw proper images onscreen at least gave you ASCII art or text. And so it went, throughout gaming history, until Parappa the Rapper finally brought a new sense into play: in NanaOn-Sha's PSone masterpiece, you had to rely on your ears as much as your eyes.

Atari's token entry into the handheld market during the classic era was actually a portable version of its unsuccessful coin-op game. Touch Me was a simple yet addictive game but never caught on, but its fun factor was confirmed by the popularity of Milton Bradley's Simon (an imitation of Touch Me by Ralph Baer), which proved to be a runaway best seller for the toy giant.

In Play Between Worlds, T. L. Taylor examines multiplayer gaming life as it is lived on the borders, in the gaps--as players slip in and out of complex social networks that cross online and offline space. Taylor questions the common assumption that playing computer games is an isolating and alienating activity indulged in by solitary teenage boys. Massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), in which thousands of players participate in a virtual game world in real time, are in fact actively designed for sociability. Games like the popular Everquest, she argues, are fundamentally social spaces.

We're all familiar with Japanese box art being changed for Americans, whether they alter the art style completely or replace minimalistic covers with garish Photoshopped collages. Just as interesting is how they taken American or European games and market them in Japan. This is a small comparison gallery of some of the more interesting changes. Most of these images were yanked from Amazon Japan and Lik Sang, so, uh, patronize them, I guess.