Grinding on the Treadmill
September 2, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Last week, Destructoid ran coverage of a couple of guys who fashioned homebrew treadmills and wired them up to World of Warcraft. They then filmed a dorky costumed performance of an obviously exhausting run across Azeroth: Is this exercise? Sure, but it's mostly geekery. I can't imagine the pair will leave their rig set up, let alone use it for their daily workout. But if you stop to think about it, WoW jogging is more similar to real exercise regimens than it seems. Wii Fit and other explicit exercise games promise to make the drudgery of exercise more palatable by ...

Gimmickry, or How Exergaming Went Mainstream
August 25, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

I've been thinking about exercise games lately, primarily due to an onslaught of new games, devices, and initiatives. For example, we've got Footgaming, a sort of promotional blog for a student fitness program called Generation Fit. The group hopes to support casual and educational play with a peripheral called FootPOWR. Judy Shasek, the program's proponent, argues that physical activity contributes to both fitness and academic success. Then there's Wii Sqweeze (pictured at top right), from Interaction Laboratories. The device promises isometric upper body exercise via shoulder abduction and adduction, wrought via a two-handled pumping interface with attached wiimote. There's reason ...

The Clintons on SNES
August 14, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

For some reason, it was possible to select then-White House occupants Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, or Al Gore as players in NBA Jam Tournament Edition for SNES. The White House routinely issues cease and desist notices for using the President's likeness for marketing, but this wasn't exactly marketing, exactly. One of the features of NBA Jam TE were hidden characters from outside of sports, including Will Smith, the Beastie Boys, and Prince Charles. It's unclear to me what if any likeness reproduction rights Acclaim acquired for these characters back in the early 1990s. I'd love to know. (Thanks to Dakota) ...

Atari Licenses Too Good to be True
August 11, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Our readers probably know well my interest, even obsession, with both the Atari VCS and licensed games. As Nick and I put the final touches on our forthcoming book on the Atari, I've been doing a lot of final fact confirmation online. In the process of doing so this weekend I fell upon some of the best ideas that, alas, never really were for the system, thanks to the Van Gogh-Gogh's comedy site. The first: Interactive 8-tracks! We've discussed music-game tie ins before (1, 2), but nothing compares to the concept of a double-ender 8-track/Atari VCS game. The fake ad ...

Go Buy Braid
August 7, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

If you own an Xbox 360, it is imperative that you go buy Jonathan Blow's newly released game Braid immediately. There are lots of good reasons to do this, for example, the game is unique, beautiful, subtly meaningful, and important. But if that's not convincing, or you think it's not your style, or whatever other excuse might come to mind, I'll give you a more fundamental reason: Jon has spent the last couple years working on the game, practically alone (David Hellman composed the terrific evocative art for the game), and its important to support that sort of creativity and ...

Simulating Torture
June 26, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Thanks to an article by regular MSNBC game columnist Winda Benedetti about it today, Torture Game 2 has been popping up on blogs and in my inbox. In the game (which is really more of a toy, if that's a fair word for it), the player can inflict a variety of bloody punishments on a rag doll physics-driven character dangling from a rope. Torture methods include spikes, gunfire, razor, ropes, and chainsaw, among others. In the article, Benedetti waxes discrepant, first admitting her disappointment upon learning that the game's 19 year-old creator had seemingly little in mind when he created ...

Pictures for Truth, an Amnesty International Game
June 9, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Pictures for Truth is a game about human rights violations in China, and also the first game developed for Amnesty International, according to its developers. Created by a group of professional game developers and volunteers from Quebec in their off time, the game puts the player in the role of a journalist called to help a Chinese colleague detained by police. Somewhat like Global Conflicts, you must investigate via conversation and exploration to obtain enough information to write stories that publicize the problems at hand. like every game that takes the journalist's perspective, the player gets an outsider's sense of ...

Ubisoft to Publish Smoking Cessation Game for DS
May 29, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

According to our friends at Kotaku, Ubisoft is bringing a videogame version of Allen Carr's popular Easy Way to Stop Smoking book/method to Nintendo DS this fall. The press release says very little about the game, and really very little in general, but clearly they are borrowing a page from Nintendo, who brought Dr. Ryuta Kawashima's book Train Your Brain: 60 Days to a Better Brain to the DS as the popular title Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day! ...

Making Room for Wii Fit
May 20, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

At the end of the chapter on exercise in Persuasive Games, I briefly discussed the problems exercise games pose to home use. A student and a colleague did a study and wrote an ACM article about how people negotiate space and play with big controllers like those used for DDR and Guitar Hero. With the release of Wii Fit, these issues are coming to the fore once again. GameCritics.com is running a poll asking people if they have enough room to play Wii Fit (Yes, No, Yes if I move furniture). The results are ongoing, and based on only a ...

iTunes App Store can reject you for any reason
May 7, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Following my occasional series of gripes about Apple openness (1, 2, 3, 4), I thought I'd share a part of the agreement iPhone application developers must accept in order to be able to publish to the forthcoming iTunes App Store: 6.2 Selection by Apple for DistributionYou understand and agree that Apple may, in its sole discretion:(a) determine that Your Application does not meet all or any part of the Documentation or Program Requirements then in effect;(b) reject Your Application for distribution for any reason, even if Your Application meets the Documentation and Program Requirements; or(c) select and digitally sign Your ...

Libery City Satire
April 30, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

In case you didn't notice, Grand Theft Auto IV was released yesterday. The coverage is predictably overwhelming, although standing out among the noise about sales records and politicians is Heather Chaplin's piece on NPR's All Things Considered, which includes a series of interviews with GTAIV writer Lazlow Jones. I've criticized Rockstar before for failing to put people in front of the media to discuss their games, so this is a welcome change of pace. Jones's thesis about the game is summed up in the call-out quote near the top, "It's a satire of not only New York, but of American ...

NASA MMO Update: Brains Pulled, not Funding
April 23, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Earlier this week I reported that NASA had pulled the $3m worth of funding previously committed to an educational MMO project. Other reliable sources ran the same story (1, 2, 3). Sean Hollister wrote a new story on the topic, including some interview material from Daniel Laughlin, one of the NASA project managers and recent WCG commenter. Here's the gist of Hollister's piece: Yes, NASA lost the $3m, but they have another $2m. But, they're not going to spend that on game development. Instead they're going to spend it on "education experts" and NASA insiders The non-reimbursable Space Act Agreement ...

NASA MMO Budget Cut from $3m to $0
April 21, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

(Updated here, 23 April) A while back, NASA started talking about a large-scale, well-funded MMO they wanted to make for educational purposes. The organization published a Request for Information (RFI) that claimed "A high quality synthetic gaming environment is a vital element of Nasa's educational cyberstructure." The goals of the project were to "foster career exploration opportunities in a much deeper way than reading alone would permit and at a fraction of the time and cost of an internship program." The reported budget for the project was a respectable $3 million. Today, the Second Life Herald reports comes news that ...

Air Traffic Chaos
April 17, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Finally something to look forward to! Majesco announces Air Traffic Chaos for Nintendo DS! In Air Traffic Chaos, aspiring air traffic controllers use the touch screen to manage takeoffs, gate assignments, and landings for all incoming and outgoing airport traffic for 14 different airlines in varying weather conditions. As someone obsessed with both air travel and mundane work experiences (having made games about both), this is a must-have. Sure, you can get ATC Simulator for Windows, and some may remember Kennedy Approach for Atari/Amiga/C64, but now we have an air traffic control game you can play while actually waiting to ...

GDC 2008: Wii Fit, Creating a Brand New Interface for the Home Console
February 20, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

(Takao Sawano on Wii Fit) Wii Fit was released in Japan Dec 1, 2007. This title was first shown at last year's E3 and you may already be familiar with it. Just to make sure, here are some commercials currently being aired on Japanese television. The ads included a demonstration of a height/weight tool, a calisthenics game, a yoga game, a party dancing kind of game. The Japanese version of Wii Fit. sold over 1.4 million copies since the release two months ago. European release is planned for April, North America for May. There are two major components: the Wii ...

Wii Fit Sits Still
January 24, 2008 - by Ian Bogost

Recently I wrote an article about meditation and games, suggesting that most existing attempts to relax through gameplay are broken. Among alternatives, I pointed to Guru Meditation, an Atari VCS game I had made to be used with the Amiga Joyboard. To play, the player sits still on the device. Today, Kotaku posts a video of what appears to be one of the minigames from Wii Fit, which appears to boast exactly the same mechanic, as at least one Kotaku commenter noted. Of course, it's hard for me to claim originality here, since I borrowed the idea from the original ...

Will there ever be politics in Second Life?
December 30, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Those of you who keep up with game industry news already know that Cory Ondrejka has left his post as CTO of Linden Lab, creators of Second Life. Cory is a respected friend, and I will be interested to see what he does next. On Friday, Cory mused on his last day on his new blog, Collapsing Geography. That may be one you want to add to your readers. More directly related to our interests on this site, however, is Cory's discussion of one of his 2007 predictions, which have become a Terra Nova tradition. ...

Spoof Research: Wii Not Active Enough Exercise
December 24, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Were you lucky enough to find a Wii console to put under the tree this year? Were you planning to engorge yourself at Christmas dinner tomorrow and then work off all that excess with a family session on Wii Sports? Well, it's not gonna work, according to a study in the British Medical Journal. As summarized in a BBC article last week, Wii play increased energy output by 60kcal, a "trivial" figure according to the report. Researchers did acknowledge that playing such games "stimulated positive activity behaviours," which perhaps would encourage more frequent, more intense activity of the kind necessary ...

My new column: The Holly and the Ivy
December 23, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

With Christmas almost here, this month's edition of my "Persuasive Games" column at Gamasutra is about holiday-themed games. It's not an attempt to write a complete history by any means, but I mention a few kinds of such games, although mostly I wonder why our medium doesn't follow packaged goods, film and others in taking advantage of the season. In addition to all the holiday-themed packaged goods and decorations, all the various media industries take advantage of the holidays. Film studios produce well-timed, if sometimes shoddy, holiday dramas and romantic comedies. Music labels release holiday albums and singles. Book publishers ...

Spurn-A-Bear
December 20, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

You know Build-A-Bear? It's a retail store that allows kids to construct custom plush toys by choosing different styles, parts, and accessories. I recently learned via Leigh Alexander that the company is about to release a virtual world based on their gimmick. As much as I loathe these kiddie virtual worlds, the concept behind Build-A-Bearville does make some sense. When you purchase a real bear, you can get an avatar version as well and play minigames with it in the virtual world. Sure it makes me want to claw my eyes out of my head and feed them to the ...

Imagine Game History
October 4, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Brian, Alice, and Leigh all wrote something snarky about Ubisoft's newly announced Imagine line for girls. They are right to point out the explicit, troubling, simplistic gender roles the games endorse. But none of them manage to locate these games historically. Videogame critics, bloggers, players, and journalists have a very short memory, and little sense for history. This makes it hard to remember that Babyz was first released in 1999, created by PF Magic, the same company that did the original pet sims Dogz and Catz (collectively Petz) in 1995. Ubisoft bought the rights to the Petz line in the ...

Persuasive Games: The Reverence of Resistance
September 11, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Gamasutra has published my latest "Persuasive Games" column, this one on the Manchester Cathedral controversy in popular PS3 shooter Resistance: Fall of Man. I take a fairly different position than A cynic, unbeliever, or Internet troll might point out the irony of the church pointing the finger, given the millennia-old history of church-sponsored violence. A gamer might rely on the title's status as fantasy fiction to nullify the validity of affront. Such impressions are merely instrumental attempts to foil the church’s parry rather than reasoned attempts to justify the expressive ends served by depicting the cathedral in the game. And ...

Army of Two's Political Agenda
September 9, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

There's a good interview up at Gamasutra with Chris Ferriera, lead designer of the forthcoming EA Montreal shooter Army of Two. Fans might know the game for its innovations in collaborative play, but Ferriera discusses the title's political content and inspiration -- private military contractors (PMCs) -- in encouraging detail. We take [the characters] from their days in Delta Force, and their days as Navy SEALs, and their start as PMCs and how they get trained. We unveil the corruption behind the military privatization, and we explain the problems that poses to society and to America, and the world, when ...

Persuasive Games Wii-bound?
August 21, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

I've been really hard on Nintendo over the past year about their support for independent development (here, here, and here, for example). So part of me wants to eat my words a bit, since Persuasive Games just got our Wii developer approval letter late last week. At the very least, I can no longer claim that Nintendo will be using their first party licensing restrictions to perform de-facto content policing. We still have to see how the WiiWare channel really works, of course. There's no question that I'm looking forward to having a go on the gadget to see what ...

Wii vs iPhone product launches
July 2, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

I've previously groused about the fact that the Wii's scarcity undermines Nintendo's claims that the console will significantly expand the gaming market. I also argued that the scarcity affected the expansion of licensed Wii developers, an issue that still remains unresolved despite Nintendo's recent announcement of the WiiWare downloadable channel. Wii supply still outstrips demand (you still can't buy one on Amazon.com, for example). I haven't yet seen a comparison of the Wii's launch with the recent launch of the iPhone, but I'd be curious to see someone compare the two launches. ...

WiiWare's Unanswered Questions
June 28, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

I have the reputation of the resident cynic regarding Nintendo's long unmet promise to independent developers on the Wii. So, I'm trying to get excited about yesterday's WiiWare announcement. The reason I'm not there yet comes from a number of important uncertainties in the announcement and press coverage of it. ...

Fils-Aime on Nintendo's Future Move
June 10, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

In an interview with the San Jose Mercury News, Nintendo of America President Reggie Fils-Aime discussed the company's planned move from Seattle to Silicon Valley. Among other justifications were the following comments: Fils-Aime said Nintendo hoped to develop more software that blends an entertainment experience with an educational or informational use, such as a DS product in Japan that provides food recipe details. Sounds promising right? We'll have to see what comes of it, and in particular if Nintendo intends to do this themselves or increase their collaborations with third-parties. ...

No touching at this dance
May 7, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

The folks over at Applied Sciences have designed a prototype for a pressureless Dance Dance Revolution controller. Instead of activating the directional arrows by pressing buttons, the player does so by interrupting lasers beamed across the device. A different pattern of interruptions corresponds with a specific button press. The prototype uses a USB interface and, as the creators point out, it could theoretically be used to play any game that uses directional keys. Gizmodo lavished praise upon the gadget, but I'm not so sure. While the photo at right is compelling, you can't actually see the lasers while the thing ...

Wario Iwata
May 3, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Kotaku points us to the most recent Nintendo investor's briefing, in which Satoru Iwata makes a number of cranky comments. My favorite is this one, about the US lagging behind the rest of the world in sales expectations: When I received a report from the U.S. that they sold 1 million Pokémon Diamond & Pearl already, I asked them, "why did you sell only 10,000 Brain Age last week, when Europe sold through 30,000?" This is a typical example of how I communicate with our people in the U.S. If that segment of customers is encouraged to buy a significant ...

No Marriage, Gay or Otherwise, in Middle Earth
April 28, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

One of our more popular posts here on Water Cooler Games is a mention three years ago about gay marriage in The Sims 2. Just last week, Turbine and Midway released The Lord of the Rings Online, sure to become an absurdly over-discussed and possibly popular massively multi-player game. The debate seems to have begun around the very topic of gay marriage. Today, Salon published a story by Katherine Glover: Why can't gay dwarves get married in Middle-earth?. Apparently Turbine's solution to the quandary was just to pull marriage from the game entirely. The article covers many themes, including social ...

You can never have too many guitar peripherals
April 17, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

I'm fascinated by physical interface peripherals of all kinds. In particular, I'm very interested in how peripherals influence players' perceptions of their living space. A new article from the Reuters wire explores this topic: Game accessories strain relationships, decor. The basic premise is that peripherals like Guitar Hero axes and bongos and the like take up a lot of room and they are ugly. Those beloved guitars are even cited as "a particularly egregious affront to interior design." The article suggests that plastic peripherals may be the man's equivalent of the stereotypical closet (or floor) full of shoes. That premise ...

How to Extract Mii's on your Mac
March 27, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

My Mii obsession continues. Here's how to extract Mii's and use them on your computer. This a Mac OS X only thing, sorry PC goons. Go get the Mii Transfer application. Make sure Bluetooth is on before you run it. Load Mii's onto your Wiimote from your console Run Mii Transfer and save them to files Open the .mii binary files up in Mii Editor (use File/Load). Click File again in Mii Editor and extract a Jpeg. The resulting images are NOT perfect (for example, the hair falls behind rather than in front of the eyebrows,a and the small beard ...

American Idol Mii's
March 23, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

I have no idea why I did this. I was writing all day, and my brain started to fry, and I went downstairs to play some Wii Play billiards. I must have been reeling still from the Life of a Mii segment, and I started creating Mii's. Somehow I ended up creating one of the remaining American Idol contestants. And then it started to seem like a good idea to make all of them. So, here you go, here's the ten remaining: I'm not sure how I'll lord my god-like power over them. I could delete one each week. Or ...

Indies continue to wait for Wii support
February 19, 2007 - by Ian Bogost

Back in November, I revealed in a column at Serious Games Source that despite their stated intention to support independent work, Nintendo wasn't planning to review independent developer applications for Wii dev kits until January 2007. We just got an update from Nintendo of America, and it looks like those of us interested in making Wii games, but who don't have a publisher contract, will have to wait even longer. According to our contact, the Wii Independent Developer Program is "on hold" until the end of the month, because "the Wii publishers are taking all of the available inventory, and ...

Nintendo: Wii is not an exercise machine
November 30, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

There are a bunch of leading articles on Yahoo! this morning about the Wii, including coverage of people breaking their TV's and windows by inadvertently hurling wiimotes. More interesting, though, is a story on "Wii elbow", in which we get an official Nintendo position on Wii as exercise. Short answer? It's not. Nintendo vice president of marketing Perrin Kaplan put it plainly. "[The Wii] was not meant to be a Jenny Craig supplement," she told the WSJ. "If people are finding themselves sore, they may need to exercise more." ...

My new column: Wii's Revolution is in the Past
November 28, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Serious Games Source has published my latest "Persuasive Games" column, this one on the Wii and its potential in serious games and indie games development. At the risk of putting a bug in our readers' ears, I think it's somewhat iconoclastic. A small taste of one thread of the column: I want to suggest that the major innovation of the Wii for serious, political, art, and independent games is not the unprecedented controller. Nor is it the potential to create new games with a dev kit still unavailable to most developers. Instead, the major innovation is a system that takes ...

Disability and the Wii
November 23, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Kotaku posted a letter they received about from a longtime Nintendo fan who also has Muscular Dystrophy. He's having trouble using the Wii effectively. I can't really play some of the games in Wii Sports, because of the broad physical movement required. ... I can however play games with more subtle movement controls such as Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. This leads me to believe that more options related to the adjustment of movement control sensitivity could have been included in games like Wii Sports, as would fit the precision that the Wiimote seems capable of providing. I'm sure this ...

Creepy Burger King on Xbox 360
November 20, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Thanks to Brian over at Kotaku for reminding us that the Burger King Xbox 360 advergame / promo games are now available. All three feature the creepy King BK mascot. Pocket Bike Racer is a kart-style racing game, Big Bumper is a bumper car game, and Sneak King is a ... strange stealth action game wherein the player sneaks up on unsuspecting people and delivers them lunch. The games cost $3.99 a piece. One Kotaku commenter notes that they are "worth the price you pay for them," which is to say "they suck for the most part." Another offers positive, ...

StrawberrWii Banana Slurpee
November 9, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Even though we talk about advergames here, we usually don't talk about videogame marketing itself. But every now and then there's reason to. This morning I awoke to a strange banner ad on my usual visit to CNN.com. For 7-11. And Wii. I can buy a StrawberrWii Banana Slurpee and enter to win a Wii. Check out the, uhm, Slurpee straw guy uttering strange pseudo-slang on the site. Marketing promotions often have a charming non-sequitur to them, but StrawberrWii? I guess, erm, sometime after drinking it one does have to... well, you know. ...

Taking Bully Seriously
November 2, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Serious Games Source has published my latest "Persuasive Games" column, this one on the controversial Rockstar game Bully. This description sounds like it might have been lifted from a grant proposal for a serious game, one that a researcher might submit to the Department of Education, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), or the National Science Foundation (NSF). But it’s not. It’s the premise for Rockstar Games' controversial new title, Bully. Read the whole thing over at Serious Games Source. ...

Wii, for non-gamers without jobs or lives
November 2, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Our friends at Kotaku have reported that Nintendo is suggesting that those of us who want a Wii this month should order early. Nintendo will ship 4 million before year's end, but that didn't stop Nintendo president Reggie Fils-Aime from saying, "The level of demand we're seeing goes beyond the ordinary. Retailers are telling us a significant fraction of customers pre-ordering Wii are nontraditional gamers - people looking for a better way to play." Of course, there's a good measure of marketing rhetoric at work here. But, truth be told, I can't seem to preorder a Wii. I think it ...

Ohmigod, I'm like totally going to the virtual mall
October 24, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Paul Hemp points us to a Harvard Business Review article on the future of e-tailing in virtual worlds. The article claims that e-commerce is going to shift from web transactions to online simulations of shopping, via virtual malls in 3d worlds. The usual references to American Apparel's store in Second Life, but goes beyond virtual stores as advertisements to suggest that shoppers will meet up online to go shopping. Sociologist Bob Moore calls it a return to the "social and recreational aspect of shopping." I'm probably cynical about everything these days, but I wonder if a return to the shopping ...

Dave Perry working on Dance MMO
October 17, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

According to 1up, former Shiny chief Dave Perry is working on a multiplayer online dancing game called Dance!. Details are very thin, but according to the report publisher Acclaim will offer the game for free, although players will be able (or need?) to purchase clothing and other accessories for their avatars. Details are thin, but the game has an official site with a short statement about the game. You can also sign up to be a beta tester. Strange as the concept might sound at first, it's already been partly proven in Ken Perlin, Mary Flanagan, and Andrea Hollingshead's Rapunsel ...

Right to Bore Arms (and new columns)
September 26, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Gonzalo and I each have a new column at Serious Games Source, the serious games arm of CMP's popular website Gamasutra. The first installment in my "Persuasive Games" column is up now, titled The Right To Bore Arms, about a new NRA-licenced game. ... By making firearms boring, slow, and arduous, NRA Gun Club might actually perform the rhetoric many people, including myself, have previously laughed-off as politicking and fabrication: the responsible handling of firearms. One might even go so far as to say that NRA Gun Club owes most of its rhetorical power to the commercial FPS. The very ...

Have a Paris Riot
August 17, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

I've been increasingly interested in so-called documentary games (or docu-games), such as JFK Reloaded and Escape from Woomera and Waco Resurrection. In fact, Cindy Poremba and I wrote an article on documentary games that should be out in the coming months (click over to her blog for more links on the topic, to which she is devoting her Ph.D. research) So, I was excited to learn about a new game that sounded documentarian in nature. Paris Riots is a mod of Medal of Honor: Allied Assault in which the player takes the role of police mustered to respond to rioting ...

Roll Your Own XBox 360 Games? Maybe...
August 14, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

As you have probably heard by now, Microsoft announced yesterday that they would offer a consumer-grade version of their XNA Game Studio product, allowing ordinary people to make games that run on the Xbox 360. XNA Game Studio Express will cost $99 (some say it's a required flat fee, some say it's an optional annual fee, not sure which is right) and contain a simpler, yet unnamed, set of tools compared to the professional-grade Xbox 360 dev kits. Apparently Microsoft also plans to offer another version of XNA Express for "professional game developers" early next year. Microsoft VP Peter Moore ...

Hand me the wiimote, stat!
July 28, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Kotaku reports that the Japanese surgery-adventure title Trauma Center: Second Opinion will be a Wii launch title. The game is being developed by Atlus, who created Trauma Center: Under the Knife for Nintendo DS, which I reviewed last year. A surgery game on Wii sounds like a sure thing, and I'm sure Trauma Center won't be the only one we see. Atlus insists that the title is not a port but a "wii-make," which has "new graphics and animation; new surgical implements and operation types; a second playable character with new missions; multiple difficulty modes; and a revised control system ...

Video Game Evangelism
July 19, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

Brian Crecente of Kotaku and the Rocky Mountain News just wrote an article on Left Behind: Eternal Forces, which we've discussed here before (and he also blogs it at Kotaku). Brian asks if the game might be "the first mainstream PC agenda game," and also offers a preview of the gameplay in the article. I played the game at E3 and wrote about it in my forthcoming book, Persuasive Games: Videogames and Procedural Rhetoric. But, you can get a preview of my opinion in Brian's article: The prayer, he points out, is completely generic. "It could be Islamic or Judaic," ...

Microsoft offers Massive services to Nintendo and Sony
July 16, 2006 - by Ian Bogost

As regular readers will remember, Microsoft recently bought in-gae ad network Massive, Inc. A few weeks ago, Hollywood Reporter columnist Paul Hyman reported that Microsoft is interested in Sony and Nintendo using Massive's services, rather than locking its competitors out of the market. From the article, "If there are three different ad-serving solutions for the three different versions of, say, 'NFL Madden Football' on three different platforms, advertisers may choose not to participate,