Gaming is everyware.

Microsoft think the Wii is a novelty. Wii has definitely attracted a new audience to gaming (which is now such a broad and worthless term), but it would be interesting to see if Wii acts as a stepping stone to more serious involvment with games.

1) supporting multiple players playing in sequence, 2) requiring persistent state that affects all players, 3) breaks are the organizing principle, 4) asynchronous need not be the defining characteristic of the game.

Tom Armitage on the clunky way that big consoles and platforms try and deal with the social web. Games need to stop being so insular and the user needs to be given more freedom over what they can do with all their data

Great presentation from etech06 about applying gaming mechanics to wider context of the net.

Good summary of what makes social media and games appealing, with particular reference to WoW.

Not particularly inventive, this. I mean "Support short session times of 10-15 minutes as well as longer. " Useful...

Positive reinforcement and operant conditioning in MMO are the reason why games like WoW are so addictive. i wonder how important 'stroking' and other more social means of interaction reinforce the interest in the gaming experience.

Great example of a performance space in gaming. Players show off their Quake skills by completing the game as quickly as possible and publishing their movie files on the site

Raph Koster's slides from a talk given at Games Developers Conference in 2007. Where games meet the web. Some interesting design thoughts, but need the audio to accompany it...

Good to see the PS3 following XBOX by ntroducing more sociality into gaming. Plugging existing social networks into the gaming architecture is going to be more and more widespread i think

Stats about MMOG usage. Playing with 'real' friends in MMOGs more widespread than strangers. Greatly heightens the experience and makes them far more interesting than TV

Much talked about piece. In summary, instrumental group play in the context of quests might not be an important source of social interactions in WoW. Guilds are also very sparse social networks. A society of the spectacle.

Blog by Nicholas Ducheneaut of PARC about the social dimensions of online gaming.

Great article and resource for studies into MMORPGs.

An old keynote by Will Wright talking about Spore. Talks about game narratives, how people share content, tell stories through games and shared experieces.

James Wallis slatest ARGs. ARG fatigue. There's too many of them, too many to demand your attention and they are no longer mysterious. Still driven by a small hardcore of players. How do you make your ARG stand out from the crowd?

A nice example of real-world 'use' for MMOGs. Using MMOGS as team-building sessions instead of adventure weekends in the Pennines.

Aleks Krotoski "To suggests that interaction in virtual worlds is somehow inferior to physically proximate interaction is to take a very backwards point of view." Interesting debate.

Article from The Times about the success of SNS/MMOG Club Penguin especially amongst the younger 'tween' market.

Buzz monitoring app a bit like Google Trends. Scans blogs and other social media.