Next Generation is reporting on the Edinburgh Interactive Entertainment Festival, with several interesting articles dealing with talks and events. Margaret Robertson (editor of Edge Magazine) discussed the reality of emotion in games, saying that emotion comes from players and not developers. Brain Training was honored with the Edge Award, beating out some tough competition. Finally, EA's worldwide studios executive VP and COO David Gardner had a keynote with seven predictions for the future, discussing the lack of female gamers and the possibilities that user-created content offer.

1up spent all last week looking at the upcoming PS2 title Okami. A truly original story, the game tells the tale of a Japanese wolf god. A distinctive art style and inventive 'drawing' gameplay has made it a highly anticipated release for this fall. Some of the features include a hands-on with the English version, a look at what went into the localization to make the game understandable for Americans, and a great look at the art and music in the game.

Despite assurances that we'd seen the last of new NWN modules, Joystiq is reporting that Darkness over Daggerford is now available for download, thanks to the folks at Ossian Studios. From the article: "Ossian Studios is comprised of BioWare veterans and RPG enthusiasts, and while they had originally planned Darkness over Daggerford as a premium module release, this lengthy single-player campaign is now available as a free download at the Neverwinter Nights Vault. Check out BioWare's interview with Ossian co-founder Alan Miranda, and let us know what you think of Daggerford."

Via Kotaku, a post on the Aeropause site about gaming as we get older. Richard has a great 'get off my lawn you damn kids' rant, and some insightful commentary on the problems we'll face as we get up there. From the article: "The other issue older gamers will face is the ever increasing difficulty of games. Games have come a long way since the simplicity of the A and B buttons. Today's controllers are becoming more and more complicated and require greater dexterity to master. While this is no problem for gamers right now, as we get older and lose some of our dexterity we will need to come up with ways to simplify the gameplay or the controller."

chrisb33 writes "After studying several MMOs, University of Illinois researchers have concluded that the games 'promote sociability and new worldviews.' The study found that the games did not foster social isolation, but actually encouraged meetings between players of differing backgrounds, supplying the 'social horizon-broadening...sorely lacking in American society.' While they caution that, in extreme cases, fixation on internet gaming could diminish offline relationships, the tone of the press release with regard to gaming is remarkably upbeat compared to that of most recent news about gaming."

conq writes "BusinessWeek.com has a piece on how some new videogames are being designed with health-related applications in mind. From the article: 'A stopwatch and a tub of frigid ice water are the standard tools medical researchers use to test pain tolerance. How long can a person keep his arm submerged? In an unusual project, last year researchers at the University of Maryland's medical center used the arm-in-ice water test to evaluate a new video game called Free Dive. The researchers found that their subjects — 60 children, ranging in age from 5 to 12 — were able to keep an arm submerged for about 19 seconds on average. If, however, they simultaneously played Free Dive on a PC with their dry hand, the kids could tolerate an average of 86 seconds in the icy liquid — an increase of more than 400%.'" Juan Rey also writes to mention a report from financial news group Bloomberg, saying that Nintendo expects that their upcoming diet-related software for the Wii will succeed the way 'Brain Training' has done with DS.

Next Generation is reporting on numbers from the Consumer Electronics Association, who has projected that game shipments this year will top $12 Billion. With the launches of the Wii and PS3 expected by year's end, and continued brisk 360 sales, the organization expects a near-record breaking year. From the article: "The overall games industry appears to be rebounding quicker than expected, in the midst of the console transition. Combined software, hardware and accessory sales were up 29 percent year-over-year in July, according to the NPD Group. CEA's news release, which was only an excerpt of a complete report, didn't mention thriving handheld sales, most notably of the Nintendo DS, which drove hardware and software sales last month."

Wired has an article looking at a game designer working in a fairly unique space: reality television. Clive Thompson discusses the game design of the show Survivor , done mostly by the show's creator Mark Burnett. From the article: "While tweaking Survivor, he closely studied John Nash's game theory in order to better engineer the hysteria and emotional blowouts of each season's finale. 'What Nash's theory predicts is that whenever you have a group of people competing, they collude to squeeze one guy out, again and again, until there's only two guys left,' Burnett notes. 'Yet when there are only two of us left, we're surprised when one of us [screws] each other over. That's the fun part. It surprised John Nash himself, but it happens every time.'"

simoniker writes "As part of an in-depth postmortem of Xbox title Stubbs The Zombie over at Gamasutra, company founder and Bungie co-founder Alex Seropian has revealed his own personal 'indie game commandments' when setting up his new firm: 'First Commandment: We shall establish our game's creative direction... Second commandment: We shall own our intellectual property... Third commandment: We shall not let a third party determine our success, such as the publisher who's doing (or not doing) the marketing, or the funding source (likely a publisher) making demands that are not in-line with our goals... Fourth Commandment: We shall have a small manageable team. We don't want 50 employees making one game over three years in house (we want low overhead), and we don't want to suffer the churn of ramping up and down for projects.'"

1up is carrying an interview from the latest CGW, talking with David Speyrer (Half-Life 2: Episode Two Project lead) about what we can expect in the next episodic content release. Typically, Valve is not exactly forthcoming with information on the title, which is expected around Christmas. Just the same, Speyrer has some interesting things to say about Valve's design process. From the article: "It's cool to realize that so many of the elements that we take for granted today, like the gravity gun or our companion A.I., were risky R&D projects during the development of Half-Life 2 or Episode One. Continuing at that rate as we release more episodes is pretty exciting for us as designers, and for our customers. We'll bring many elements from Episode One forward into Episode Two, but we expect to use dynamic scripted sequences extensively. They allow close interaction between NPCs during combat--such as Alyx wrestling with zombies in Episode One--and because they happen spontaneously, every player will see different interactions at different moments in the game."

An anonymous reader writes "Gen Con begins this week in Indianapolis. This convocation of the geek is epic in its scope, encompassing all aspects of the gaming subculture. Rabbit over at GamersWithJobs kicks off their coverage with a hilarious little game of their own called "Gen Con Bingo." From the list of potential Bingo squares: The Inappropriate Card Game - Ever see 12 year old boys playing Magic in a public bathroom? It's not pretty. Ever since I've been going to Gen Con (not forever, but long enough that I consider myself a veteran) there has been an entire subculture of teenage boys who will play Magic, or whatever the collectible card game of the moment is, anywhere, anytime. Their therapists say they have 'boundary issues.'" I got that square at my very first Con. I actually thought they were dealing crack in the stall at first, but the mention of a 'Mox' quickly dispelled my imagination of normalcy.

MetaFuture, a game journalism analysis site, has recently refocused on review scores from the big gaming sites. The author takes an interesting approach, taking a look at Gamespot's review spread and IGN's tendencies. Unsurprisingly, both sites tend towards the 7 to 9 range, making it debatable whether their numbers are actually useful. The site's eventual goal is to normalize the review scores from the major sites, and actually make them useful. From the article: "Games will still get an average score from all contributing reviews. But a site's contribution to that average will depend on that site's own individual normal curve-- with the immediate left and right of the bell's tip signifying three stars on a scale of one to five. Watch the drama as the biggest sweethearts see their 8.4 score for Gun and Car IV get pegged as three stars." This is the reason Slashdot videogame reviews don't have numbers anymore.

Donnie D writes "Video of id Software's John Carmack is available from his address to QuakeCon 2006 last week. It was comparable to his down to earth speech presented last year when he focused on next generation console gaming. This year, he focused on multi-processor support in games. Mentioned in his address are interesting details such as NVIDIA's sponsorship of Armadillo Aerospace for the X-Prize competition, vague details on id's next game, and topics related to his cell phone games. The video includes 1 hour and 20 minutes of Carmack's address."

The increasingly important role that China is taking on the world stage, both politically and economically, has been reflected in the gaming industry of the last few years. Last week BusinessWeekOnline published an article looking at 'China's Online Gaming Craze.' The piece looks at the huge surge in online players in China, and estimates that the online gaming market for the country will surpass $2 Billion by the end of the decade. Relatedly, Simon Carless and the Gamasutra crew attended the ChinaJoy event in Shanghai last week, and return bearing information on how the games business ticks over there. Articles include another look at the online gaming market, the business of outsourcing in the country, and a lot of general information on the state of the industry. From that article: "In terms of a long-term bet, especially with the Chinese economy continuing to grow swiftly, it's clear that it's the domestic Chinese market is one that most major game companies want to be in. In addition, it needs to be in a way that the Chinese government feels comfortable with. Thus, we're seeing Electronic Arts moving its Pogo casual game service into China, and other companies such as Ubisoft building branch offices."

Robert Cox from SWG.WarCry.com interviews SOE producer Grant McDaniel on the three-year anniversary of Star Wars Galaxies. From the article:
"'There was certainly a concern over how [the NGE] was going to be pursued by the players, but we knew that to make the kind of game that us and LucasArts expected for a Star Wars online game, we needed to make the changes,' said McDaniel. 'And to actually be able to continue to support the game that we've got, we needed to make those type of changes, to make it something that we could really feel good about, that we could really make sure was a high-quality game that provided the action experience that you'd expect from a Star Wars game.'"

Dubane writes "The 2006 Casual Games White Paper (pdf) has just been released by the IGDA Casual Games SIG. The 116-page report was contributed to by nearly 40 professionals in the casual gaming space, spanning all aspects of the industry, including developers, publishers, portals, tool providers and more. Notable updates from last year are the Business Models section with up to date information on how casual game companies are making money today, and the Publishing section which contains results from a publishing survey of over 50 players in space. These results provide information how companies earn their revenue, what genres of games perform the best, and typical royalty rates seen for the various players in the space (among other things). This year's paper is also available on the IGDA wiki where it can be continuously updated by the community."

cyrus_zuo writes "Game Tunnel has just published its June Independent Video Games Round-Up. This month's article looks at twelve indie titles including the physics-based gem Armadillo Run, the newest Spiderweb Software RPG Avernum 4, and the finally released Wild Earth, the later of which walked away with the Game of the Month award. As always the article includes four different people reviewing and rating each game, including a new face this month, Savant, as Game Tunnel marks 2 years of doing the monthly round-up."

GamePolitics reports on the Games for Health conference, held the day before E3 opened in LA. From the article: "Immune Attack is a first-person, real-time strategy game which employs authentic biology concepts to teach students about the immune system in a fun and engaging way. Developed by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), Brown University, and USC, the game challenges players to rebuild a human body's immune system from scratch by training cells to identify and combat infections. Contrary to the common public image of gamers as isolated loners, games can also provide a way to practice social skills. With advances in artificial intelligence and 3-D graphics, computers can accurately simulate complex social interactions. Imagine software that allows you to interact with a virtual personal trainer who customizes your diet and exercise regimen. How about a virtual tutor who walks you through your calculus homework?"

Lost Planet is coming to the 360 soonish, and is a 3rd person shooter about being cold and shooting bugs. From the GameDaily Lost Planet hands-on: "Our second time through the level we used a bit more strategy by taking down the first set of pirates with our rifle, sniping them from a distance. Before the mech was alerted to our presence we sniped the pirate in the cockpit and hopped in ourselves. From there we used the dual machine guns in the mech to take down the tower guards and moved on from there." There's a demo up on Live Arcade if you're interested. And you should be, because it's very good. Assassin's Creed, meanwhile, is slated for the PS3 and has whispers of 'Best of Show' following it around. From the Next Generation Assassin's Creed hands-on: "Eliminating targets is completely up to the user. Where, when and how you take out your enemies left completely open. You can stalk your prey, scale buildings to get a better view of their actions, mount horses and follow them or just blend into the crowds and keep an eye on them from afar."

Impressions from the sequel to a tale about a very angry man. From the IGN hands-on: "Though he's riding atop a Pegasus, the combat here looks to be nearly identical to what you'll find on the ground. A few demonic creatures atop gryphons soon catch up with Kratos and begin swarming about, trying to knock him off his winged transport. Lashing out with his blades (of Chaos or Athena's, we're not sure, as Sony is a little hesitant to make perfectly clear), Kratos takes them out one by one while his mount does the flying."