fembots writes "Former world champion Gary Kasparov has announced that he is to retire from competitive chess. The chess grandmaster, a leading critic of Mr. Putin, heads a group of top Russian liberals who have joined forces to keep Vladimir Putin from staying in the Kremlin after 2008."

Eli Singer writes "Are gamer employees different? This is the question John Beck and Mitchell Wade answer in Got Game, How the Gamer Generation is Reshaping Business Forever. They argue that yes, employees who grew up with Nintendo, TurboGrafix and Genesis approach their work in fundamentally different ways than non-gaming workers. If you grew up with games, you can use this book to teach your boss how to appreciate your gaming abilities in the workplace." Read on for the rest of Singer's review.

Months after EA: The Human Story was released to the web, Gamasutra.com has word that EA will begin paying out overtime to some of its employees. Which is not to say they don't give it any spin. From the article: "The employment environment at EA was built to allow you flexibility as professionals, with the expectation that time on the job could be managed without watching the clock. Unfortunately, labor laws have not kept pace with this spirit of entrepreneurialism, innovation and creativity." Additionally, taking overtime makes you ineligible for bonuses and this largely has nothing to do with the coders and artists who have filed suit against the company.

The next Playstation console has been designed with ease of development in mind, according to a story on GamesIndustry.biz. The PS3 an its relationship to the development community was discussed in depth at a GDC session earlier this week. From the article: "The PlayStation Portable's comprehensive set of tools and APIs has largely been well-received by developers, but for PlayStation 3, the company plans to go even further - adopting a number of familiar industry standard systems that will give game creators a running start on the platform."

The panels, lectures, and roundtables are what makes GDC so interesting to attend. The opportunity to hear the thoughts and opinions of game developers in this setting is unique, and every day there are dozens of options for the curious-minded. Wednesday I had the opportunity to attend one particularly intriguing session. The "Game Design Challenge" attempted to stretch the bounds of game design by tasking Peter Molyneux, Will Wright, and Chris Hocking with coming up with a game under the Emily Dickinson License. Read on for impressions and images from the unique experience.

The Microsoft Keynote address today was a ra-ra session, trying to get people excited about the future of games (the Microsoft way). Which, of course, is not to say that it wasn't interesting. For the word straight from the mount, the sound and video is available on the Xbox site. Many sites have their impressions of the keynote, including Joystiq, GamesIndustry.biz, and Gamemethod. Read on if you'd like my thoughts on Microsoft's vision of the future.

Huckster writes "Jeffrey Parsons - a doctoral candidate from University of Iowa has resently conducted a research on MMORPG addiction. It took a while to get the results - but they are now available. The study found that about 15% of gamers meet the criteria for Internet addiction as provided by Kimberly Young, a leading researcher in Internet addiction. Using more strict criteria, a minimum of at least 10% of gamers met criteria for Internet addiction. Compared to national studies of Internet addiction, this numbers are somewhat elevated. However, given the sheer number of hours MMORPG gamers spend online (in comparison to the general population), even a 15% addiction rate is somewhat low. To illustrate the point, the college student spends 10 hours on the Internet per week. The average MMORPG gamer (addicted or not) spends 20-25 hours per week just playing MMORPGs, and an additional 10-15 hours per week in other Internet use. In other words, MMORPG players are spending 4x as much time online as non-gamers."

The Independent Games Festival is the opportunity during the GDC to recognize game developers from smaller efforts that don't have the big budgets and long development cycles of more commercial titles. All the nominees this year were top notch ideas, and the winners deserved every moment in the spot light. Read on for this year's winners.

Quite a ceremony. The winners this year were all extremely deserving and a lot of good games received their due respect. While commentary and images from the ceremony will be available here on Slashdot later today, read on for a look at the list of winners.

The official World of Warcraft site has details on the Player vs. Player ranking system which they'll be rolling out to the game. It gives meaning to the PvP concept with tangible, and impressive, rewards for engaging in combat with other players, a leader board, and little things like an officer's title. From the article: "As we have mentioned before, when you kill other players or aggressive PvP-enabled non-player characters (NPCs) in your level range, you will receive an honorable kill. All your honorable kills for a week are then calculated to give you an honor score for that week, which then translates into an honor ranking. This honor ranking carries with it titles and material rewards, and eventually, officer status and other perks."

rauper wrote in to alert us to a GameIndustry.biz story. The quote says it all: "Swedish company Meqon, the firm behind the physics for 3D Realms' Duke Nukem Forever, has rekindled interest in the long-delayed game with a stunning demonstration of its latest physics technology."

Gamespot has the word that designer Warrren Spector has gone ahead and formed his own development shop. The company, Junction Point, is titled after a MMOG that Warren designed but never got off the ground. From the article: "The company has started preliminary development on a "fantasy" title created by Spector, who worked at Dungeons and Dragons creator TSR in the 1980s. Although Spector said the title was rapidly evolving, he did not give any indication about what specific subgenre the game would fall under or what platforms it would be released for."

lunatick writes "The second expansion for Star Wars Galaxies has been announced : 'Rage Of the Wookiees.'" From the article: "The new expansion features the Wookiee planet of Kashyyyk. There are 100 new missions for players of all types on this Wookiee homeworld. Most revolve around the Wookiees' fight for freedom from their Imperial and Trandoshan predators. The Empire is worried that the Alliance is gaining a foothold on the planet and willing to fight to prevent the population from going over to the Rebels."

snuttepelle writes "Pong creator Nolan Bushnell and Donkey Kong maker Shigeru Miyamoto, along with gaming icons like Mario, have received the first-ever 'Walk of Game' stars for video games in San Francisco."

Video game ombudsman Kyle Orland has a short post up describing an American Public Media 'Marketplace' piece discussing the increasing clout of the games industry. From his post: "The piece focuses on the increasing respect games are getting as both an artistic and business force. The reporter, Jeff Tyler, provides a good mix of hard numbers, market analysis and trend spotting."

Gamasutra's coverage of GDC this year is top notch, and they have several excellent pieces on the Serious Games Summit and GDC Mobile '05. Machine Learning details how game AI developers are turning to real life academic studies on decision making trees to make their work more realistic. A rundown on the Serious Games Summit Panel reveals answers from people who are making games for non-entertainment purposes. Finally, Final Fantasy for Mobile is an analysis of how the Square-Enix folks are planning to take the best-selling franchise to mobile devices. Meanwhile Alice's Wonderland blog continues to be the most immersive coverage here this year, with run-downs on Cory Ondrejka's Building Serious Games with Second Life talk and THQ's Tips from a Mobile Publisher session.

The Seventh Annual Independent Games Festival doesn't start until tomorrow (indeed, the kiosks at the Moscone Center aren't even set up yet), but if you're interested in the contenders you can play many of them at Gamespot. While not all of the games have demos, the ones that do are definitely worth checking out.

Christopher Reimer writes "C|Net is reporting from the GDC that the video game industry will have to improve its work environment as the working population gets older and unionization becomes an issue. From the article: 'Numerous studies have shown that developers and other workers putting in 12-hour days routinely make more mistakes as the midnight oil burns, said Francois Dominic Laramee, a freelance game developer and author. That means any extra productivity is eaten up by hits to product quality. "If your company is in crunch mode, drunken zombies may be checking your code right now," he said.'"

Gamespy's reporters have been on the ground at the GDC, and managed to wrangle specifications for Microsoft's upcoming next-gen console. From the article: "Xenon's CPU has three 3.0 GHz PowerPC cores. Each core is capable of two instructions per cycle and has an L1 cache with 32 KB for data and 32 KB for instructions. The three cores share 1 MB of L2 cache. Alpha 2 developer kits currently have two cores instead of three."

The Guardian's excellent gamesblog has an editorial up discussing the role rappers and rap culture has taken in games. From the article: "Following Def Jam Vendetta and more pertinently Def Jam Fight for New York, this is another game that places real-life Hip Hop artists within a fictitious gangland setting. It's an interesting sub-genre, trading in on the mythologies that many rappers build around themselves in their lyrics, album art and endless feuds - fantasies of gun violence, rivalry and retribution."