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interacting with a work does not shape the work, it ‘only’ reveals it.

Because a game is a complete formal system

The rebuttal to this argument lies in a comparison to film or to music or to any other collaborative artistic creation.

Children (on the Autism spectrum) take games that call you a loser or say other things like that very personally

Garth Chouteau, spokesman for PopCap Games, says the company has received an immense amount of calls and letters from parents of children with an ASD diagnosis, such as Schramek, stating the positive effects their games have had on children. "These games are created with no purpose in mind other than fun, but people say these games help them relax and provide cognitive activity for their children. These are side effects of a really good game," says Chouteau.

"Kids on the autism spectrum have a hard time with emotional control. From a social standpoint, one of the things the games are helpful with is teaching the children to take turns."

Fun Inc.: Why Games are the 21st Century's Most Serious Business by Tom Chatfield 288pp, Virgin Books, £11.99

games might involve a lot of effort, but the payoff is that "effort is always rewarded".

elf-and-safety roleplayer World of Warcraft

And then there's Saint's Row 3, an open-world crime shooter, that seems to have been concocted entirely by hyperactive 14-year-olds force fed on a diet of sherbet, Red Bull and Korean gangster movies. This is a game in which the player can, entirely at random, bludgeon passers-by with a giant dildo. To the best of my knowledge, Downton Abbey features nothing even remotely comparable – although, to be fair, I skipped most of season two, and may have missed a key scene in which Hugh Bonneville attacks his butler with some nightmarish Edwardian device intended for the cure of female hysteria.

Please, if you are a parent and you want something to do with your kids on a wet Sunday afternoon, don't rent the latest heavily marketed CGI bore-fest from a Hollywood studio more interested in selling you merchandise and the moral agenda of its self-serving financers, buy Zelda. Buy Zelda and share a genuinely thrilling, heart-warming escapist fantasy with your children. Certainly, it's not as 'good' as taking them to a museum or getting them to play footie in the park, but if the only alternative is Horrid Henry, it is spectacular – and they will never forget it.

Interactivity is a blunt but effective tool to ensure attention and alertness. And as such, video games have never sought to stultify or repress. Video games are not interested in teaching us to make the most out of our tired soft furnishings.

It is more useful, and perhaps more complete, to see virtual worlds, games, and simulations as points along a continuum, all instances of highly interactive virtual environments (HIVEs).

The ease with which the children in the pool, the students in the virtual class, and the pilot in the flight simulator move from exploratory virtual-world behaviors to structured but simple games to taking on rigorous simulation challenges illustrates both the differences across these three instances and the connections that link them. It is only by building from open experimentation to increasingly rigorous rules, structures, and success criteria that children learn transferable water survival skills and pilots learn critical flying skills.

A virtual world will not suffice where a simulation is needed. The virtual world offers only context with no content; it contributes a set of tools that both enable and restrict the uses to which it may be put. An educational simulation may take place in a virtual world, but it still must be rigorously designed and implemented. Organizations routinely fail in their efforts to access the potential of virtual worlds when they believe that buying a virtual world means getting a simulation. Likewise, a game is not an educational simulation. Playing SimCity will not make someone a better mayor. Some players of, for instance, World of Warcraft may learn deep, transferable, even measurable leadership skills but not all players will. The game does not provide a structure for ensuring learning. Just because some players learn these skills playing the game, that does not mean either that most players are also learning these skills or that it should be adopted in a leadership development program. Conversely, a purely educational simulation may not be very much fun. The program may have the three-dimensional graphics and motion capture animations of a computer game, but the content may be frustrating. Specific competencies must be invoked, and students' assumptions about what the content should be, likely shaped by their experiences with games, will be challenged.

A Facebook spokesman said the company wouldn't speculate about Google's initiative but said the company expected new social-networking efforts by others and "looks forward to seeing what others have to offer."

Many users now rely on their friends on Facebook—not just Google—to discover content and products they can purchase on the Internet. And much of the content generated by users on Facebook is generally kept out of view of Google's search engine.

In an interview this week, Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt declined to confirm the development of a social-networking service that would incorporate social games, rumored to be called "Google Me." When asked if Google's service might resemble Facebook's, Mr. Schmidt said "the world doesn't need a copy of the same thing."

You leveled up and rolled the dice in Dungeons & Dragons because it was impossible to run such systems under the game's hood. You know why? Because there wasn't a hood. Video games not only have hoods but also engines, and all manner of delightfully invisible computation can be dealt with and handled there. So I ask: Why isn't it invisible more often? Why this useless Gamification of what are already games? Why do we tolerate it? What do we actually get out of it, other than some mouse-brain satisfaction of knowing exactly where we are in the maze?4

I recently asked a game-designer friend if one of the reasons these skill-tree and leveling-up systems actually show up in games is due to the fact that some poor bastard actually had to work for months and sometimes years refining them and planning them and gaming them out, so that everything made sense and demonstrably kept players from getting too powerful too quickly. He said, with a sigh, "Pretty much." Which means that one problem with game design today is the game designer's emotional inability to hide his or her hard work. Oh, the humanity.

Techland consulted some real geniuses of nomenclature in coming up with Dead Island's weapons' subclass names: We have the Flimsy Cleaver, the Tiring Knife, the Frightening Mace, the Spiteful Pistol. It all sounds like the work of two Poles with a big bag of weed and a thesaurus. What's next? I wrote in my notes. The Recalcitrant Hoe? Two minutes later, no joke, I found the Languid Pistol.

being a gamer is less an inherent attribute—either you are or you aren’t—than it is a malleable description of practices that change throughout one’s lifetime, whether from “hardcore” to “casual,” single-player to “social,” or genre to genre

one could argue that part of the origin story of game studies was the struggle to establish the idea that games are not narratives--that they were a radically "new" textuality, but this just delayed the needful discussions of how games related to the inherited media ecology, how they used narrative, music, video, etc. to new effects

students tend not to be "well-played," on an analogy to "well-read," but knowledgeable in one or a few genres

Admongo.gov, the new Web site from the Federal Trade Commission, seeks to educate kids ages 8 to 12 about the nuances of marketing. In the Admongo video game, players confronts advertisements at every turn—at bus stops, in magazines, on TV, even as part of other video games within the video game. Whenever an ad appears (they're all for fictional products, including a soda, a cereal, a movie, and an acne wash), the player is encouraged to ask three questions: Who is responsible for the ad? What is the ad actually saying? What does the ad want me to do

there's no evidence I know of showing that media literacy has an impact on consumer behavior. Ads target emotions, not logic. You can know you're being manipulated but still be manipulated. People talk about how media-savvy kids are these days, but that just means they recognize a lot of brands

the most interesting thing about Admongo is its emphasis on the ubiquity of ads. A previous FTC-designed game, called You Are Here, also urged kids to consider where ads come from and to examine the truth of marketing claims. But in Admongo, a major part of playing the game is understanding that ads can be anywhere and can take many different forms. The player encounters text-message ads, ads inside videogames, cross-promotions, and product placements. This element of Admongo is testament to the explosion of new advertising platforms and the fierce intensity of modern marketing. According to Linn, in 2008 American Idol—consistently a top-rated show for 2-11 year-olds—featured 4,151 product placements in its first 38 episodes, averaging 14 minutes of product placement on each show. Kids are now constantly in front of screens of all kinds, and those screens are brimming with ads that pretend they aren't ads. These days, just being able to recognize when you're being marketed to is a useful skill.

The A Slow Year limited sets include the poetry book and the game on Atari cartridge, all set in black velvet and red leather, gold foil stamping, all hand-numbered, hand-made. While a manic counter was screaming the end of Bogost's journey to challenge social gaming norms, the creator was quietly, manually, assembling a physical art object. Only 25 will ever be made; they will sell for $500 apiece. Most have already been sold. To Bogost, like the poetry book that accompanies the Atari game, the handcraft and limited nature of A Slow Year's special edition help establish the project uncompromisingly as an art object, a creation bigger than "video game."

"I never expected that would happen," reflects Bogost. "A lot of the serious players… just like clicking a cow sometimes. It's very innocent; they just like clicking a cow."

Cow Clicker was never supposed to be fun. It was supposed to be silly, insultingly simple, a vacuous waste of time, and a manipulative joke at the expense of its players-–in other words, everything Bogost thought that Facebook games like the Zynga-made hit FarmVille are. In Cow Clicker, players get a cow, they click it, and then they must either pay to click it again or wait six hours; an embarrassing, joyless labor that to him represented the quintessential aspects of the games that were flourishing all over the social network.

"Moving Learning Games Forward: Obstacles, Opportunities, and Openness," by Eric Klopfer, Scot Osterweil, and Katie Salen of the Education Arcade, an MIT research division that explores games that promote learning through play, explains why educational games have seen an increase in popularity: mainly owing to the advances in consumer games.

A report from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, "Game Changer: Investing in digital play to advance children's learning and health," claims that on an average day, children as young as eight spend as many hours engaged in media activity as they spend in school. Seventy-five percent of American children play computer and video games, it says.