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The NYU Game Center, established in 2008, is an independent, multi-school center for the research, design, and development of digital games. The Center is housed at the Tisch School in the Skirball Center for New Media and is a collaboration with NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Polytechnic Institute of NYU, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, and Tisch School of the Arts. Its goal is to incubate new ideas, create partnerships, and establish a multi-school curriculum to explore new directions for the creative development and critical understanding of games. In so doing the Game Center will help establish New York City as a place of innovation and creativity in this important field.

YU Game Center, established in 2008, is an independent, multi-school center for the research, design, and development of digital games. The Center is housed at the Tisch School in the Skirball Center for New Media and is a collaboration with NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Polytechnic Institute of NYU, Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, and Tisch School of the Arts. Its goal is to incubate new ideas, create partnerships, and establish a multi-school curric

The way the market actually works is that you catch wind of a game through a friend or a website, and you eventually stumble upon its page on a digital distribution site like Steam or Good Old Games. You watch the trailer, look at the screenshots, maybe double-check its purported quality by reading Metacritic reviews (or just glancing at the game's damnable Metacritic score) ... and you imagine what the game might be like to play, and whether you'll enjoy it. You create a mental picture of that enjoyment you'll get from the game, and then you compare that to the asking price. If the asking price is aligned with the enjoyment you predict you'll get from the game (and everyone's equation for this is different), AND you have that money to fart away on entertainment, THEN you may just complete the purchase.

If i were to approach this exercise completely cynically, i would continue to tweak and refine the page until i got the best potential conversion from my respondents, and then release Spellirium without making any changes to it. Because, speaking absolutely cynically, it doesn't actually matter if the game is good or bad - it only matters that people buy it. But that's not how Untold Entertainment rolls!

Of course, i desperately do want to make a good game. So i'll use the Steam page mock-up and survey as a funnel to decide on my testers. Those respondents who report the highest interest in playing the game, and the highest likelihood of buying it, will test the game. At that point, it doesn't matter who is a "proper" word gamer and who isn't: what matters is that i have an obligation to the people who are excited about my game and who want to buy it. If those players struggle to make 3-letters words, and if those players expect long words to be rewarded over tricky words, then i will adjust the game for the sake of those players. Because those players are my paying audience - not some mythical "perfect" players that i've hand-picked to enjoy Spellirium the specific way i've configured it. The players choose my game - not the other way around.

Results: The prevalence of pathological gaming was similar to that in other countries (9%). Greater amounts of gaming, lower social competence, and greater impulsivity seemed to act as risk factors for becoming pathological gamers, whereas depression, anxiety, social phobias, and lower school performance seemed to act as outcomes of pathological gaming.

You can download the Kinect SDK beta right now; it's free, but Windows 7 only and for use with Visual Studio in C++, C#, or VB. If you still need the hardware, Kinect sensors are a mere $150 at your friendly local gaming emporium.