I wish somebody would take the realism of ArmA (formerly Operation Flashpoint) and apply the same smoothness of control and attention to detail that AAA-military shooters like CoD and MoH have. ArmA is a pain to control... realistic, sure, but a buggy, difficult to control mess. And that's unfortunate, because the premise blows these run of the mill shooter clear out of the water.

I think casual games and "real" games will merge, meaning that casual games will stop underestimating the players and "real" games will take more cues from what makes the casual games so popular, namely ease of access. In practice, however, this will mean a lot of games will be released with some sort of halfassed attempt at being "casual" and "social".

So far the only tangible differences between Vista and 7 seems to be better DirectX support for games at some point in the future and better startup times... I have yet to be convinced that risking problems with backwards-compatibility, drivers and so on would be worth the upgrade from Vista. As far as visuals, Vista can do pretty much all the fancy tricks that 7 does with a few simple modifications.

"Mr. Potato Head had finally had enough."

Good article. What Juul may, however, have been referring to was the discussion on the deeper being of computer games that raged in the early days of game studies (that is, early 2000's): whether a game should be studied AS a narrative or as something else - not so much the narratives IN the game. I refer you to an article by Gonzalo Frasca (www.ludology.org) where he discusses this matter. Or, as Markku Eskelinen, another game scholar, said: "Outside academic theory people are usually excellent at making distinctions between narrative, drama and games. If I throw a ball at you I don't expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories." Anyway. I would like to respectfully disagree with what prof. Dutton said; if you were to use for example Vladimir Propp's morphology on pretty much any game with a major storyline (Tetris and similar games aside), you would find that they very well follow the traditional setup of a "good story": there's a villain, there's a hero, there is a quest, a twist, the hero prevails and returns in triumph after a number of setbacks and so on. That's not to say that he isn't right in that the story may be simple and superficial compared to more traditional forms of storytelling, but I would personally say that's down to the youth of the medium, the dynamics of the industry ("what sells") and, of course, the fact that it's a game, not a book. As mentioned in the article above.