Op-Ed

Jordan Deam travels 4,000 miles to party with Vikings, eat a $27 sandwich and check out Funcom's Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures.

Joe revisits his misspent youth while sampling Magic: The Gathering's latest expansion, Shadowmoor.

By pandering to gamers' obsessively forward-thinking approach to their hobby, the media and industry both encourage an enthusiast culture that, for the most part, suffers from an inability to thoughtfully examine the games its consumes.

Some will care, some won't, and, to be perfectly fair, most will never even realize that anything controversial is happening. Still, the continued tightening of the noose around big-budget PC titles brings questions about the platform's long-term viability back into stark contrast against the comparatively hassle-free experience of consoles.

It's a Friday afternoon, and Scott Foe is in a hotel room, 27 floors above the streets of San Francisco. In two hours, he'll be unveiling his latest project to the press. It's billed as "the highest production value mobile title ever."

The loss of two of the ESA's largest members - who would soon have become its single largest member - will likely cause ripple effects with far-reaching and potentially damaging consequences to the organization and the industry at large. But in matters such as these, there are typically many more questions than answers, not least of which is why anyone should care about the ESA in the first place.

I like open world games - in principle. Granted, the worlds are never really open; most max at around small-town size. But compared to the games in which you're stuck on a single stretch of road, where the colors change occasionally to signify you've moved to a new area, games like Grand Theft Auto feel like vast universes.

The videogame industry has an increasingly significant problem, and as a consumer you may not be happy about what game publishers have to do to solve it. In business speak, publishers need to expand their revenue streams and explore new avenues for monetizing their properties. In short, they need to find new ways to get money out of your pockets.

Life is full of surprises. It starts when you're young: Girls are icky and gross, until the day you realize you'd happily ransom your soul to the devil to get them to pay you some attention. Later, with the acquisition of your driver's license and your first set of wheels you swear you'll never become one of those minivan-owning chumps, and then one day you wake up with three kids, a dog and a need to get them all across town in 15 minutes.

I bought a Wii on release day, seduced by its reasonable price, magical controllers and family-friendliness. General tech lust and the promise of a new Zelda title didn't hurt, either. Now it sits atop my entertainment center, blanketed in a layer of dust. Cold, unplayed and unloved. I haven't switched it on in weeks.

Piracy is a hard topic to discuss reasonably and rationally in a public forum. It is a polarizing issue, revealing deep divides between consumers of all media forms, and an even deeper divide between the public and the industries at large that find themselves under siege.

For almost as long as there have been videogames, debate has raged over their worth as art. Be it early text adventures or the latest high-tech simulations, long-winded discussions about the artistic merit of interactive electronic entertainment have been as close as the nearest message forum. But there's a more fundamental aspect of our hobby that's undeniably true and yet often overlooked: Art or not, it's all business.

Audiosurf recently brought to my attention the similarities between playing music and playing games. It's a simple, casual game where you control a little ship as it rides down a linear track, colliding with colored blocks. ... But what makes Audiosurf special is the way it incorporates music.

The potential of video games is limitless, and their value understated in a culture that is, at best, grudgingly accepting of their existence. ... And yet, like so many media-fueled discussions of the past decade, the debate over the place of gaming in Western society has been forfeited to the extremes on both sides.

I have a lit-up, pimped-out, overclocked rig that's worth more and goes faster than my car. I am disgusted by the weakness of people who complain that standard PC keyboards are unintuitive as game controllers. I beat games like I beat children and small animals: enthusiastically and often.

And I'm looking at the PopCap website.