I can only talk about the world as I see it: So I can only talk from the position of a mother with a nine year old daughter. I’m not trying to make any great claims, it’s just what I observe. I don’t know if things would be different if I had given birth to a boy.

My daughter is a healthy consumer of computer games in a variety of forms. I say healthy as she consumes them in small amounts every now and again, and for at least half of the time with her friends. So she is a social gamer in that wider sense; she does it to be sociable.

Her favourite games at the moment involve dancing; madly matching the movements of an on-screen avatar, and running around trying to keep a host of hungry penguins satisfied. I’ve never seen her running around a landscape with a gun. In fact I can’t ever remember her playing a game which involves killing anything. I will leave our games out of this discussion since there was a small amount of coersion involved in that particular engagement

I wonder what the experience of a mother with a young boy is. Are the games they play the same? At what age do their sons hang up their dancing shoes and pick up their ground-to-air missile launchers? Certainly many of the older boys I know do play games involving heavy weaponry. Was there a moment in their lives when their behaviour changed? Or were these the games they progressed to when they became consumers of “serious” games?

As I said at the beginning I don’t have a point to make other than to question how and when dancing becomes forgotten in favour of the more serious pursuit of war.

By Anakissed

Sony US have announced that FluffyLogic’s hit monster game Eat Them! was is in the top-selling indie PSN games of 2011.

With the 2011 coming to a close, we also wanted to highlight some of the most successful indie game development efforts on the year. If you haven’t already, give these games a shot during your holiday vacation.

To help keep the indie spirit vibrant, we also incubate some indie developers to give them access to our resources, enabling them to realize their full artistic vision while being able to tap into the expertise and experience of SCEAs World Wide Studios development ecosystem.

Read the full article here: blog.us.playstation.com/2011/12/13/celebrating-psns-top-selling-indie-games-of-2011/

In Novemeber Develop Online ran a feature by Armin Elsaesser, the sound designer for UrZoo. In the article he asks: Does working for free devalue the game audio profession? Is it detrimental to game composers? Is music you get for free not as good as music you pay for?

So does giving away your music for free devalue it? You could argue that if you gave all of your work away for free as you would never make a living. That is pretty obvious. But if you ask most well-established composers both within the games industry, and outside, how they got noticed, the answer that comes back is unsurprisingly that they gave their music away for nothing. In doing so they found that producers who liked what they heard called them back and offered them paid work.
 On the flip side, nothing could come of giving your music away for free. But if you don’t give it a go, you will never find out.

Read the full article here: develop-online.net/features/1486/Paid-the-price82328232

You can listen to some of Armin’s video game music here: soundcloud.com/arminelsaesser