Researchers at Beckman Institute, Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL,  found that “Expert gamers and non-gamers differed on a number of basic cognitive skills: experts could track objects moving at greater speeds, better detected changes to objects stored in visual short-term memory, switched more quickly from one task to another, and mentally rotated objects more efficiently.”  I’m probably not allowed to repost sections of the body of the article, but the abstract sums up the findings nicely.

When I go home I think I’ll have to work on improving my cognitive skills.

An important point to note is that the 90% of the people that didn’t buy the game are not lost sales since only a percentage of those pirates would have actually paid for the game if they couldn’t get an illegal copy.  Also once a DRM scheme is implemented there are lost sales due to a degraded game experience, so one should be able to calculate a direct cost benefit for implementing DRM.  If someone knows of an impartial and well researched article, one not written by a game company or someone with an axe to grind in the argument, let me know.  I’d like to see if the 90% piracy rate is a number that is found across the industry, how DRM schemes compare at increasing or decreasing sales, and if this number compares to the music industry.

If you haven’t tried world of goo you probably should.  It is an awesome game and well worth the price.  I was looking through the independent game entries ad thought the following looked pretty cool:

Machinarium:

The artwork for this game looked super awesome.  Very original and very well done.  There is something about having good art that really helps your game.  You can have a realistic guy holding a gun in a 3d environment, but really good art will trump that for me.

Machinarium Preview 02 from Amanita Design on Vimeo.

Check out more images of the game here: http://www.machinarium.com/

Blueberry Garden:
Again the artwork gets me. I’m not really sure if the game mechanics are any good but I’ll definitely play a demo and check it out.

This game doesn’t appear to be complete yet so i guess stay tuned for more:
http://eriksvedang.wordpress.com/blueberrygarden/

Defense Grid:

I don’t think this game was part of the independent game awards, but it is fun. It’s a tower defense game so you have to like that kind of game. I really enjoyed it and it was pretty cheap ($20). I could only get it through steam.

More here: http://defensegrid.hiddenpath.com/

Iron Dukes:

At last years GDC I played One Ton Ghost’s Iron Dukes and loved it. It is a quick game that you can play the first level online. Unfortunately the game doesn’t seem to have been developed in the year since they won awards at last years game developers conference. It’s kind of sad that it appears to be abandoned. Oh well.

On an unrelated note you should check out this crazy animation.

As you can see I am a rank 2 gamespotter which means that I can browse the website with about as much authority as if I randomly came across the site on the web. I have the title of journeyman because I am currently on a painful journey to be able to post on a website. Eventually I could achieve the rank of “captain able to post stuff” or perhaps “sergeant can now change the picture next to my name”.

I was trying to comment on one of the few articles that I could find about the IGF at the GDC: link to the article here.

Since it is an unfinished idea, I think demonstrates really great artistic talent and great game design right off the bat. This sort of thing makes me glad that I got World of Goo.

The first game I’ll mention is Iron dukes which is a game about pirates. From this initial description this game is already awesome. It runs on flash and actually requires you to be running a relatively new computer for it to not slow down to a crawl. Since you can run the game in a web browser, if you wanted to, you yourself could go check it out for free. Below is the picture of my crew during one of the games:

Another really cool game was world of goo. You basically use the goo to construct bridges and structures in order to get to your objective. If you preoder the game for $20 you can get the preview/demo right now while the game finishes development. The goo has a personality and you sort of think of them as you minions.

I should also mention that there was a game in the theme of guitar hero and rock band called guitar rising. Basically in both guitar hero and rock band you get really good at playing a plastic guitar. In guitar rising you learn how to play an actual guitar in a very similar format to guitar hero and rock band. It was pretty cool but also needed some development time (their website says that the release date is late 2008). You of course need a guitar to play the game.