• CNet has an article on THQ using brain sensors to refine gameplay. I saw this sensor at GDC last year… The game industry doesn’t do nearly enough, overall, in terms of scientific assessment of their product. There’s a great playability lab at Microsoft that monitors players as they experience games, but there’s a really long way to go in terms of measuring people’s reactions to the content. Fortunately, there’s folks like Mark Terrano (who has a great diagrammatic method of measuring player engagement over gameplay time), Nicole Lazzaro, and Dan Cook thinking about this. 🙂

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Anti-TD is a fun take on Tower Defense games: you play the never-ending march of invaders, and the computer places the towers.

I’ve talked a lot in the past about how games can be symmetrical or asymmetrical. Symmetrical games are ones where the capabilities of the player are comparable to the capabilities of the opponent: tennis, Quake, chess. Asymmetrical games are ones where the player and the opponent have differing games to play. This latter form really flourished with the advent of computers, but examples do exist from prior; for example, baseball or cricket can be viewed as alternating rounds of asymmetrical gameplay, and board games like Fox & Geese are asymmetrical.

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