According to this article in The Guardian prisoners in Chinese jails are being forced by guards to play online games and acquire virtual gold which is then sold to resellers and bought by players all over the world.  The prisoners worked 12 hour shifts to bring in virtual gold. Sure, they beat them if they dropped below quota but comparing playing video games to the usual manual labour forced on Chinese prisoners such as...

According to this article in Gamasutra the US Navy is using an MMO to crowdsource ways to combat Somali Pirates.  Interesting approach, but I don’t really get it.  Crowdsourcing military strategy? What type of people have good ideas in this regard that are not already engaged in the military?  If they are out there at all, I guess the hope is that they will play through the scenarios in this game and teach the military...

The followup to the Diablo look-alike from Runic Games is headed to PCs springtime next year.  Torchlight 2 will contain the biggest feature asked for since Torchlight: Online Co-Op. I loved Torchlight and can’t wait to play the next version of the game with friends.  If it hits the street at anywhere near their current price point I will pick it up for sure. As for the MMO the team is working on?  It’s still in the...

Baldree told PC Gamer: Our vision is to have an MMO that plays as close to single player as we can get it.  It will have the same focus on relatively fast action: carving your way through the hordes of monsters with a large number of hugely devastating skills.  The game has to be solo-able, but players will ahve to have skills that make them useful in a party and make them work together. Besides the fact that Baldree also mentions...

APB or All Points Bulletin is basically a mashup of an MMO and Grand Theft Auto.  Seemed like a good idea at the time, but has taken a really long time to come to fruition and in my opinion is still coming out too early. As somebody who played during the ‘Keys to the City’ event I found it buggy, very buggy, and no where near ready for production.  We are talking Age of Conan level of buggy and broken. Add to that their...