Column: 'The Esoteric Beat: Gender, Surgery, Blogging'

In today's edition of The Esoteric Beat, Gamasutra's weekly look at the esoteric side of game design and development, regular columnist Jim Rossignol reports on massively multiplayer gender tests, Super Monkey Ball surgery and auto-blogging, as outlined in this extract: "Gaming academic Edward Castronova has highlighted some interesting things going on in A Tale In The Desert III, which has just launched. It seems that in the wake of 'synthetic world' conference Ludium I, the ATITD guys have taken it upon themselves to try to test some of Francis Steen's theories about the evolutionary origins of play. Castronova explains: "Develop in your mind an evolutionary theory of human gender differences... Note how easily it explains why more guys play the current crop of MMORPG games. Here comes the hard part: use the theory to redesign games so that they appeal to your evolutionarily-designed model of females. It's not hard to do, just uncomfortable to think about." You can now read the full Gamasutra column on the subject for more on this and other burning esoteric-related issues from the week (no registration required, please feel free to link to this column from external web sites).