Gamasutra Member Blogs: From Social Games To Demon's Souls

Showcasing highlights from Gamasutra's Member Blogs, our weblog writers examine social game players, Demon's Souls, and slow disc loads. Member Blogs can be maintained by any registered Gamasutra user, while invitation-only Expert Blogs -- also highlighted weekly -- are written by selected development professionals. Our favorite blog post of the week will earn its author a lifetime subscription to Gamasutra's sister publication, Game Developer magazine. (All magazine recipients outside of the United States or Canada will receive lifetime electronic subscriptions.) We hope that our blog sections can provide useful and interesting viewpoints on our industry. For more information, check out the official posting guidelines. Here are the top member blogs for the week: This Week's Standout Member Blogs - A Peek into the Mind of a Social Gamer (Hsiao Wei Chen) Social games are monumentally successful, but they are also quite young, and relatively under-discussed compared to their more mature gaming brethren. Hsiao Wei Chen is a self-described social gamer, and in this post she provides a profile of the segment's audience. For her effort, she will receive a lifetime subscription to Gamasutra sister publication Game Developer magazine. - Slow Disc Loads (David McClurg) Longtime game programmer David McClurg isn't a big fan of long disc load times, and yet they're still extremely common in games today. Here, he offers two reasons for the persistence of that pitfall. - Selling Souls: Demon's Souls Analysis (Josh Bycer) Josh Bycer knew he'd love From's unlikely hit Demon's Souls even before he started playing it, and in this post he goes into great detail as to why. - Disturbing Happenings in iPhone Land and more... (Marshal Hernandez) Pay-to-play reviews and interviews are apparently alive and well in the Wild West-like world of iPhone games, as developer Marshal Hernandez recently discovered. He shares his unfortunate experiences here. - Demarcation: An Objective Metric for Skills in Games (Enrique Dryere) What demarcates skills from other aspects of games? Enrique Dryere offers his rubric of main skill qualities -- time, feedback, and potency -- and provides an additional list of important factors.