Author: by Staff

Showcasing highlights from Gamasutra's Member Blogs, our weblog writers take an interesting approach to the games and aggression topic, and write about how social networks should get more experimental. 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. This Week's Standout Member Blogs - Aggressive Games and Aggressive Behavior (Taekwan Kim) The relationship between video games and aggression isn't a new topic. But Taekwan Kim examines the supposed link between aggressive games and aggressive behavior from an interesting neurochemical angle. For his effort, Taekwan will receive a lifetime subscription to Gamasutra sister publication Game Developer magazine. - Single-Player Videogames (Emanuel Montero) Spanish PhD student Emanuel Montero is worried about what he calls a " single-player game tyranny" that is keeping multiplayer gaming down. "I want to play a story-driven game with my friends. Hand to hand. In the same room." He's aiming to solve the perceived problem himself… - Copy Paste And Coding (Ofer Rubinstein) Indie game developer Ofer Rubinstein explains in his blog how to avoid copy/pasting code through the use of an example. "As a rule of thumb, copy pasting in programming is a bad thing (sort of)," he writes. - Video Game Reviews and the Much Maligned Dark Sector (Jay Johnson) Jay Johnson uses the game Dark Sector as a jumping-off point for a critical examination of game reviews. He says that the commercially underperforming Dark Sector was victim of "over-comparison" to other games, a trend he believes is getting worse. - Social Network Games: New Grounds For Experimental Gaming (James Gonzalez) Member blogger James Gonzalez argues that there are two types of social networking games: the kinds that are just fun to play with friends, and the ones that are just "marketing scams" where the sole focus is virility. But Facebook and MySpace should be used for more "wacky" experimental social games, he says.