The London Games Festival is one of the biggest events dedicated to gaming industry this year lasting since October 22 until early November.
The visitors will have the pleasure to meet video games publishers, developers, partners, personalities, and trade and media organizations.
The festival will include several events organized by different organizations, intended for everyone, from industry workers to parents that need an advice about games.

The events are:



- FRINGE: Tha Click exhibition which is featuring a playable hacked version of Nintendo Hogan’s Alley;
- FRINGE: The Soho Project;
- FRINGE: Nintendo DS Pub Meetups;
- FRINGE: Skills Week, where you can meet experts that will guide you in finding a good job in the gaming industry;
- FRINGE: Lounge & Zero Gamer exhibition, where you can relax or watch games playing;
- BAFTA Ones To Watch Award Preview;
- Dare at the Festival that features concept art, finished characters, games trailers, playable demos and a documentary film plus some games will be available for free download on a first come first served basis;
- FRINGE: Play/Time Games Lab, where you will see or be one of the artists, writers, developers and producers from backgrounds in video-games, animation, web design, tv, radio and theatre, that will have the opportunity to collaborate and compete to create original ideas for new games across a range of platforms;
- GLAM Academy Party (Games, Life, and Media, Ltd.);
- Video Games Live, where you can enjoy listening the best music from the biggest video games;
- ELSPA Annual General Meeting;
- Be Very Afraid IV, an event that combines intelligent students of all ages, with cool technology, conversations with key influencers, and some remarkable projects;
- Guerilla Gal Games Networking;
- Virtual Worlds workshop: Virtual Worlds 101;
- London Game Career Fair, an event organized by GamesIndustry.biz and Gamasutra.com, where you can find a job in the gaming industry;
- Virtual Worlds workshop: Enterprise virtual worlds, where you will understand the significant impact virtual worlds will have on corporate collaboration;
- FRINGE: Women in Games Mixer, destined for women that like games or work in the domain;
- Working with Games: How games can power cross media content across TV, Film and Advertising, destined for exploring the potential for working partnerships across the games TV, Film and Advertising industries, and help create new opportunities;
- Virtual Worlds Forum Europe, designed to enable businesses to harness the power of virtual worlds to engage with clients, suppliers and customers. This two day conference and expo is accompanied by three optional workshops.
- FRINGE: Getting Personal - Artists and Audiences in the Era of Web 2.0, where Arts Council London invites you to consider with us the implications of Facebook, Second Life, You Tube, Alternate Reality Games and other online interfaces on artistic practice and cultural participation.
- The British Academy Video Games Awards;
- FRINGE: Guy Debord's The Game Of War;
- "Games Production and Globalization" seminar;
- Computational Brain, where people will debate upon the similarities between the human and computer brains.
- FRINGE: London Gamer Geeks Quiz;
- "Creating and Exploiting Games IP" seminar;
- Dr Kawashima's a great teacher! Games based learning in Scottish schools;
- FRINGE: Videogames and Art book launch;
- Will Wright - BAFTA Annual Lecture;
- Electronic Arts present Be the One in Trafalgar Square, where you will play EA games and discuss about them;
- FRINGE: Dorkfest - Console Hacks, a discussion about game machines;
- Design Rules! Creating Compelling Emotive Games with Ernest Adams, about games design;
- Eyes on the Game with demonstrations of the eye-tracking technology;
- Working with Games Writers - BAFTA & Writers Guild of Great Britain. Topics covered will include: In-house versus freelance, working in groups, finding the right writer, finding games writing work, integrating writers into a team, defining the role of the writer, deliverables, pre-production, story design, script polishes, rewrites, localization, marketing, contracts, credits, rates and more.
- It’s Showtime - with Machinima;
- FRINGE: Channel 4/Electronic Arts Mobile Game Competition;
- FRINGE: Sense of Play 07, about game design;
- Virtual Worlds workshop: Risk, Reputation & Virtual Worlds;
- Jade Raymond presents Assassin's Creed;
- Jump in at The Vinyl Factory - The Xbox 360 base camp;
- FRINGE: Txt 4 Treasure, a mobile phone treasure hunt;
- FRINGE: Games – AV;
- FRINGE: London Geekdinner goes a Wii bit mad;
- Jade Raymond Assassin's Creed - Press Event;
- FRINGE: 3D Business - Reality or Fantasy?;
- Classifying Games at the BBFC;
- Fuse 07, dedicated to music;
- Designing & Developing Effective Serious Games Symposium.

If you want to know more details about each event and to book, visit the official festival’s website.

<-125x125 Button - right->Every once in a while the scientific community feels obliged to enter the taboo gaming territory and run studies demonstrating the absolute obvious for the sake of scientific argumentation. Today’s piece comes via Associated Press and tells us just how time consuming online role playing games can be, changing the user’s life patterns into less sleep, work and social activities in favor of more game time. At least we’re one step closer to unveiling the truth as out academic researcher states that games have great “enthrallment” potential instead of the overused term of addictive qualities. The study was published in the October issue of the journal Cyberpsychology & Behavior.

Syracuse University psychology professor Joshua Smith tested the gaming habits of 100 student volunteers, as they were presented with different role playing games to try while randomly divided into four test groups. While the laws of psychological experiments are clearly stated in the deontology books, I believe a gamer’s perspective on the matter could have improved the accuracy of the final result. At the moment there are no hard cover books to explain what 12 year old gamers have known for a long time from experience. Do you agree that games spread over significantly different release dates, platforms and popularity pools have the same impact on perfect test subjects? Then let’s take a look at the contenders.

One group played on token machines at a local arcade, having to taint their gaming sessions with the social pressures of an open real life environment. The second group played “Gauntlet: Dark Legacy”, a 1999 hack and slash console RPG for Playstation 2, having access to personalized time frames while playing the game in the comfort of their own homes. The third group got down and dirty playing Diablo 2 on computers (first released in 2000), with access to multiplayer online features. The last group played the “Dark Age of Camelot” MMORPG, exclusively online role playing game which was released in 2001.

The way I see it arcade games have a greater appeal casual gamers, due to the low amount of time involved in playing the game from start to end. Things turn hardcore more often in the role playing computer world. While the Playstation 2 title was a good one, its success was nowhere close to the incredible hype that drove Diablo 2 players to keep gaming years after the release. Professor Smith also disregards the fact that the MMORPG scene was in its infancy in the 2000’s and games didn’t fully have the addictive stimuli of recent day titles. Dark Age of Camelot had and still has a good number of fans, yet it’s nothing compared to the millions of users locked in similar modern MMORPGs.

One month of testing showed revealed the fourth group having the highest amount of time spent inside the game, more than twice as much as the Diablo 2 group. The first two categories weren’t even close, proving once more the poor choice in selecting similarly effective gaming incentives. Joshua Smith concluded that Dark Age of Camelot players reported significantly lower health and poorer sleep patterns. Gaming also interfered more with their studies and social lives. Looking on the bright side, group four had a lot of fun playing the game and even said they made many new friends within the virtual realms. So there you have it, online gaming is better than any other type, a hard truth many non-academic devotees have experienced for years.

On Friday, CPP, the owner of the massive online multiplayer game
EVE Online, made public the fact that they have discovered a security breach.



<-234x60 Half Banner - left->The game went offline, while the team of experts was trying to fix the anomaly founded in the database, which indicated an exploit.
Jon Horodal, CPP chief operating officer, declared that "What we discovered was an indication that one of our databases was being accessed through a security breach. While some may feel that such a drastic reaction was not warranted, it is always our approach to err on the side of caution in order to protect the players."



After a short period of time, the security breach problem has been solved and things went back to normal.
The company announced that no personal information or credit card numbers were exposed.

There are some rumors though, saying that one of the CCP database administrators was a victim of a keylogger, fact denied by the CPP.
Steven Davis, CEO of game security company SecurePlay believes that "The most likely scenario is that the Eve operational team has a live Internet connection and that a worm or other tool was used to access the game database."

This is not the first time EVE Online is implicated in a security scandal.
It happened previously, in 2006, when an insider was accused of giving confidential information to players.

On the Global Gaming Expo website, EuroTouch Interactive is announced to come with a stunning presentation for the gaming sector, more exactly the Z-Dome.



<-125x125 Button - left->The Z-Dome is a projection screen in a sphere shape, 8 foot tall, a simulator that can show you games and movies 180 degrees around you.
The device has touch screen controls at the bottom, speakers in its base, while the projector is situated in the back.
The key here is the software used, which takes PCs input and transforms it to fit the round area.

Wanna have one of these?
It is easy if you live in the US.
You can order one from EuroTouch and they’ll deliver at your door the package containing the projector, the screen, shipping and hand-holding.
But you got to have a lot of money for that because it costs $19,000.



Global Gaming Expo(G2E) is the most acclaimed event of the year for the gaming industry.
Taking place each November in Las Vegas, in partnership with the American Gaming Association, the event gathers the biggest gaming executives, industry professionals, and buyers, to share the newest products, trends and ideas.

Starting in 1982 as an arcade game, Jungle Hunt has spread on all platforms becoming the delight of all players that enjoy confronting the jungle’s danger, swinging from vine to vine, avoiding crocodiles or falling rocks.



Their goal is to save the girl from hungry cannibals.

This time it is about the mobile version of the game, published by Taito, a Japanese video game software and arcade hardware developer.

Starting this month, Jungle Hunt is available for 30 different Sprint Nextel mobile phone models including Motorola, LG, Samsung and Sanyo.

Keiji Fujita, producer of this game said that "The simple, engaging gameplay of Jungle Hunt makes it a perfect fit for mobile. This rollicking adventure game is sure to please Spring Nextel users."