Great article. The thing that really nails it is the composition of the teams making the content. Who makes games? For the *vast majority*, it's young(ish) white guys. Some Asians. A very, very small number of hispanics and black folks. Mostly dudes, with a small proportion of women developers.

@IronChu: Wow. That's about as inane a response as I've ever read about anything. So, the merit of the issue at hand doesn't matter, and you should never try to take on someone because they're powerful.

I'm the game designer that was interviewed in the article, and I ended up writing a bit more about why I think Angry Birds is addictive here:

As someone who just picked up the Pro Guitar controller for RB3 yesterday, I think the most disappointing thing is that basically the music genre's taking a beating when the best game in the entire history of the genre should be picking up steam.

@Klumpmeister: Are you kidding? Have people *already* forgotten what happened at Infinity Ward? If that's Activision "treating you like royalty," I'd hate to see how they treat anyone who *isn't* making them a billion+ per game.

The thing that boggles my mind is that anyone would continue to work with Activision. As a game developer, knowing that any promised bonus could be arbitrarily held until some other random conditions are met... that's not a company I'd ever want to do business with. I'd never want to work for them. I'd never want to…

@Jdizzy42: Hi, jdizzy - our best estimate is ~3.6megs per hour you play. I wouldn't use that estimate to try to "max out" your data plan, as it's just a back-of-the-hand calculation, but you should be able to at least check it out.

@kayfouroh: Yep. It's been submitted, and it's just waiting for Apple's approval. Also, if you like WA, and you've got friends who don't have iPhones/Pres, it's on Facebook now, as well.

@JoDi: Thanks! :D (just a weird trivia bit - the dog in the user avatar is my dog Mobius, that's me on the bottom left, and the other co-founder of Self Aware, Colin, in the upper right). All the AI characters in Practice Mode are our friends and coworkers.

@kayfouroh: Yep! One of the co-founders. :) Thanks for the kind words. We're working on ways to combat cheating in Word Ace, which will start rolling out in the 1.1 update. Thanks again!

@Eulatos: Got two - Word Ace, a combination of Texas Hold 'Em and Scrabble, and Taxiball, which is basically Crazy Taxi meets Marble Madness. :)

The value of this column escapes me a bit. The thing is, this information is readily available already to anyone with an iPhone or iPod Touch (save the "weeks in the list" bit, which isn't hugely interesting).

Wrote up a little blurb on the Self Aware blog about exact thing, really. But the idea is that the next-gen games are are about games that are pervasively connected from *anywhere*, and as a result, they're found on the iPhone/Palm Pre/Android.

@ADVENTURE.exe: Yeah - I remember the announcement. But that was what, months, if not years ago, now? You can't get away with that in journalism - you have to disclose potential conflicts of interest every time they occur.

Without question, journalist first, gamer second. Honestly, being a "gamer" isn't that rare a quality these days. Pick up a handful of rocks, and chances are you can hit a dozen hardcore, life-long gamers.

I know this may seem trivially silly, but it seems like a disclaimer be included about McWhertor & his involvement with Meat Bun.

Weird. A few years ago, just before an interview, I was watching Matrix 2, and saw that. The way I did it uses less tie, so you don't need something super-long.

The RSS feed of this got a list of pictures that was a incredibly long. I'd just like to ask if, in the future, galleries like this can be excluded somehow from the RSS. Thanks!

Having worked in the console industry for a handful of years, having failed for almost a decade to get any sort of indie development off the ground, and then finally succeeded, there were three key factors:

#1 FTW.