Here. Sounds, ahaha, hot. No seriously, I'd play it.

Also: best picture of a girl used to advertise a game ever.

The Forest In Winter is a very nice animated short. I won't use any more adjectives so as not to spoil it. I recommend you don't read the text, but click on the image and watch the video first.

Did you think game development was all about fun and excitement and roller-coaster thrills? Did you imagine the devs sitting around a TV, controller in hand, laughing and laughing as they concoct another little moment of joy for the masses?

You were wrong. To illustrate the point, I'd like to invite you to have a look at the blog of an esteemed co-worker of mine.

Everyone, meet Jim. He is bored. Update: GAAAH! Link taken down. Site now contains graphic cat spaying pictures. This stretches even my rather broad definition of interactive entertainment. But well, at least he's not bored anymore.

Korean "macro" programs and keyboard emulators for gamers.

The Korea Times covers the "Macro" software scene among Korean Gamers; this is software that automates tedious, repetitious in-game "grinding" tasks, such as repetitively hunting down and killing weak monsters. I'm especially fond of the hardware-based keyboard emulators that look like thumb-drives and can be trained to undetectably automate input to in-game tasks

Hardware-based keyboard emulators to automate grinding. And of course, this being South Korea, it's a scene.

It can grab video signals transmitted between the PC and the monitor, and analyze the signals to make a judgment.

Wow. What's worse? Third world sweatshops farming gold? Or those jobs being replaced by machines? Not to mention that the fight against gold farmers is getting more and more like the fight against online crime. Which, according to whose TOS you subscribe to, it is.

This is probably old hat for people deep inside MMOs, but it's fun if you're sitting on the sidelines and eating popcorn.

(Via BoingBoing.)

You probably know this commercial for the Sony Bravia TVs (if not: aaugghh!!! go there now, it's awesome).

This is what that looks like in Battlefield 2.

(Via BoingBoing.)

Inspiration for level design maybe? Ironically you'd need to work hard to not just have this come across as fantastic art direction in a game - you don't have the 'omg it's a real building' factor working for you...

(Via BoingBoing.)

There's a very nice review on CNN of DreamCatcher Interactive's adventure game 'And Then There Were None', based on the Agatha Christie novel, and written and designed by Lee Sheldon.

I can't say anything about it that Alice hasn't said already. It's on the Blizzard site so it must be true :)

Just read about NCSoft's new MMO, Dungeon Runners via Penny Arcade.

Is this me or is this a brazen WoW clone? The art style... even the names... Embercore Broodling? Shadowspawn Queen? Or am I an MMO n00b and/or blind to Blizzard's fantasy clichés after 1 year of playing?

Concept art looks great though.

For about a whole minute, I thought this post on bosses was about conflicts with upper management.