Personally, I think that Wii-style motion control combined with 360 / PS3 graphical detail is a big win. Perhaps I'm alone on this, but sales figures so far seem to be bearing it out.

I'm not slating the Wii; Nintendo managed to launch a console that was incredibly cheap to make yet hugely innovative, and they made a massive amount of money by doing so. Now the other console makers are cynically cashing in on the market that Nintendo has created. C'est la vie - they're in this for the money after all.

But the visuals on the Wii really are pretty bad, even to someone like me who favours innovation over glitz. If I can get motion control and nice visuals in my games, I think that's worth paying a bit of a premium.

Yes, it seems to me that we've reached a bit of an IMPAS.

Except Big Mike's.

Actually, I've noticed a similar kind of degradation over the careers of many authors, without (as far as I am aware) any degenerative mental disease. Which is not to say that you're wrong about Pratchett's work; I'm not familiar enough with it to say, having only read a handful of his books.

I certainly don't disagree that this would be an interesting area to study, I'm just not convinced that you can necessarily attribute such changes in his work to the disease.

I'll be very interested to see if that does come about. It's something Nintendo have repeatedly denied, but that doesn't mean it isn't going to happen, of course.

Whether Sony (or Microsoft - hahahaha!) can make any inroads into the casual/party game market in the mean time remains to be seen.

I think there's probably some crossover point between casual and hardcore gaming, combining motion control with state of the art graphics, which could work really well. I don't know if the market agrees, however.

Good graphics != Fun

I bought a Wii because the games are fun. Graphics are not the be-all and end-all of gaming, they're just the icing on the cake.

If I can have an equal amount of fun but with great graphics too, all the better. I think there's a market for such a thing. If you don't, that's fine - neither of us own Sony shares (I assume), so it's not going to affect our lives too greatly.

Then why do I own a Wii, and a small collection of the better games for it? Why would I describe the Wii as fun, if I didn't even own one?

I don't own a PS3 either. Personally, I prefer to do my hardcore gaming on PC. But anyone who thinks there isn't a market for Wii-style party games with better graphics is deluding themselves. If you seriously think the only difference between Wii and PS3/Xbox/PC graphics is the resolution, I find it hard to believe you've spent any time gaming at all.

What if the question is: -

"Wii games can be pretty fun sometimes, especially with a few mates around having a laugh, but why can't we have something similar where the control scheme is a bit less dodgy, and the graphics don't suck ass?"

I'm pretty sure there's a fair few people asking that question.

Inform 7 might be of interest. It's a tool for creating interactive fiction (otherwise known as text adventures). It uses a natural language syntax, and it's dead easy to learn the basics, making it ideal for non-techy types.

Text games might not be the kind of thing you initially had in mind, but this could be a useful way to teach topics like storytelling, characterisation, dialogue trees and so on. As an added bonus, your students can have a prototype game up and running in no time, with the accompanying sense of satisfaction, rather than having to spend weeks learning complex tools first.

So some small proportion of people have 50,000 favourite and/or hated films or shows?

Hardware isn't the issue here, software is. Each manufacturer adds their own skin over the top of the stock Android interface. But even this is not, in itself, a bad thing.

The inconvenience starts when Google releases Android 2.2, and your phone is still stuck on Android 1.6, because the manufacturer hasn't got around to applying all their custom skinning to the new version. They might get around to it six months or a year later, if you're lucky and you've bought a popular model of phone. They might never get around to it either.