Gamespot has a report on Stardock new strategy game Society.

Society promises to be something we haven’t seen done well, a MMORTS. And success will depend on how much you can rely on other people within your empire.

Though details on how the empires will be compiled and how much control your allies will have over your own resources remain unannounced, this is quickly becoming a title to watch for the next year or so.

BBC reports that ESA head honcho Doug Lowenstein thinks that games are too focused on the same demographic that they have always focused on – men in their 20s and 30s. The industry needs to do more to broaden its appeal if it wants to move beyond a niche entertainment industry, Lowenstein argues.

I’ll go one better.

The industry is marketed towards men in their mid-teens and early twenties. Games require more attention and more hand-eye skill than ever – so only those with more free time can get the most out of them, and they stick to the old stand-by of blowing things up or kicking ass. Preferably with a half-clothed anime model somewhere nearby.

Think of all the gaming magazine covers or exclusives you have seen in the last year. How many were for shooters?

Why is G4 running a poll on Videogame Vixens? (this is me gagging.)

The thing is, I don’t think the industry has any desire to move beyond its comfortable young male demo. They have perfected marketing to this group, they know what sells and there are few surprises. Let’s face it; when you were 16 you only had one or two things on your mind and I doubt Psychonauts would have scratched that itch.

Casual gamers are usually older, have more idiosyncratic tastes and don’t follow the marketing. If they buy a game it is usually an established franchise or something they learned about through word of mouth. If these people don’t read game magazines or Gamespot, how can you market to them?

If you have a marketing division, you have to give them something to do. And that means finding the ready made audience for ads, bright lights and shiny objects.

The Holy Grail is a way to convert casual gamers into hardcore gamers, i.e., marketable eyeballs. But this is much easier said than done.

The generation going through high schools now (which has zero trouble getting its hands on M rated games, btw) is the industry’s best chance to date at converting women and casual gamers to the seductive power of gaming. But, like Lowenstein, I see little effort to make this shift.

Do they resist because they have no ideas? Because it is hard? Because they like the boy’s club they have set up?

And Lowenstein is saying nothing that is surprising to developers or publishers. Speak to them and they all say they want to broaden the appeal of the hobby. But Lowenstein is preaching to a choir that will say “Amen” but not sing for their supper.

Gamasutra has a report (reigstration required) on a panel discussion led by UC Irvine’s Patricia Seed on the place of computer games in her university history courses, specifically Civilization.

The most interesting point in the report comes from high school history teacher Jeremiah McCall. He says that asks students to consider what aspects of a game are accurate and which are for gameplay value only. Somehow this leads to an ability to think critically about biases in sources and the contested nature of history.

I’m skeptical about how well this works. Criticizing a game and its oversights is very different from reconciliing different eyewitness accounts of the Boston Massacre.

Seed offered a course at Rice called “World History Through Games“. The course focuses on Age of Empires and Civilization and how they portray historical progression. There are also sections on European board games and how they use history as a backdrop for competition. This sounds like an exciting course, and something appropriate to the university level. I have long wondered what impressions of history are conveyed through games and such a course is a fine companion to the usual university stand-bys about history and Hollywood.

But do the students learn about history or just about how history is used or manipulated? Once you know that you need access to fresh water to grow your city or that iron is kind of important, where can we move there learning wise? This is a very different matter from actually teaching historiography or in-depth analysis of a particular issue.

As you can tell, this will probably be a constant theme of mine in this blog since historical strategy games are supposed to be something more educational and intelligent than Painkiller. I have my doubts that this is actually the case, but if people keep saying it I will keep writing about it.

Steve Butts of IGN has an informative interview with Firaxis’ Barry Caudill. We finally get some information on how the religion dynamic will work and some not so thrilling news about the addition of more movies.

The big news items are that eras are gone and so are governments. Now you government structure will be defined along five civic criteria: Government, Legal, Labor, Economy, and Religion.

The graphic rewrite looks significant and will be more user friendly from the main screen.

The title exaggerates, of course. As a strategy gamer, I haven’t many choices and I have been gaming on a PC for as long as I have been gaming seriously.

But today I had to help a friend with a problem.

He is a casual gamer. He likes games and plays them quite a bit, but doesn’t read about them, can’t troubleshoot them and asks me for recommendations. The other day he asked if he should buy Rome: Total War or Pirates! Since he was already committed to buying Imperial Glory later this week, I suggested Pirates! It’s a different game than Rome and Imperial Glory and would show PC creativity at its peak.

Today he IMs me. Pirates keeps crashing and he doesn’t know why. “It meets the system requirements”, he says. I have to tell him that listed system requirements are usually no better than a guess and often lowball, but yes, his system should handle Pirates just fine.

So I ask him about his video card. He has no idea. I show him where to find this information and he tells me has Intel integrated graphics. Yes, this is a laptop.

I don’t want to tell him the bad news (that this could take a long time and still not work) so I tell him to update his drivers. In other words, I find the driver website, point him there and tell him what to do.

Then I ask if he has patched Pirates! He has no idea what I am talking about.

Don’t be hard on him. He’s a very smart guy. A successful professional, a risk taker who is midcareer change. A real stand-up guy who is a Master of Madden.

But patching is something that we PC gamers take for granted. So I link him there and talk him through the process.

He then – understandably – asks how he can get a better video card for his laptop. He’s not ready for that, yet.

All of this gets me frustrated for him. All these great games out there that require fine-tuning, downloading, updating…all those things that we serious PC gamers just take as a matter of course are flummoxing him.

If I was smarter I would have asked him more about his computer before recommending anything. Of course, none of this was an issue when I recommended Political Machine. But this type of crap is one big reason why PC games will never catch up to consoles in market share. I think that most PC games are better, more enjoyable and deeper. But they are also a pain in the ass to use unless you have been playing them for years.

This little adventure may have pushed my friend over the edge into buying a gaming desktop, since, through my evangelism, he knows there are lots of great games out there for the computer. But it’s a shame that we had to spend so much time in frustration and IM guessing game hell because he can’t play one of the best games of the last two years.

A final list of the strategy games on display at this year’s E3. Lots of big titles here. Civ4. AoE3. Rise of Legends. And, most anticipated by far, Spore.

Fantasy strategy seems to be making a comeback and tycoon games are still going strong.

The shocking title is Frog City’s Snow. One of my all-time favorite developers – the makers of the Imperialism games – is now doing a drug lord tycoon game. Since I openly admit to targeting civilians in my RTS games, I shouldn’t get on my high horse about ethical behavior in games, but there does seem to be a qualitative difference somewhere in there.

Age of Empires III (Microsoft/Ensemble)
American Conquest: Divided Nation (CDV/GSC)
Ascension to the Throne (1C Company/DVS)
Battle Mages: Sign of Darkness (Buka Entertainment/Targem Games)
Black and White 2 (Electronic Arts/Lionhead)
Blitzkrieg 2 (CDV/Nival Interactive)
Brigade E5: New Jagged Union (1C Company/Apeiron)
Civilization IV (2K Games/Firaxis)
Codename: Panzers, Phase Two (CDV/Stormregion)
Company of Heroes (THQ/Relic)
Cuban Missile Crisis (1C Company/G5 Software)
Desert Law (1C Company/Arise)
Diplomacy (Paradox)
Dragonshard (Atari/Liquid)
Earth 2160 (Zuxxez/Reality Pump)
ER (2005) (Vivendi Universal/Legacy Interactive)
Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords (Strategy First/Stardock)
Ghost Wars (Hip Games/Digital Reality)
The Guild 2 (JoWood/Deep Silver)
Hard Truck Tycoon (Buka Entertainment/G5 Software)
Heart of Empire: Rome (Deep Silver/Deep Red)
Heaven vs. Hell (TKO Software)
Heroes of Might and Magic V (Ubisoft/Nival Interactive)
Hotel Giant 2 (JoWood/Game Factory)
Imperivm: Great Battles of Rome (FX Interactive/Haemimont)
Joint Task Force (HD Interactive/Mithis)
The Movies (Activision/Lionhead)
Outfront II(1c Company)
Pacific Storm (Buka/Lesta Studio)
Paraworld (Sunflowers)
Perimeter: Emperor’s Testament (1C Company/KD Labs)
Panzer Elite Action (JoWood/Zootfly)
Rollercoast Tycoon 3: Soaked (Atari/Frontier Dev.)
Rise & Fall: Civilizations at War (Midway/Stainless Steel)
Rise of Nations: Rise of Legends (Microsoft/Big Huge Games)
Rush for Berlin (Deep Silver/Storm Region)
Seven Kingdoms: Conquest (Enlight Software)
The Sims 2: Nightlife (Electronic Arts/Maxis)
Singles 2: Triple Trouble (Deep Silver/Rotobee)
Snow (2K Games/Frog City)
Space Rangers 2: Dominators (1C Company/Elemental Games)
Spellforce 2 (JoWood/Phenomic Game Development)
Spore (EA Games/Maxis)
Stalingrad (1C Company/4X Studios)
Star Wars: Empire at War (LucasArts/Petroglyph)
Tycoon City: New York (Atari/Deep Red)
UFO: Aftershock (Cenega/Altar)
An Untitled RTS (Deep Silver)
War Front: Turning Point (CDV/Digital Reality)
Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War – Winter Assault (THQ/Relic)
War Leaders: Clash of Nations (CDV/Enigma Software)
World War I (1C Company/Nival Interactive)
A World War II RTS (1C Company)
XIII Century: Sword and Honor (1C Company/One Small World)
Zoo Tycoon 2: Endangered Species (Microsoft/Blue Fang Games)