Good to see Phil Harrison has got the defibrillator out and is working manically to bring Atari back from the dead.

In this piece for Edge, the new Atari President explains some of the initiatives undertaken to help transform the ailing publisher, including a focus on "higher quality products" and plenty of work by (former SingStar Executive Producer) Paulina Bozek to recruit new talent for Atari's internal studios.

Atari-published games currently in development include Demigod from Chris Taylor's Gas Powered Games, the highly-anticipated (Activision-Blizzard reject) Ghostbusters, Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena, Australian-made flight combat game Heroes Over Europe, a console version of the excellent role playing game The Witcher, the revival of Ready 2 Rumble Boxing on the Wii, and a new Wii music title from Rez/Sega Rally creator Tetsuya Mizuguchi.

Do you think Atari can pull itself out of the mire?

Even if it did make me look like a member of Melbourne's underworld community, Screen Play was pleased to join hundreds of other members of the Australian gaming community to promote Movember.

Companies like THQ, EB Games and Ubisoft heavily supported the initiative to help raise awareness of men's health issues like depression and prostate cancer, and the Screen Play team was ably led by captain Bryan Froud.

If you spent Movember looking like Mario or Solid Snake please send in your mugshot and I'll add it to our rogues gallery below.

Remember it's also not too late to get out your credit card to support the Screen Play team.

Firstly, I'm not sure if everyone has been reading for long enough to realize this, but GSW has been through quite a major series of shifts over the past three years or so (yes, we've been running since 2005).

Here's a potted history, with links to weekly archives to give you a good idea along the way:

- Early Prehistory (January 2006)
We started things off with more of a group feel and eclectic, six+ posts a day styling. In fact, our initial group bloggers theoretically included Michael McWhertor (nowadays at Kotaku, of course), Brandon Boyer (who just started the BoingBoing-affiliated Offworld, which early GSW vaguely resembles, only with less Greenblat), and Wonderland's delightful Alice Taylor. It evolved into a solo effort (with a few exceptions) over time, though.

- The Mid-Period Evolution (April 2007)
Halfway between the oldschool and the new school, GSW in mid-2007 had quite a few link-style posts. It was still clocking in at about five posts a day, some on eclectic subjects, but now had a regular-ish GameSetLinks link round-up. It was also starting to increase longer-form columns from folks like Slashdot/Massively's Michael Zenke, the indefatigable John '@Play' Harris, and quite a few more besides. It was a transition time...

- The Here And Now (November 2008)
Well, now we're at three posts per day, with the daily GameSetLinks round-ups picking up some of the more thoughtful writing online. The other posts alternate between GSW-exclusive columns (generally design analysis/critiques, like 'The Interactive Palette', or more personal perspectives, like 'Chewing Pixels'), and there are more crossposts from sister sites - particularly longform writing from Gamasutra that we think might get lost, but also link round-ups from sister sites like FingerGaming and IndieGames.

So that explains where we were, and where we are.

In a lot of ways, today's GameSetWatch is an 'unblog'. Which is to say - instead of lots of tiny, pithy posts, we hit you with three big chunks of text every day. I guess this is a little bizarre - and in our regularity in doing so, we're practically recidivist.

Of course, the site's current structure is partly a reaction to the site itself being a sideproject to our regular dayjobs running Game Developer magazine, Gamasutra, and helping with GDC, so there you go.

But I'd like this to be a call for ideas, and feedback. What bits of GSW do you dig now - which columns, whose writing, what particular features? What would you like to see more of, and what would you like to see less of? What are we doing that's important and enjoyable, and what are we doing that's tedious or less than necessary?

[Feedback to editors at gamesetwatch dot com welcome, of course, but the blog comments are the best way to get discussion going.]

Charting crafting changes in EverQuest II: The Shadow Odyssey originally appeared on Massively on Fri, 21 Nov 2008 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Second Life affair grounds for real-life divorce originally appeared on Joystiq on Sun, 16 Nov 2008 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Online games like World of Warcraft and communities like Second Life allow people to connect in amazing ways. Take Amy Taylor and David Pollard, a happily married British couple who met in a chat room and demonstrated their love with a fantasy wedding in Second Life before marrying for real. It was a nice story, but this virtual marriage is ending in a very real divorce.

Both avid gamers, Pollard, 40, kept playing Second Life. His wife, 28, became suspicious when she found his virtual character snuggling up to another woman’s. Taylor hired an online private detective (12 yr old hacker?) and found that her husband was visiting a virtual prostitute. “I looked at the computer screen and could see his character having sex with a female character. It’s cheating as far as I’m concerned,” she claims.

Pollard confessed that through the game he had been seeing an American girl, but said that he wasn’t doing anything wrong and that they “were just chatting and hanging out together.” Stories like this and the Maple Story should serve as a reminder to gamers everywhere that virtual relationships are becoming more and more real. Most of us with wives should probably just stick to FPSs. Don’t feel too sorry for poor Amy Taylor though. She already has a new love interest, who she met while playing WoW.

Amy Taylor, 28, is divorcing her husband after allegedly catching him engaging in virtual sexwith a prostitute in the simulated world, according to British paper Western Morning News.

In court papers, Taylor says she caught her 40-year-old husband, David Pollard, twice with other "women" in Second Life. Linden Lab's virtual world lets players create unique avatars (pictured), then use the characters to explore an endless variety of activities.

"I looked at the computer screen and could see his character having sex with a female character," Taylor told the paper. "It's cheating as far as I'm concerned. But he didn't see it as a problem, and couldn't see why I was so upset."

The kicker: The couple were married in 2005 after meeting in a chat room.

Image courtesy Linden Lab

See Also:

• Second Life Without Sex Would Be a Sad Life, Indeed
• True Story of a Twitter Marriage Proposal
• Join Second Life, Save Marriage
• Sweetest Tweet Ever? Man Proposes Via Twitter
• Virtual Rape Is Traumatic, but Is It a Crime?

For something that isn't strictly a videogame, Second Life is responsible for so much unbelievably stupid crap that it's difficult to ignore. Take, for example, the case of Amy Taylor, who is divorcing husband David Pollard for having an "affair" via the online social network.

Both Amy and David are avid Second Life players, and their online avatars became a couple to match their real world status. That is until Taylor caught Pollard having virtual sex with a virtual prostitute, virtually. She stayed with David in real life, but the avatars broke off their relationship ... are you still following this?

Taylor decided to test her man's loyalty by hiring a Second Life "private investigator" who lured Pollard into a "honeytrap." I should remind you all at this point that these people are not 12-years-old. Pollard actually passed the test and did not break any virtual fidelity. Thus satisfied, Amy Taylor married David Pollard in Second Life, once again matching their offline relationship. 

That is until she discovered him chatting to another avatar that was not her own, and displaying "genuine affection." So disgusted was Taylor that not only did the Second Life marriage end, but so did the first life one. Taylor and Pollard are now divorced -- both in the game world and the real one.

This happened between a 28-year-old woman and 40-year-old man. Just think about that.

For something that isn't strictly a videogame, Second Life is responsible for so much unbelievably stupid crap that it's difficult to ignore. Take, for example, the case of Amy Taylor, who is divorcing husband David Pollard for having an "affair" via the online social network.

Both Amy and David are avid Second Life players, and their online avatars became a couple to match their real world status. That is until Taylor caught Pollard having virtual sex with a virtual prostitute, virtually. She stayed with David in real life, but the avatars broke off their relationship ... are you still following this?

Taylor decided to test her man's loyalty by hiring a Second Life "private investigator" who lured Pollard into a "honeytrap." I should remind you all at this point that these people are not 12-years-old. Pollard actually passed the test and did not break any virtual fidelity. Thus satisfied, Amy Taylor married David Pollard in Second Life, once again matching their offline relationship. 

That is until she discovered him chatting to another avatar that was not her own, and displaying "genuine affection." So disgusted was Taylor that not only did the Second Life marriage end, but so did the first life one. Taylor and Pollard are now divorced -- both in the game world and the real one.

This happened between a 28-year-old woman and 40-year-old man. Just think about that.

For something that isn't strictly a videogame, Second Life is responsible for so much unbelievably stupid crap that it's difficult to ignore. Take, for example, the case of Amy Taylor, who is divorcing husband David Pollard for having an "affair" via the online social network.

Both Amy and David are avid Second Life players, and their online avatars became a couple to match their real world status. That is until Taylor caught Pollard having virtual sex with a virtual prostitute, virtually. She stayed with David in real life, but the avatars broke off their relationship ... are you still following this?

Taylor decided to test her man's loyalty by hiring a Second Life "private investigator" who lured Pollard into a "honeytrap." I should remind you all at this point that these people are not 12-years-old. Pollard actually passed the test and did not break any virtual fidelity. Thus satisfied, Amy Taylor married David Pollard in Second Life, once again matching their offline relationship. 

That is until she discovered him chatting to another avatar that was not her own, and displaying "genuine affection." So disgusted was Taylor that not only did the Second Life marriage end, but so did the first life one. Taylor and Pollard are now divorced -- both in the game world and the real one.

This happened between a 28-year-old woman and 40-year-old man. Just think about that.