Inspired by the work done at the oft-mentioned Experimental Gameplay Project, Finnish Helsinki Polytechnic student Petri Purho has given himself over to a public task with a unique look inside the life and mind of its creator.

Set up through his blog Kloonigames, Purho will be designing and releasing a new game monthly, each with a strict 7-day limit from start to finish. His first game, coming in at less than half the required time with just 3 days of development, is Jimmy's Lost His Marbles is a very playable puzzler along the lines of Same Game or Experimental Gameplay's Super Tummy Bubble, minus the sickening squelches and fetuses.

Even more valuable for fellow rapid-designers are and will be his accompanying postmortems for his games, as well as resources on prototyping, and with just five days as of this posting until Purho's next release, Kloonigames is certainly worth keeping a steady eye on to watch the madness unfold.

Via the blog of videoludica editor Matteo Bittanti comes news of GameScenes, a primer on the world of game art -- that is, art with games as its cultural guideline, with a list of all of the names you might have seen here before like Aram Bartholl (previously mentioned here), Cory Arcangel, ASMBLR's Brent Gustafson, and JODI.

Accompanying the release of GameScenes, Milano's Civic Gallery will be holding an exhibition called "GameSpaces.The Landscapes of Videogames," giving visitors a first-hand look into the world of "digital games, spaces, and urban environments in in our hyper-mediated age" as covered by GameScenes.

GameSpaces will open October 12 at the Civic Gallery, with the GameScenes book to roughly coincide with the exhibition in October. Check the GameScenes site for more info on both.

On the heels of last week's release of Persuasive Games' Airport Security, Atom Entertainment (overseers of viral video portal AtomFilms) has announced that their viral game site AddictingGames has added a section to their site purely dedicated to the budding genre of 'NewsGames.'

Currently home to previously mentioned and noteworthy games like McDonalds Videogame and Darfur is Dying, it has yet to see an influx of supporting games other than the usual Flash suspects riffing off of the Bush administration, Steve Irwin, or Zidane -- but we'll call it a step in the right direction for now.

You'd think that with the inherent time necessary to build a game -- from design to assets to programming -- making something both topical and worth playing beyond inane Flash one-clicks would be next to impossible.

Not so for Ian Bogost and his Persuasive Games, though. Makers of some of the finer "anti-advergames" like part-time dead-end job sim Disaffected, Persuasive's latest might not be the most extremely timely, but that added effort has paid off in a game that's both fun and more than a little scathing.

Riffing off of recent 'liquid bomb' airport security increases, Airport Security is a simple concept -- clicking passengers' carry-ons and clothing to strip them of a constantly updating list of banned and allowable items -- played through both smartly and humourously, capturing all the absurdist spirit of modern day air travel. Do some screening of your own by playing the game online here.

Microsoft's announcement of its upcoming XNA kit and Creator's Club have likely charged the minds of many hoping to break it big in Live Arcade's future, there's still many harsh realities to indie development that have to be considered.

To that end, GarageGames' and Marble Blast Ultra's (and ex-Incredible Machines co-creator) Jeff Tunnell has updated his Make It Big In Games blog with a post on the financial considerations of Live Arcade development. More hopeful sounding than his previous How Much Money Can Indie Games Make? and XBox360 Live Arcade Opportunities Get Competitive In A Hurry! entries, Tunnell admits that a typical Live Arcade slot could net developers anywhere between $780,000 - 1.5million (£414k-796k), though he admits the figure is a drop in the pan compared to most game budgets and returns.

For a good read on all the ins and outs from someone who's been working at indie development for as long as nearly anyone, Tunnell's blog is a fascinating and insightful read.

By now everyone should be familiar with Portal, the former DigiPen student demo gone full Sourced in the vaguely Half Life universe, likely by means of its tongue in cheek training video trailer. That humour, it was later revealed, likely stemmed from Valve's recent hire of former Old Man Murray and Psychonauts script writer Erik Wolpaw.

So it's not surprising to see some of that same Wolpaw-esque humour surfacing in the latest viral attempt to raise (or perhaps befuddle) awareness for Portal, the official Aperture Science website. Set up as an ancient command-line terminal, the interface, which can be accessed by first entering "HELP" or "LOGIN" and then using a username and obvious password (think very obvious), is a fun, similarly teasingly text-based new employee application that should give players a full taste of what to expect from the final product's overall atmosphere.

On a similarly analogue-converted note, Micromusic Netherlands and ON's previously mentioned C64 Orchestra, a live show giving famed SID composers Rob Hubbard and Jeroen Tel the orchestral makeover, have officially settled their own event details.

The Netherlands' Gigant theatre in Apeldoorn will be hosting the event this coming September 22nd, followed by an afterparty promising 'beats and blips' with live performances by GameBoy rocker Goto 80 and Jeroen Tel himself. Also, though it's yet to be formally announced, there will be a second follow-up performance of the orchestra in Amsterdam's Westergasfabriek a week later on September 29th.

More information on the show, along with downloadable arrangements from its interpretations of Cybernoid 2, International Karate and Monty on the Run can be seen at the project's new requisite MySpace page.

Following that same trickle of blood, freeware zombie hunters will be pleased to note the new 1.0 release of home-coder Alan Gordon's Zombie City Tactics (via insertcredit).

Still in its visual infancy, it's zombie hunting in spirit only, with the simplified colour-coded graphics just as easily representing ever-advancing swarms of anything that might strike dread into your heart. But, with this latest version, Gordon's also announced his intentions to assemble a willing team to turn the game into a fully commercial version, which we now patiently await.

As a bonus, Zombie City reminds us via his list of inspirations of a forgotten but similar GameBoy Colour effort put together by erstwhile indie handheld developers Berserker Industries. Their Hungry Are the Dead demo remains just as adorable and just as punishing as ever, but, unfortunately, came too late in the handheld's life-cycle to get considered for proper development. Grab a copy of the freely distributable rom file courtesy of Zophar.

As part of a series of lectures in Second Life's own virtual recreation of the New Globe Theater, the virtual space got what might be a special first for online worlds -- a sit down with a political candidate.

Potential US presidential candidate (who has yet to formally declare his intentions to run) and former Virginia governor Mark Warner joined the Second Life world as part of a campaign to reach his hands even further down into the netroots, establishing a virtual base in the space for his Forward Together political action committee.

As usual, Wagner James Au, as host of the event, has a full transcript and screen-log of the event, in which Warner stuck close to message-based questions from Au and held back from answering many queries from the audience, preferring to save that for a followup virtual town hall meeting planned for later this autumn.

Whether other candidates will soon see the Linden's space as a potential platform to reach beyond just the blogosphere is up in the air, but for now, Warner likely has the ear of the citizens of the Second Life community.

Despite the recent quick end to the usual summer lull, there's been a surge of recent interesting indie-developed game developments across the spectrum of the 'net.

Former Website of the Month JayIsGames has recently played host to a simple Flash puzzle game competition sponsored in part by Adobe, and 17 of the resulting entries have made their way online in two batches here and here. Showing a striking amount of diversity -- from Ico-inspired cerebral gear-locking puzzlers, to any number of room-based point and click outings, and even chord-picking sound games, there's hardly a dud in the bunch.

Independent Gaming and GameSetWatch have also pointed toward the PC preview for the upcoming superflat vector minigame PSP homebrew title Visiting Day, by one-man-team Mike Bithell. Lost somewhere in the realm of the limited palette and storybook style of Rub Rabbits, the extended play microgaming of Beito Hell 2000 (aka WTF), and the crushing punishment of every game to incorporate QTEs, it's one we're highly looking forward to taking on the road soon.

Finally, on a completely different front, AtariAge member Dragnerok X has uploaded his adorable parody homebrew creation, Atari 2600 GUI. For a one-off joke it's a gem, giving Windows-flavoured functionality to decidedly command-line era technology -- have a look at qotile's YouTube video if you find yourself Stella-less.

Nearly a year after the manifesto was first penned and we took a look at founder Greg Costikyan's plans for revolutionizing independent gaming's foundations with Manifesto Games, the covers have been pulled back off of the site for an initial open beta test.

Though self-admittedly by no means feature complete, the site has launched with an impressive array of titles both bedroom-coded and professional, and an allegiance of developers both familiar and new. The inclusion of niche hits like Cloud and Gibbage, for instance, wasn't surprising, but running across Codo's Laser Squad Nemesis and Funcom's Dreamfall was.

What the site may lack in promised polish, it certainly makes up for in a spirited adherence to its own unyielding anti-establishment cause: "This," Laser Squad's description reminds us, "and not some $40 million budget game developed by hundreds of drones in an EA sweatshop--this is the future of games."

You can test-drive its recently unveiled engine and lift your skinny fists in unison here.

Though the inspiration is clear -- shameless, maybe -- there's still something irresistibly hypnotic and endlessly addictive about dan-ball.jp's Java time-waster in the vein of d_of_i's Sand works. This time centred on liquid physics, the curious creations of water, magma, and swirled paint can only be called a game in the loosest, most emergent sense of defining your own goals, but toss in a few rubber ducks and you're only a few squints away from your average Sony hardware demo.

d_of_i himself has continued to update the formula that brought him net-fame, returning to basics (and apparently giving up on creative titles) with Sand Sand Sand, this time adding fractally-branching trees to the mix. He's also widened his oeuvre with an oeuf in Egg Way, a game we wouldn't be surprised to hear was inspired by some of the DS' early library, where the player guides the freefalling innards of a cracked egg by drawing a safe path into a welcoming frying pan.

It's been at least since the year-and-a-half old Super Monkey Ball Deluxe spots that a Sega viral campaign has been this appealing, and if you haven't already shared in the black ultra-violent warmth of their ongoing Yakuza campaign, it's probably time to start.

Split into four ten minute subtitled sections, the second of which has just recently been posted, the company is giving fans the entirety of inimitable director Takashi Miike's live-action take on the Yakuza underworld both in streaming and downloadable high-quality formats, leading up to the game's forthcoming western release. Equal parts coming of age and coming of killer, the movies are part of a smart campaign, and a perfect tie-in to the crisp bleakness of the game itself.

It's been some time since we last visited the dark laboratories of the Experimental Gameplay Project, but we're happy to discover that there's been no discernable lack of engineering going on in the interim. Specifically, project founder Kyle Gabler -- currently employed by EA where, he notes in his resume, he was "regretfully responsible for the controversial censorship of the middle fingers" in the Urbz -- has unleashed his latest "thrown together" work, Disco Extermination Nation.

Running dual purpose both as open-source framework for prospective creators to have a foundation on which to build their own games (a helpful nod toward its latest design competition), and as sample game itself, Nation is the group's first foray into peripheral support. In it, players can use their favorite PC-compatible dance pad to act out Gabler's special breed of indiscriminate cartoon violence by stomping hapless dancers in true grotesque Python-esque style. For the dance-pad-less and the out of shape, the game also supports keyboard control, but the temptation to rain down an otherwise physically impossible rapidfire flurry of feet makes the pad a preferable option.

While you're there, be sure to also stop by project co-founder Kyle Gray's way, as his own latest, Child Eater -- a paper-cut one-button keep-alive/kill-everyone combo -- is just as intriguing.

Though it's obviously yet to achieve the same monumental success as its goal-driven MMO peers - with large swaths of developed but unpopulated areas between the sex and Tringo parlours - there's little denying that Second Life has become the virtual-space-du-jour of the digital elite, and, increasingly, retail outlets and entertainers looking to reach out into this new space.

The BBC reports that the latest of these is Duran Duran, who, likening it to the advent of the music video, find the service a new frontier to connect with fans who they hope will turn their new space into a digital utopia. Meanwhile, similar musical and more academic diversions have been taking place via The Infinite Mind, who recently hosted Suzanne Vega giving a personal avatar enhanced performance (unlike previous U2 fan-recreations), and will be accompanied by MIT Media Lab's John Maeda and author Kurt Vonnegut, the latter presumably conducted via audio only.

Perhaps it's simply a law of averages -- while 2006 has seen MMO subscriptions climbing to consistently higher record numbers every month, so too must go its admonishing cutbacks. Final Fantasy XI recently announced an additional 2000 accounts removed for using prohibited third-party utilities, a number which seems comparatively large -- more than the accounts removed throughout the rest of the year combined.

But World of Warcraft, its population far-outpacing any other, takes the fell-swoop award for its just announced removal of 59,000 accounts from its roster, for similar gold and farming cheats. The number is in addition to another 30,000 deleted throughout the month of May, and several smaller bans before it.

The numbers of players whisked away are themselves impressive, and indicative of the enormity of the problems continually faced by MMO developers in keeping their worlds running smoothly, but working out the maths and realizing what an enormous yearly loss in subscription fees the bans represent is much more sobering.

Two weeks after Ultima Online began utilising online third-party cheat detector PunkBuster, it has announced the closing of 180 accounts and the removal of a massive portion of its economy. After discovering cheques held in accounts for amounts more than the current million-gold restriction, UO mods have permanently deleted an approximated 15 trillion gold pieces from its world.

Spring has sprung and with love in the air, the Wall Street Journal has posted a look at romance on- and offline through the medium of the MMORPG. Now a well-established net-wide phenomenon, the players profiled in the piece cite the sense of trust and understanding gained through months of group questing as the foundation of their affection, and recommend the use of a little language play, with one Everquest 2 player learning the other's elfin dialect to woo his future spouse.

Though as late its more often been referenced for its seamier underbelly and devious denial of service attacks, MMO veteran Raph Koster points out an exciting emerging technology cropping up in Second Life's landscape.

Created by reported former Lionhead developer "Laukosargas Svarog", Svarga is a Second Life territory with a procedural and self-sustaining ecosystem of plant and insect life. In development for a year and still in its early beta stages, Svarog points out that already emergent behaviour is taking hold, with genetic mutation causing over- and undergrowth on its own, and dominant genes washing entire fields with a single colour.

As Koster points out, the development isn't the first of its kind, but it is an underutilised resource in virtual worlds, surprising as in the long run it can often be more cost-effective. With Spore on the cusp of championing similar technologies, it could be that dynamic worlds such as these might just be a defining characteristic of the next generation.

Swedish developer MindArk, creator of MMO Project Entropia, most recognized for its recent headline-grabbing purchases of virtual property by player (and, perhaps not coincidentally) "US spokesperson" Jon 'Neverdie' Jacobs has announced the launch of a new service further entangling virtual economies with their real-world counterparts.

The company has begun to issue real-world cash cards capable of drawing funds from in-game Entropia savings, at the established exchange rate of 10 PED per dollar. Though there's no mention yet of participating countries and the networking logistics behind it, it means, for example, the estimated 120,000 PED Jacobs is alleged to make on his virtual property translates into $12,000 (£6600) in available monthly funds theoretically redeemable at any local ATM.