Videogame publishers, pushing to expand their businesses, are making games that target girls and women a new industry battleground.

This holiday season, more games than ever are being geared toward female players. Electronic Arts Inc. (ERTS) is releasing the latest installment of its “Littlest Pet Shop” game for young girls and introducing a series of fashion-themed games called “Charm Girls Club” for older girls later this month. Sony Corp. (SNE) in August packaged a lilac version of its PlayStation Portable device with a “Hannah Montana” game, based on the popular television show about a girl and her secret pop career.

Publishers also will target women with workout games. Ubisoft Entertainment SA is introducing “Your Shape,” a personal-training game, and “Just Dance,” a dancing game, in November. Nintendo Co. hit the market with “Wii Fit Plus,” a sequel to its popular fitness game, in September.

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U.S. sales of video game hardware, software and accessories were down 23 percent in May to $863.3 million, according to market research firm NPD. It was the first month with sales under $1 billion since August 2007.

Hardware sales were hit the worse, down 30 percent. Software sales were off 17 percent, while accessories were down 25 percent. For the year to date, sales overall are down 7 percent, with hardware off 6 percent, software 8 percent and accessories 5 percent.

Among the consoles, the Nintendo Wii sold 289,500 units, down from 340,000 in April and 601,000 in March. That was followed by the Microsoft (MSFT) Xbox 360 at 175,000, flat with April.

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Last month, I became an obsessive air-traffic controller. The culprit: a terrific game for the iPhone called Flight Control. The premise is simple: You’re faced with a crush of planes, and it’s your job to guide each one to its respective runway. The gameplay, though, is irresistibly difficult. A few minutes in, the planes start to show up at an alarming rate, and you scramble to keep them from crashing into one another.

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US consumers are more likely to have played video games over the last six months than gone out to see a movie, though neither activity is as popular as listening to music. Still, gamers are spreading their wings and using more mediums, and they continue to spend money on their favorite pastime.

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The Xbox 360’s exclusive Grand Theft Auto IV add-on, “The Lost and Damned,” debuted yesterday to generally positive reviews. That’s good news for Microsoft–especially considering how much the company paid for rights to the extra downloadable episode.

Seth Schiesel’s New York Times review gives you a good sense for what $25 million buys a console company these days.

“’The Lost and Damned’ suffers from a few curious and unfortunate design decisions–players often have less freedom than in the original–that will probably prompt most to return to the original game after completing the new episode’s main story. But there is no question that it is the most fully realized, thoroughly produced and substantial downloadable add-on yet released for a console game. Anyone who enjoys Grand Theft Auto IV should get it.”

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There are two types of people when it comes to the games-as-art debate: those who spend too much time and energy arguing one way or another, and those who ignore it altogether and simply create games that are art. Jenova Chen and thatgamecompany belong firmly in the second category, and after playing Flower to completion on the PS3, we can confirm that they have given us another game to talk about, puzzle over, and enjoy.

In Flower you control the wind, causing a trail of flower petals to fly around each level, gathering more petals to itself by touching flowers, which makes them blossom. Touch a group of flowers and a splash of color spreads out across the land. These transformations are oddly satisfying, as if you’re painting the landscape with a heavenly brush. The music also works with the graphics to create a soothing, evocative mood for the game. These aesthetic issues are only part of the story, however.

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Today I decided to conduct an experiment. I started calling people I knew and asking if they had one or more videogames in the house. Then I asked if they breast-fed their children. To my great shock, most answered “yes” to both. One couple I contacted switched to formula after their child’s birth, and told me that they didn’t play videogames. The data, based on my first round of calls, was conclusive: If you play videogames, you are much more likely to breast-feed your children.

You’re probably ready to shoot five thousand holes in my argument. For one, I only called people I knew—we’re talking about a small sampling of individuals who happen to be friends with someone who writes about games for a living. Second, my friends are firmly in their 20s and 30s, which means they grew up playing games. I could have asked them almost anything and linked it with playing games. I did my job though, and you clicked on the headline. You may comment on this story, as well. It’s a good way to get readers, this tactic of linking a popular topic on a tech Web site to any other controversial topic.

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A new generation of designers and developers is putting the social element back into videogames, using online networks such as Facebook as platforms to turn people from across the world into poker aces, boffins and the proud and sometimes obsessive owners of virtual pets.

These new games give people the ability to play with their friends rather than strangers, which has sent usage through the roof.

Facebook is already seeing over two billion minutes of game play a month, and the longer people stay online the more chance the game’s developer and the network itself have to make money out of them, most obviously through advertising.

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Take-Two Interactive (TTWO) shares are down sharply in late trading after the company provided guidance for its fiscal first quarter ending in January and for all of the October 2009 fiscal year that is dramatically lower than Street expectations.

For FY Q4 ended Oct. 31, the publisher of Grand Theft Auto and other videogames posted revenue of $323.4 million and a non-GAAP profit of two cents a share; the Street had been looking for $325.8 million and five cents.

That’s not good, but the real trouble is the guidance.

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Electronic Arts (ERTS) shares are being pounded today following the company’s guide-down for its March 2009 fiscal year. The stock was downgraded by, well, almost every analyst who follows it, which of course doesn’t help anyone who owned the stock as of yesterday’s close. The general consensus is that EA has simply been producing games that not many people want to buy; there is a fair amount of cheering from the sidelines about how this is not an industry problem, and demand for videogames overall remains just fine. But the skeptics think this is not entirely right, that however bad the current EA lineup is, there are additional pressures coming from the weakening economy, with retailers cutting inventory in the face of tighter credit conditions.

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Rather than wasting their time, children who gab on Facebook or play online games are gaining valuable social skills and learning some technology basics, according to a study to be released today.
The report, sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation, contradicts the idea held by many educators, parents and policymakers that children should be blocked from online social networks and videogames like Halo, which allow users in different locations to play together. Instead, children should be encouraged to use the technologies to gain a certain level of digital literacy, the study said.

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The news for videogame stocks is decidedly mixed this morning. The raw numbers look good: According to NPD Group, videogame software sales rose 35 percent in October, better than many had expected. Hardware sales rose five percent; peripherals fell eight percent.

But the stocks are coming under pressure, due at least in part to cautious comments on the prospects for the industry in the unfolding economic downturn by Merrill Lynch analyst Justin Post. The Merrill analyst cut his ratings on both Electronic Arts (ERTS) and Activision Blizzard (ATVI) to Neutral from Buy. He maintains his Underperform rating on THQ (THQI).

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The Thukrals wanted their son, Dhruv, to go into nanotechnology. So when he told them he’d rather be a video game developer he might as well have said he wanted to join the circus.

“Are you serious?” they asked.

He was. The 21-year-old USC graduate student proved it by switching the focus of his computer science doctorate from a field known as distributed systems to video game programming.

He then launched a campaign to convince his parents back home in New Delhi that helping people have fun was not only a legitimate career but also lucrative. He peppered them with articles about the growth of the video game industry, which is expected to generate global revenue of nearly $50 billion this year. He also sent them stock charts and annual reports of some of the industry’s top companies.

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Jack Thompson is a master of self-promotion. The Florida resident has made a career out of talking to anyone who will listen about the evils of video gaming, the violent ideas and passions that gaming puts into the minds and hearts of children, and the soulless industry that cranks out these terrible games. Whenever there is a tragedy he’s there to jump in front of the camera and find a tenuous link between real-world violence and gaming. The legal system finally decided the man went too far, however, and has made it official: Thompson has been disbarred.

This is the culmination of a 2007 case brought against Thompson by the Florida Bar covering a number of complaints about his professional conduct.

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Parents of videogaming children, take heart: Your kid is not destined to become an anti-social hermit who lives at home until he’s 35. In fact, a new study shows that all that game time could actually be making him a better citizen.

No, this isn’t a study funded by the videogame association. It’s from the respectable folks at the Pew Internet & American Life Project. And it’s the first, says study co-author Joe Kahne, to track the sorts of things kids do when playing–not just how much time they spend playing. “It’s really valuable to focus heavily on the quality of those experiences,” he says.

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