Aside from being attractive to the non-gamer, the Wii may be attracting the attention of industries in the future as well. The first we've heard of the Wii being used for practical purposes was for physical therapy but now it seems it may be headed towards even more specialized practices and applications.

Dr. David E. Stone, author of Planning and Designing for High-Tech Web-Based Training believes that a fusion between Wii technology and the world of Second Life may be the next step for corporate training. Not only on Second Life, but maybe for other virtual worlds that may be developed in the future for the technology. But for now, why Second Life? Best bet is because it's open sourced.

The appeal of such a synergy is that manufacturing all the necessary equipment in a virtual training room would be cheap, not to mention being able to reset everything with a click. The application of the Wiimote in such an endeavour would bring training into a different level. Imagine practicing surgery on the Wiimote (and not just on the table of Trauma Center) or handling nuclear material. It's not only safer, it's cleaner and you're not in danger of getting horribly mutated in a meltdown.

Research has already been conducted by a separate group, called WiiController4SecondLife, to fuse the Wii and Second Life. Here's a video of their prototype, featuring a Wiimote to control direction and a treadmill to control speed for walking:

Sony Online Entertainment has definitely improved in leaps and bounds over the years, and now with their licensing of the Unreal Engine 3 and their acquisition of Worlds Apart, there is definitely nowhere to go but up for future SOE MMOs. Now, SOE's Senior Director for Corporate Communications, Chris Kramer, is speaking up about the company's future plans and what they plan to do with Worlds Apart.

He gamely mentioned that their last two PSP games (Untold Legends: The Warrior's Code and Field Commander) "have significant online play modes using the PSP’s ability to connect to WiFi networks. Our next PSP title, the recently announced Cash Money Chaos, and our PS3 launch title, Dark Kingdom, will also have a number of multiplayer modes...Online entertainment for us means much, much more than MMOs." Chris also mentioned that they are also evaluating on releasing Online Trading Card Games of the current SOE franchises like EverQuest and Planetside.

He also discussed SOE's Station Exchange. In fact, he divulges that "SOE is currently working on a white paper that will be released towards the end of this month that will highlight a lot of really interesting information about the service and how people are using it. We’re still examining how it might be implemented into other live games, but we’re also looking at designing with the service in mind for several new titles."

And in an interview like this, it is almost impossible not to be able to talk about Unreal Engine 3. The communications honcho mentioned numerous perks of working with UES3. Our developers are able to spend more time working on core gameplay mechanics and design, which is where we as a company excel. Our developers working with UE3 have been able to rapid-prototype their titles, which means that they can quickly bring up roughly playable milestones in a much shorter timeframe. Instead of having to re-invent the wheel, a few of our new projects have been able to actually test game concepts, look-and-feel and direction in the space of months, instead of years.

No way to go but up? Or could it be a fateful blunder on SOE's part? Only time could tell.

When people play a word association game between "video gaming" and "college" they think (a) students playing video games when they should be studying and/or (b) a video game design course. When people play a word association game between "video gaming" and "graduate school" (the one that hands out masteral degrees) they're bound to think "What student in his right mind will have the time for video games while he's in graduate school?"

Trust me. I attended graduate school. Between the heavy classroom work and the heavy outside-of-classroom work and thesis research and thesis writing and thesis editing and even more thesis writing and more classroom work and out-of-classroom work... (phew! Gotta catch my breath) it was nigh difficult - nay, impossible - to squeeze in a couple of hours for a video game. Any video game. Even Pong.

Well, what if the video game was your masteral degree? The UK-based University College for the Creative Arts is now offering an MA in Digital Games Design for this coming academic year. Call it the result of two converging forces: the undeniable impact of video games in global culture today, and the game industry's quest to have its output recognized as an important and serious cultural work - you know, like classic novels and opera and such.

Rise of Legends, the follow up to the widely acclaimed Rise of Nations game, has been living up to expectations ever since it's release last May. That's why you can't really blame its developers if they constantly try to make things better and easier. If you have no idea what Rise of Legends is all about, it is a real-time strategy game for the PC made by Big Huge Games, and published by Microsoft.

It is the spiritual successor to the popular game, Rise of Nations released on May 2003. However, rather than being a historical game, it is based in a fantasy world, where technology and magic coexist. Rise of Legends has only three races - the technology-loving human Vinci, the magical Alin, and the demigod-like Cuotl (who replace the Wealth resource with Energy, offering a new gather strategy). With all those info refreshing your memories about this game, here are the game's patch notes.

The game's patch notes awaits after the jump!