"As spotted by the canny denizens of the Escapist forum, there is a quite extraordinary clause in the EULA of EA’s new game service, Origin. One that may well make you think twice about letting the software on your PC.

"Despite recent talk that Diablo 3's required Internet connection was all about the player's character and Battle.net's feature set, game director Jay Wilson made it clear that the requirement is also to prevent the same amount of hacking as seen with Diablo 2. The revelation was made while explaining why it's a bad idea to have an offline mode for the upcoming action-RPG game..."

"Is there any way Deus Ex: Human Revolution can live up the groundbreaking orignal?"

"But you wouldn't know it by how often players finish their games. In fact, the attrition (or bounce rate) of video games is pretty pathetic. "What I've been told as a blanket expectation is that 90% of players who start your game will never see the end of it unless they watch a clip on YouTube," says Keith Fuller, a longtime production contractor for Activision."

"As we all know, Jonas Salk invented money in 1955 so he would have a way to earn a living from his polio vaccine. Before that, people just traded things they found for things that other people had found. So you might "sell" somebody a scrap of carpet, say, in exchange for an old bottle. It was a perfect system with only one drawback: people spent their lives bartering for piles of garbage before dying of polio.

"I've always assumed that this reading style is a perverse personal habit, a symptom of a flawed literary intelligence. It turns out, though, that I was just ahead of the curve, because spoilers don't spoil anything. In fact, a new study suggests that spoilers can actually increase our enjoyment of literature. Although we've long assumed that the suspense makes the story—we keep on reading because we don't know what happens next—this new research suggests that the tension actually detracts from our enjoyment..."

"While it has been the most successful MMORPG of all-time, World of Warcraft is slowly dying. The publishers of the game, Blizzard said that the numbers are down by 600,000 players in the last seven months. Blizzard reported another loss in the second quarter. Subtracting another 300,000 players from the game. This means that WoW has lost nearly a million users in about nine months. The reason that the decline might have slowed by Blizzard bringing in a free-to-play model. Players can play for an unlimited amount of time for free until a character hits level 20.

"Gamers have been worried for some time about their ability to buy Battlefield 3 from Steam, and EA has now provided an official statement on the matter: until Valve changes its policies, the game won't be available on the most popular digital distribution service in the United States. According to EA, this isn't their call; it's due to the fact that Valve has placed restrictions on how content can be shared on the games sold via Steam."

"Meanwhile, at QuakeCon 2011, I get around 60 minutes to make sense of Skyrim. What follows is inevitably closer to panic than pleasure.

The best I can really do is to pick one path and see where it goes, so as soon as I exit the character creator – decked out as a smart but sexy male Khajiit cat warrior – I grab a fireball spell in one hand and a war axe in the other and make a beeline for the nearest mountain.

"A man whose son died after playing computer games is campaigning for greater awareness of the risk posed by their excessive use. Chris Staniforth, 20, who would played his Xbox for up to 12 hours, died in May from deep vein thrombosis (DVT). His dad David believes the condition may have been triggered by long gaming sessions and is caused during long periods of immobility."