It's a Saturday, I'm jetlagged, and the internet seems to be blazing with news of nothing but Diablo III; perfect time for a light and cute flash timewaster. This one is called Bowja the Ninja 2, a point and click puzzler that's nicely illustrated and oh-so-cute. Not terribly challenging, but a good thing to spend a bit with on a lazy Saturday.

Bowja the Ninja 2: In Bigman's Compound [Pencilkids via Rock, Paper, Shotgun]

Hasbro Family Game Night Invades the Wii

Electronic Arts' casual label showed off their upcoming collection of virtual Hasbro games at the gathering in LA last week.

Hasbro Family Game Night will include Wii-friendly versions of Connect Four, Sorry, Boggle, Yahtzee, Battleship and Sorry Sliders.

The games are all played on a table in the Hasbro Family Game Night living room, which can be decorated with unlockable themes and items.

I had a chance to check out two of the games during the presentation.

Zubo Hands-On Impressions

Zubo, due out later this year, has DS gamers adventuring around the cartoon world of Zubalon helping and collecting the bullet-headed, mini-fig like Zubos through rhythm-base combat.

The game, created for 7 to 11-year-olds, may sound childish, but it looks to have the right mix of art-style, sense of fun and graphic muscle power to be a potential hit on the portable.

I sat down with the game for a short demonstration last week with UK's EA Bright Light studio. The devs told me that the game will push the DS to it's technical limits with scenes that boast a minimum of 2,000 polygons.

'Why User Generated Content Matters' (For Some)

Casual is Complex: The PopCap Model

Study: Break Bad Habits With Casual Games

If there's one thing we know about casual games companies, it's that they love to conduct surveys, don't they? The latest one commissioned by RealNetworks' RealGames division aims to correlate casual gameplay with improvement of bad habits. Need to lose weight, quit smoking, quit hitting the potato chips? Play a game, it seems.

59 percent of the survey participants said that casual games offer a "positive distraction" from overeating, and 42 percent said it helps distract them from smoking. Smokers apparently prefer "hidden picture" games to other types, by the way. No surprise, either, that the survey results show that taking a little clicky-break to play a casual game helped them relieve stress.

I wonder why console publishers don't underwrite studies like these periodically, to show the positive impact games in general might have on their audience. Too much of a minefield, do you think?

Full study announcement after the jump.

Nolan Bushnell Doesn't Want To Mess with 47-Button Controllers

Nolan Bushnell (pictured) is a casual guy. As the Atari founder likes to point out, his games were easy to pick up and play, but difficult to master. And the controls for something like, I dunno, Pong? SIMPLE. Says Bushnell:

I think the Wii by Nintendo is getting games that once again are fun for people who don’t want to make a career out of figuring out how to run a 47-button controller... I think that the business right now should be much, much bigger than it is. If it were evenly spread over all demographics and age groups, it'd be huge. But it’s not. It's basically an 18 to 28 year-old male dominated business of about 15 million. That’s where most of the traffic is. Casual games on the net add to that, but they're all network-based.

Wait, wait, wait. Back up, Bushnell! A 47-button controller? Oh man, would we love to see that! (Playing it, well, that's another matter.)

Bushnell Interview [Next-Gen]

'Under the Mask': Gaming Culture, an Essay

2008 May Be the Year of the Board Game?

PopCap: UK Workers Should Play Online At Work

PopCap, paragon portal of the casual clickfest, wants desk jockeys in the UK to spend more of their office hours playing casual games online. To support its efforts, the company is claiming that banning personal internet use in the office is costing UK businesses £4 billion ($7.85 billion) a year.

Workers unable to visit social networking, dating, shopping and gaming sites on office time, PopCap said, have reduced staff efficiency and morale. The casual games company even brought in a Goldsmiths University Psychologist, Dr. Chamorro-Premuzic, to study the impact of personal internet bans on employee productivity.

Plus, the report suggests, the 71 percent of employees who sneak online to mess around when they're not supposed to probably feel "frowned upon," even resentful of their workplace. 47 percent of PopCap's survey subjects said they felt their boss would rather they take a five minute "fag break" (that's cigarettes, guys) than surf online.

So, demoralized UK workers, PopCap apparently calls on you to help your economy by playing some Peggle on the job! Steely-eyed supervisors relent!

Defining Plagiarism in Video Games

You might need to head to Australia to find them (Brian? Luke?). Or at least, that's where the sure bet is. A story in the Sydney Morning Herald last weekend cites figures showing 41 percent of gamers in Australia are women, and also 38 percent in the United States, both figures representing growth. The Herald also says that if the trend continues, it will be 1:1 guys/girls gaming by 2014.

Ubisoft Leads Casual Games To The Slaughter

What better time to appoint a new head to your company's casual gaming division than casual Friday? Ubisoft reiterates their dedication to the casual gaming space by creating the position of group brand manager for the casual gaming division and filling it with cool, refreshing, former Coca-Cola marketeer Mark Slaughter, not to be confused with the lead singer of heavy metal band Slaughter. Mark will be controlling things from the UK, reporting directly to Ubi's marketing director John Rosenblatt.

Mark will be in charge of all things casual and Ubisoft, from the My Coach line of games to the Petz series. Not sure how comfortable I feel having a man named Slaughter in charge of Petz, but any executive move that has me pondering the headline "Ubisoft Slaughters Petz" can't be all that bad.

Ubisoft appoints new head of casual [Casual Game News]

The Sims Is Not A Casual Game, Buster

I don't think of it as casual. We were one of the first games that started to attract a broad audience. We were one of the first games that bought in women... To some degree The Sims is more of a toy than a game. People want to create characters, tell stories and explore relationships in a way that is maybe different from their real lives.

The State of Indie Gaming

Juan Gril has an interesting look up at the current state of indie games, both on the PC and on this current crop of consoles — what's currently cooking, and potential and pitfalls for the future. And where is the hotbed of radical innovation?:

Some people may disagree with this statement, but frankly if there is one platform where most of the radical innovation in video game design is happening, that platform is the World Wide Web. For every innovative Wii game in the market, there are dozens of innovative Flash games.

It's not only because the barriers of entry and the production costs are lower, it's also a platform open for experimentation. You can throw something out there, discover that you wanted to change something, change it on your server, and boom, it's available for everybody else.

There are some other interesting bits of information contained within the article ('Don't spend more than $200K developing a game for XBLA!'), and some stats and predictions as well.

The State of Indie Gaming [Gamasutra]

The Casual Games Manifesto

Daniel Cook of Lost Garden has another thought provoking article up on Gamasutra, this one on the casual games market. Targeted more at developers, it's still an interesting look at the promises and pitfalls of the current distribution models:

In the new world of high profit margins, limited middlemen and free green lighting for all, innovation would inevitably flourish. And for the most part, once you account for Sturgeon's inevitable law that 90% of everything is crap, this is exactly what happened. More game developers poured into the market and some truly wonderful games were born.

Middlemen, however, were not eliminated. They merely evolved.

2008 ArtSpark Competition Open 'Til April 14

I'm not entirely sure what's going on with the HBMG Foundation's 'ArtSpark' competition (designing a stage play or a video game seems to be a pretty broad spectrum of potential products), but in case you're feeling creative, submit an application for the 2008 collaborative competition. Since we here at Kotaku didn't get the information until yesterday, the nice people at HBMG are apparently willing to extend the deadline a little for those of you who came by this information on Kotaku.

The rules of the game are simple... Start with nothing. Use a piece of visual art and a musical composition to "spark" the creation of a video game or play. "Spark" a new musical composition and piece of visual art as a new play or video game is created. Finish with a public showcase of your work and the chance to walk away with a cash prize! Don't forget to enjoy the toys that the HBMG Foundation gives you along the way: a budget, workspace, industry workshops, and equipment to help facilitate the process.

Sounds like an interesting concept, and I'm curious to see what will be produced at the end of this 12 week competition. Collaboration can be fun!

2008 ArtSpark Festival [HBMG Foundation]

Digital Kriegspiel Creator Under Fire From Dead Marxist

Alex Galloway has put together a lovely digital adaptation of a chess-like game created by French Marxist Guy Debord dubbed Kriegspiel; now the estate of Debord is sending cease and desist letters to Galloway, claiming the digital version is infringing on the intellectual property rights of Debord. Reminiscent of the problem faced by the Scrabulous creators, Galloway is insisting that the idea of a game and rules are not subject to copyright. Ian Bogost weighs in:

Galloway has been served a cease and desist by the attorney representing Guy Debord's widow. It's too early to tell what will happen next ... Galloway's situation bears some similarity to that of popular Facebook app Scrabulous. The irony, of course, is the estate of a dead Marxist pursuing litigation over the exchange value of the name and image of its intellectual property.

The Revolution will be Litigated [Water Cooler Games]