The Perfect World Masters kicked things off in Shanghai last night, and one team had to scramble last-minute to find a substitute player. Team Secret's MidOne had an urgent personal matter, and so his team had to turn to a local substitute and unique method of communication.

With its big, bright screen, ability to sense touch and motion, and controls that mimic a home video game's, Sony's Playstation Vita delivers the sort of gaming that approaches what you might expect to experience in your den. But is that what gamers still want?

As game consoles become more like cable television boxes, maybe it's time for video games to start becoming more like cable television shows.

This story starts, as so many great ones do, with a classified ad: "I will take bullets for you," it read.

Despite its inherent brutality, war has rules. Laws of war have been around in one form or another since biblical times. They govern the treatment of prisoners of war, the expediency of death on a battlefield. Could they, should they also pertain to the depiction of virtual war in video games?

With the Christmas holidays rounding the bend and the big shopping season about to kick off, now's a great time to start thinking about what to buy that gamer in your life, be they casual, hardcore or even a once-a-year player.

A new fitness program that asks gamers to earn time gaming by exercising is targeting fans of one of the biggest releases of the year.

Baseball, hockey, football... Call of Duty? If the people behind Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 have their way, the next big sport people around the world will be obsessing over will involve virtual soldiers killing each other in perpetual warfare.

While conceived as a device meant to expand the reach of Microsoft's Xbox 360 gaming platform by allowing people to play video games without the need for controllers, the Kinect has always been destined for a broader future.

Pinball played right is an act of violence. Violence against that steel ball trying to slip past your paddles. Violence against gravity urging that escape along. Violence against the glass top that contains everything happening within and violence against the wooden casket packed with hundreds of moving parts, lights and noise.

Your cable box is headed for obsolescence. It may not be within the next year, but it could be within the next three that having a box dedicated to TV programming sitting under or next to your television will no longer be the norm.

It's like clockwork; Moments after popping open any game that has a mature rating, my 10-year-old son seems to appear at my elbow to ask if he can play it with me.

Japan may not be the birthplace of video games, but it is the heart of video game culture.

Computer games have long lived online, but nowadays video game consoles are joining them, becoming a form of entertainment that can be not just enjoyed online, but increasingly, purchased online.

For one week a year a very different sort of campsite forms along Cologne's pebbled shores of the Rhine river.

Orangutans, it turns out, love the iPad and its games just as much as some humans do.

Born of Hurricane Katrina and the passing of a dear friend, The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore is more than a poignant, interactive allegory, it is the budding metamorphosis of the narrative.

Last week's drastic, surprising price drop for Nintendo's 3DS gaming portable brought turmoil not just to the last major dedicated gaming hardware company in the world, but also the notion of portable gaming.

Anders Behring Breivik was a likeable loner, a seemingly harmless Norwegian who masked his sudden disappearance from society to prepare for the biggest single-handed massacre in recent history with a modern affliction: video game addiction.