The Wii Fit makes me wonder how significant the “exergaming” genre might become in the future, as a genre appealing to different sets of players — and those with more money to spend on games — than the stereotypical pimply teenage boy.

I think the Call of Duty titles must be added. I have had students whose parents allow them to stay home from school to play the new releases in this series. The COD titles also map onto the development of America’s Army in the 00s (developed by the US military) – sophisticated recruitment devices that labor to tie together games, masculinity, and combat.

While released in 1999, Dance, Dance, Revolution and its titles made way for wii and the guitar games of the 00. DDR became a party game of the early 00s. In a similar vein, Rock Band is extremely popular with groups of people and individuals often use it as a way to organize an event. For example, a group of friends recently went to a New Year’s party in which they dressed in black-tie and played Rock Band together.

Lastly, a general category – Browser Games – and in particular online sites like Kongregate that feature small developers and their hordes of browsers apps.

I am tempted to add many games onto the list for personal and academic reasons, but for the sake of space, I’ll only propose Bioshock, which raised the moral questioning possibilities for video games to the larger public. While Bioshock is not the first game to present moral choices and implications, it was significantly received in such a popular, yet resonant way outside of gaming circles (I’m curious how the film will be received). Plus, it contains one of the most revealing and self-aware moments of video gaming boundaries in the technology’s history, a moment that prompted discussions and debates about the limits of the medium itself.

All in all, great list Ben!

However, Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day! (Best. Title. Ever.) has to be the choice: it solidified the DS’ position as a lifestyle system, and managed to make us all believe for a brief moment that people would en masse start using video games to learn (turns out they wanted to use them to lose weight instead – c’est la vie).

All your other picks are solid, though I curse you for introducing me to Mirror’s Edge, which I hadn’t heard of. Just watching the trailer made me wince. I thought Prince of Persia: Sands of Time was hard enough to play as a vertigo-sufferer!

Perhaps my only additions, though I question their “importance,” and am perhaps adding them for personal reasons, would be Star Wars Lego (since every franchise is now being Lego-fied, and its fun multi-generational gaming), and Shadow of the Colossus (since it’s just so beautiful, looking like a PS3 game on the PS2).