@theKSMM "It's a shame that there aren't more places like Bell Labs and Xerox PARC that encourage pure research for its own sake anymore." - Yes and no: Over the last decades most industrial research in the domain of entertainment electronics in general has been provided by big private companies like Sony (and with more money than used to have the universities), while the growing computer industry contributed a lot to making digital devices --both hard and software-- affordable to everybody so that electronic music today can easily be produced in a home studio (and distributed via Internet), independent of public funding (techno music and other pop electronica did largely profit from this), yet academic research structures still have the task of teaching basic scientific concepts and traditions. However, computer music concerns video games only in part, and there synthetic sound contents like in Pacman might be closer to genuine electronic music, while a lot of musics used in video games today in reality is but truly composed music performed through real orchestras just implemented in the game...

Lady gamer myself I appreciate that nowadays there are more video games on the market letting one choose the sex of the protagonist to go on with (Mass Effect 2, Dragon Age II...); this being basically a technical question --"making every character bisexual is the least resource-intensive way of handling the issue", Kevin-V in his comment to a recent HotSpot podcast-- I decline but the issue's tasteless political instrumentalization: making the story's hero *optionally* a women has nothing to do with bisexuality, but means just a little more equality as to the female condition, also societally spoken. Happy that here in Spain the relation of men-women as users of video games is 2:1, which has a lot to do with the country's own emancipational tradition, Imho that women should however refuse being put in the box of casual games only (though SIMS players are said to be 60% female), as well as (m)any sexist facets that may vary as much as between female submissive behavior (Duke Nukem) or ostentatious clothing (e.g., nail'd). Personally preferring action-type games rather I don't think that video games (woman-)made for a "typically female" public would really help making things better, though, neither within the gaming sector nor in society in general. Yet Laura Parker's essay, and the fact of GameSpot's web-publishing it, does surely contribute to putting them straight by raising a wider consciousness that this is *really* an issue no to be disregarded anymore.

Thanks for the info: Imho that when there is a video game music really outstanding from the large mass of insignificant ones it is crucial to value the composer behind it and with this, the category as such.