The dreaded marketing doublespeak so freely strewn across the Web is now invading your videogame consoles. Game developers are eyeing the market for cheap, fun "casual" games — the kind you play on a Nintendo Wii, as opposed to the graphics-laden shoot-'em-ups favored on Microsoft's Xbox and Sony's PlayStation. To tap into that market, they're becoming fully buzzword compliant: "social networks," "crowdsourcing" and "user-generated content" are just some of the meaningless shibboleths that have jumped from the Web to the gaming world. BusinessWeek dubs it "Game 2.0." Please, somebody, frag me now.

The success of massively multiplayer online role-playing games like World of Warcraft is driving game-makers to produce more online worlds — but, of course, they're drawing all the wrong lessons. Sony's Home for the PlayStation 3 is a social network-cum-virtual world akin to Second Life. Startup Areae is taking tips from MySpace and YouTube to build virtual worlds on the cheap. And Acclaim is using "crowdsourcing" — relying, in other words, on users instead of expensive professional designers — to design a new massively multiplayer online game.

Blunderful. This is clearly what gamers have been waiting for: Immersive experiences with the production quality of a MySpace page and gameplay as thoughtful as the comments on a YouTube video.

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