"Dragging clouds through the sky. That's the most exciting activity you can do in Cloud, a new computer game where you play a young boy who flies through the air above a small group of islands.

Add in slow melodic piano music and beautiful water-colour graphics, and Cloud becomes the only relaxing game I can ever recall playing.

The game goes beyond the usual, hopelessly basic, range of emotions elicited by computer games: anger, frustration and aggressiveness.

Cloud, which can be downloaded for free, has come out of the Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California.

The lab's brief is to 'try and create projects that could drive games into new areas', says Tracy Fullerton, co-director of the lab, who was in town last week for the Interactive Entertainment 2005 conference at the University of Technology, Sydney.

While Fullerton is dead against censorship - like most gamers - she does think computer games are too limited.

'Games today have a very narrow range of emotions,' she says. 'I think that in order for games to appeal to a wider range of players, they have to address a wider range of content but also a deeper range of emotions.'" [more]