Most pirate-themed video games encourage 
players to strap a parrot to their shoulder and hoist the skull and crossbones. Now the Navy — yes, the U.S. Navy — is asking gamers to walk the other side of the plank.
Starting Monday, the naval branch of the military will launch an experimental online game that hopes to tap the collective intelligence of gamers to help combat real-world pirates terrorizing the waters off the Horn of Africa.
The Easter Bunny apparently stuffed a 
few baskets with video games this year. The late holiday and a strong slate of titles overcame gloomy headlines of data theft to boost April video game sales by 26 percent, according to the NPD Group.
Hardware sales were also impressive, climbing 12 percent overall, though Microsoft and Sony had a lot more to celebrate than Nintendo did.
As the PlayStation Network outage 
inches closer to the one-month mark, the extended downtime is testing more than just the patience of some players.
It’s testing their loyalty.
Not content being the queen of social 
media, Lady Gaga is now taking her act to social gaming.
The iconic pop star has teamed with social games maker Zynga to create GagaVille, a newly created FarmVille farm which will give her little monsters the chance to hear unreleased songs from her forthcoming album, “Born This Way,” before anyone else.
Scrabble, one of the last bastions of grammatical 
purism in a world overrun by cell phone text abbreviations, is capitulating to the times.
The board game plans to add 3,000 new words to its official dictionary, including several slang terms like “thang” (9 points) and “grrl” (5 points) as well as pop culture touchstones, like Facebook and MySpace.
Every day, the average Facebook user spends 
55 minutes clicking through the popular social networking site. That’s an impressive time sink — but players of Call of Duty: Black Ops have them beat.
Activision says since the First Strike downloadable content pack was released on February 1, players have averaged 58 minutes per day playing online. Given that the game itself is now over six months old, that’s a seriously dedicated fan base.
Don’t look for a Pac-Man machine in 
Marshfield, Mass. And forget finding a place to play Golden Tee as well.
Located 25 miles southeast of Boston, the small city of 4,297 is the only town in America where arcade games are illegal. And it likes it that way.
The video game industry is littered with 
terrible gadgets. But while the gaudiest gear — Nintendo’s ROB the Robot and PowerGlove, or the original Xbox’s massive Steel Battalion setup — score headlines, it’s the smaller bits and baubles that can really make you crazy.
Intended to make your gaming experience smoother, easier, smarter, or prettier, the worst extras often wind up spending more time in a drawer than your hands. Here are a few pieces of gaming hardware you should probably play without:
Washington D.C. is about to be invaded 
by a who’s who of video game icons.
The Smithsonian American Art Museum has unveiled the 80 fan-selected titles that will be on display at an upcoming exhibition on the art of video games — and a lot of familiar names appear on the list.
Even the unfortunate people whose personal 
information was stolen in the great PlayStation data heist of 2011 have to feel a little bad for Sony these days – or maybe some Schadenfreude.
Between the initial hack — in which 77 million accounts were compromised — the continued disruption of the PlayStation Network and the subsequent discovery that another 25 million accounts had been hacked, the once proud tech giant has been brought to its knees. Can it rise again?
Chris Morris: Journalist 