I cared about Aeris, I cried when she died. This was something I had not experienced before, and it's execution was masterful. If you remember, right after she dies you have a boss fight, but instead of the music that usually accompanies the boss fights in FFVII, Aeris' haunting theme keeps playing, and it doesn't let you go.

The use of a very gamey mechanic to accentuate the very real narrative idea of death was fantastic. I was sitting there thinking "This can't be real, she's not dead." and begrudgingly fighting a stupid boss. That was not fun, but I think it was the first time I really confronted the death of a loved one.

I definitely agree that we had games that evoked emotions in the past. I'm not sure the difference is entirely marketing though. I think the "horizon" that requires "innovation" is to make a nonlinear game that has an involving story no matter what the player decides to do.

It does seem very odd doesn't it? There's been more discussion of Dragon Age than anything else games related on the only forum I go on, but that's very small. Penny Arcade have been mentioning it a lot recently, but then again that's three posts a week. The others I've not heard any discussion of really. It seems very suspect that more people are talking about Mario & Sonic at the Winter Games than they are Modern Warfare 2.
I skimmed over the explanation of their system and it does raise a couple of questions. It didn't suggest that they weight a page by amount of views or anything like that, so I could make a domain with 1,000 pages just saying "GTA SUCKZ" once each and it should be added (by what they described.)
I'd also be interested in how it deals with forums, you could have easily have a 20 page thread with each post alternating between "GTA is good" and "GTA is bad." Is that one entry or one for each post?
I have no criticism of it, I can't say it's wrong and I find it a fascinating idea, but I would enjoy a better explanation of their methods.

I like that you put this as a game. When I was in school and flash was disabled on our school computers, people would be constantly taking these sorts of tests to pass time and giggle. (Granted these tests were on the level of "How Gay are you?" (the answer being an integer percentage!) and "Are you a B*tch?" )

The interface can't be denied as important at all. The Wii has certainly nothing else to sell itself on in terms of netork, raw power etc, but it bucked a trend and got millions of people excited about it.
As for the PC interface thing, the very next thing I read was this from slashdot and thought I'd share it:
"About a month ago, Microsoft sent out prototype pressure sensitive keyboards to 40 international teams. They had four weeks to hack and cobble together some cool ideas. The innovation contest that centered around the keyboards released the winners last night (after a voting period Monday night at the ACM UIST conference). Some pretty neat ideas, ranging from pressure-sensitive password entry (Safelock), magnetic pens for cursor control (Hidden Forces), and even cool climbing (Rock Climbing) and land-deformation games (BallMeR)."

(here's the link to the winners http://www.acm.org/uist/uist2009/program/sicwinners.html )

Well I'm not sure, having never made a game before but surely at some point the blu-ray (with its 25/50gb capacity) is going to be really handy to people who want to cram more stuff into a game than the Xbox360's DVD9 disc (with 8gb). Maybe 360 games will have to go multidisk but we've already heard that FFXIII will have problems with putting all the different voice tracks onto an xbox disc.