Text now or forever hold your peace.With Valentine's Day hitting next week, there's plenty of love in the air — but if you want that love to last, your odds are better in cyberspace.

A study of virtual marriages in MapleStory, a massively multiplayer online game from Nexon, finds that people who vow to stay together forever in-game tend to be more successful at it than those of us in the real world.

The Elder Scrolls V: SkyrimChalk up another big win for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Bethesda's much-loved dragon-slaying role-playing-game has taken home another Game of the Year award, this time from one of the most widely respected bodies in the video game industry.

The Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences held its annual Interactive Achievement Awards Thursday night at the DICE summit, with Skyrim taking top honors — as well as four other awards. Uncharted 3 and Portal 2 each took home a trio of trophies.

Still the king.To say the video game industry stumbled out of the gate in 2012 would be exceedingly kind.

January software sales, which are the most closely watched figure by investors, were down 34 percent - the biggest percentage drop in more than 2 years — to $750.6 million. That's more than $389 million less than a year ago.

Zynga toys around.We've seen Legend of Zelda action figures. We've seen Cut the Rope plushes. We've even seen Angry Birds board games.

Next up: Farmville toys, games, and action figures, courtesy of a just-announced deal between social game maker Zynga and toy-world behemoth Hasbro.

The deal sees Hasbro picking up a license to produce toys and games based on Zynga's numerous properties, which include popular social network games Farmville, Cityville, and Words with Friends. Hasbro's products should start showing up in stores this fall, and with Zynga boasting a total active userbase well north of 200 million, it's safe to say they'll be hot property...even though your average Farmviller is probably far too

Double Fine founder Tim SchaferWhen he couldn't find a publisher to front the cash for his next game, Double Fine Studios' Tim Schafer (Psychonauts, Brutal Legend) came up with a different approach.

He asked his fans.

Posting an appeal on crowd-sourced microfunding site Kickstarter last night, Schafer asked gamers to contribute as little as $15 to his next work. In return, they'd get a copy of the finished game, plus other incentives. He set a lofty fundraising target of $400,000, enough to finish the job and produce an accompanying behind-the-scenes documentary.

By Natalie Wolchover | LiveScience.com

Reading is mental.You might not realize it, but your brain is a code-cracking machine.

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S1M1L4RLY, Y0UR M1ND 15 R34D1NG 7H15 4U70M471C4LLY W17H0U7 3V3N 7H1NK1NG 4B0U7 17.

Passages like these have been bouncing around the Internet for years. But how do we read them? And what do our incredibly low standards for what's legible say about the way our brains work?

According to Marta Kutas, a cognitive neuroscientist and the director of the Center for

iDes of March?The rumors about the next iPad have been growing for a while now — and it may be just a matter of weeks before we find out which are true.

AllThingsD is reporting that Apple plans to host an event the first week of March to launch the new iPad — which is largely expected to be called the iPad 3 (though keep in mind we all expected the company to unveil the iPhone 5 last year, so the name may be different).

Time to take a break.The humorist Don Marquis once said that "a sequel is an admission that you've been reduced to imitating yourself." He died in 1937, so I'm pretty sure he wasn't talking about video games. But glance at the sequel-flooded game industry these days and you'll know that he was on to something.

The good news? Despite their prevalence, video game sequels tend to be technically superior to their predecessors. They often fix flaws, improve visuals, and add features than fans have requested. The best games in most successful franchises are often not the first ones.