The Nielsen Co., America’s measuring stick for media consumption, has released its report on what we watched, played and did in 2008, and the results for video gaming are a little surprising.

Buried near the bottom of the report — below listings for most-watched TV programs (led by “American Idol”), most-viewed websites (Google was No. 1) and most-popular movies (”The Dark Knight” shined) — are charts for most-played PC game titles, mobile-phone games and video game consoles, the last one measured by number of network usage minutes. The marketing research company didn’t include console games in its research this year.

Nielsen’s findings, compiled between January and October, insist that “World of Warcraft” dominated among PC games, occupying a whopping 72 percent of each networked gaming minute played, followed by “Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare” at a distant 16 percent and “Halo: Combat Evolved” at just over 9 percent. “The Sims” and “The Sims 2″ round out the top five.

Not so much of a surprise there, but take a look at what we liked to play on our mobiles. The old standard “Tetris” led with a 7 percent share of the carrier-billed revenue. “Bejeweled” came in second at 4 percent, “Guitar Hero III” was third at 3.6 percent, and “Wheel of Fortune” and “Pac-Man” were fourth and fifth respectively with about 2.5 percent.

Game Guy would have thought people were tired of “Tetris” by now; that title in various forms has been around longer than a lot of gamers. Guess the value of “simple” cannot be underestimated.

But most surprising among Nielsen’s findings, Sony’s aging PlayStation 2 was considered the leading console of all in 2008, garnering almost 32 percent of all measurable console-usage minutes — nearly twice what the No. 2 console, Microsoft’s Xbox 360, pulled down. Nintendo’s Wii was third at 13.4 percent.

Stranger still, the 360’s predecessor, the plain old black Xbox, did better than PlayStation 3, with 9.7 percent of the usage minutes compared to PS3’s 7.3 percent.

So, what do all these numbers mean? Hard to tell; Nielsen did not account for mitigating factors. For example, the top PC games occupied gamers’ time an average of 62 hours per week in 2008, according to Nielsen, whereas the company’s 2007 report showed the average was 86 hours. Meanwhile, video game sales had double-digit sales growth late last year despite the onset of a recession. (Nielsen didn’t collect figures for mobile games in 2007.)

And is Xbox 360 really doing that much better than Wii? Not really, if you compare last year’s figures to 2007. The Wii’s percentage of usage minutes went to 13.4 from  5.5 a year earlier. Xbox 360’s percentage, on the other hand, went to 17.2 from 11.8 — a smaller range of growth than Wii.

As for PS3, Sony cannot be happy to see its pride and joy lagging behind two systems with older technology. This just adds fodder to recent pronouncements of the console’s failure, and makes Game Guy eager to see whether those claims are justified in 2009.