PUBLIC MARKS with tags blogs.guardian.co.uk & games

A few weeks ago, there was a post on GamerGod which listed the 10 most interesting people in games 2005. While some of those who made the cut were arguably admirable, it was a hugely US-biased list

The Korean games industry is a giant enigma to many observers and professionals in the western market. Their industry is so massive, so socially-accepted, so utterly all-encompassing that it makes legal tiffles in the US look like something out of a parallel Eastern interactive cultural Stone Age.

"Academics and other students of the Internet have known for decades that even typed communication can reveal such non-verbal aspects of an online user, but it still comes as a surprise when discrimination emerges in an online game."

"Last week gamesblog covered Persuasive Games' latest release Airport Insecurity, "a game about inconvenience and the tradeoffs between security and rights in American airports". I grabbed Ian Bogost, one half of the company (and one-half of the blog watercoolergames) to explain exactly what he means by "serious games"."

"The following is provided as an outline more to cause controversy than to really get to the meat of the debate. Please add your own, and maybe we can get to the bottom of it."

There are some tremendous "interactive fictions" (as they're now called) out there in Internet Land, from the re-issue of the classic Hitchhiker's Guilde to the Galaxy to the superb adaptation of Hamlet (which was such a hit that it seems to have overstepped its bandwidth allowance).

Doom RPG looks rough - humorously limited even. But it’s a careful, respectful mobile interepretation that actually addresses key issues with mobile gaming and makes the very best of a very limited platform. If only other developers treated their source material so logically, this industry might actually start making the impact it has been promising for five long years.