First is Bryce Glasses Flow maps & Frag Grenades two parter on boxes and arrows. Its an interview with Comm Nelson, the interaction designer for Halo 3…

“Online systems that facilitate player experiences around social interaction, custom content sharing and online communities have received a lot of attention by both the gaming press and fans and is definitely a hot trend in gaming. The gaming press has even begun to draw comparisons with these features to You Tube, My Space and Facebook. My observation is that developers that are offering more features in [the] user experience around the game are seeing more of a need to specialize and fill roles specifically around user experience and interface design.”

Second is an interview by Joshua Bokardo with Amy Jo Kim, a veteran thinker in the UX / community space as well as the game industry. She has very interesting background. The interview is about how game mechanics and interaction design work together…

“I think game design principles have become common knowledge for young Web designers. Many of the people who are designing and building these sites grew up playing games, and are familiar with game design principles – even if they’re not ‘officially’ game designers themselves. It’s a testament to how pervasive and mainstream gaming has become.”

Lastly, is a hot tip from my co-worker Chandler on a London Review of Books article about video games success as an industry and its contrasting lack of success as a culturally and artistically valuable medium…

“There is no other medium that produces so pure a cultural segregation as video games, so clean-cut a division between the audience and the non-audience. Books, films, TV, dance, theatre, music, painting, photography, sculpture, all have publics which either are or aren’t interested in them, but at least know that these forms exist, that things happen in them in which people who are interested in them are interested. They are all part of our current cultural discourse. Video games aren’t.”

I feel like I am forgetting one more, oh well, maybe one of you know it?