"If this doesn’t seem like a big issue imagine the state of cinema if film students were only able to study films made in the last two decades? Or if English Literature students no longer have the ability to examine the works of Shakespeare or Twain? What might be lost?" Seriously, companies: stop turning servers off. Processor power is cheap.

"Outside of the novel setting, the individual multiplayer games have nothing substantial to offer a person other than progression. This is pretty ordinary stuff.

There are so many things to do in the actual game that you'd want to do with other people: you'd want to play horsehoes, or Poker, or Blackjack. Even those would be diversions, though. You'd want to drive cattle, or steal them; you want to cut a slice of that country out and see what you could make of it - or get yours riding rough over the smaller towns. As it stands, you're given desperately limited access to a sterile, stricken place without heart or memory." (RDR is great, no question of that, but I think Tycho's right about the missed opportunities of Free Roam. More on this in a proper blog post, coming soon).

"In fact, when Dust 514 launches, the map of EVE, currently divined only by player structures owned in the PC game, will also take into account infantry successes and failures within the console game. Players in the PC MMO can "fund mercenaries and give them goals" in the console title." Oh, now that is nice: CCP build a multiplayer game for consoles, and tie it - with data and everything - to the PC MMO, but it's only an indirect link. As a 360 owner without a PC, I shall have to be proud to serve in the mobile infantry.

Words With Friends: it's like Scrabulous, but on your iPhone, with push notification. There is little more that needs to be said, other than that it's a very good implementation with some nice UI detail.

"CCP often touts this sort of thing with the bland marketing lingo of 'player generated content.' What that actually means is that you get to share a galaxy with Russian aluminum magnates, French-Indonesian nightclub-owning hackers, self-aggranziding 'spymasters,' and people who will cut the power lines to your house to destroy your internet spaceship. There's something deliciously addictive about the sweeping, endemic insanity, one of the ever-present yet rarely remarked upon facets of this most unhinged of MMOs." Some first-hand evidence of just how deep, how hard, and how crazy EVE gets.

"Planbeast is a free service that lets you find people to play your favorite Xbox 360 games with online. Planbeast allows you to schedule and join new online events for any Xbox Live-compatible title." And there was me all ready to build this (albeit just for Left4Dead)... and now somebody's gone and done it already.

"Though few gamers might be interested in long haul trucking, there is nothing wrong with concentrating on a small group of gamers and offering them the best experience they can get within their limited requirements. In fact, the more MMO developers who realize this—that a small group of loyal players is better than a huge group of disinterested players—the better, honestly." Very true - a nice conclusion to Matthew Kumar's round-up of a somewhat niche - but interesting sounding - browser MMO.

"If the Barack Obama presidency fails to unite us as a country, I'm going to hold out for a fast-zombie apocalypse." Iroquois on co-op, and the way Left 4 Dead sees online co-op - and the bad behaviour of players online - as design problems to solve, rather than to ignore.

"Somewhere, across whatever barriers stand between, is an other." Jason Rohrer's new game is for two.

"Maybe this could eventually become an entire category of entertainment: You're dropped into a huge, lush, gorgeous, sprawling world, and all you do is just sort of ... wander around. We could even give it a name. Radical singleplayer: The game of solitude."

"Lionhead's system acknowledges the social context of co-op that other games ignore, and the bargaining over who gets to be the hero and how much the henchman is paid is a crucial part of the fun." It's all about the context; aninteresting take on co-op.

Digg as MMO: "everytime you “digg” a story, you recruit another troop into your army". Reminds me of my Champ-Manager-As-Economic-Tool idea. Brings a whole new meaning to "gaming" Digg.

"Infinite Games are relationships" - fascinating interview with Justin Hall

Quite weighty, so I'm going to come back to this later. A look at the goal of co-op FPS gameplay, taking Battlefield 1942 apart piece by piece.