Sundays! Sundays are for grand victory on the field of battle! The smell of smoke and blood in your nostrils, the knowledge of having trampled the bones of your nemesis. Yes, Sundays are for the champions who write their own history. But are these some of those? Let’s find out…

• This piece by MMO designer Raph Koster fascinated me. It asks “Is immersion a core game virtue?” and then decides that “Immersion is not a core game virtue.” Regardless of how nebulous a concept “immersion” actually is, I find it totally unconvincing, as it seems to be a piece of writing about Raph’s perception of where games are as a medium, and I am not sure that I agree. “Immersion does not make a lot of sense in a mobile, interruptible world. It comes from spending hours at something. An the fact is that as games go mainstream, they are played in small bites far more often than they are played in long solo sessions. The market adapts — this reaches more people, so the budgets divert, the publishers’ attention diverts, the developers’ creative attention diverts.” But personally I only see what Raph is talking about here as diversification, not an overall change. The kind of games (and resulting imaginative engagements) Raph is talking about are not gone, there’s just a lot of other noise, too. I think he’s making a mistake of following trends in the market and seeing that as the whole picture.

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