Phew, time for just a few more GameSetLinks, this time headed up by JC Barnett discussing the state of game education in his normally interesting but acerbic manner - and the MTV Multiplayer folks wandering through their fave games of 2008 so far, always entertaining.

Also in here somewhere - some predictions for E3 announcements, reputation systems for social media explored, the future of online worlds opined on, and the difficulty of games probed.

Kirk Spock Sulu:

Japanmanship: Hey, teacher!
On game education, esp. in Japan.

MTV Multiplayer » Our Top 5 Games For The First Half Of 2008
Lists are interesting!

selectparks - Neural #30: 'Dangerous Games' now available.
Interesting, a print-based art mag referencing (the pictured) Rom Check Fail, among other things.

T=Machine » Reputation and ranking systems for online games and web games
Discussing the recent Yahoo! guidelines co-authored by the Habitat folks.

Terra Nova: Virtually Eternal: A Positive Pathway to a Healthy and Sustainable Virtual Worlds Industry?
An online world pioneer opines - quite floaty but quite smart, too!

Vertigames » Blog Archive » Weapons of Awesome Power (and some less so)
Analyzing FPSes : 'For each weapon, I examined several different elements that contribute to a sense of power' - via Tynan Sylvester.

The Difficulty with Difficulty in Games | Moving Pixels | PopMatters
'Despite how seemingly obvious the concept may be, there is actually a great deal of discussion about how difficult a game should be.'

Quel Solaar: 'I am a machine vastly superior to humans.'
The creator of odd procedural MMO 'Love': "It is so clear to me now, but as a writer I have always felt that unintelligent characters intrigue me."

Back and Predictin’ « The Space Oddity
Xbox 360-exclusive Kojima Productions game for E3 that's "...a family-friendly RPG that’s along the lines of Kojima’s Boktai games"? We'll see!

Richard Cobbett's Online Journal: The Beast With A Billion Plotlines
Good review, but more relevantly, you can see 'Ms. Marple Madness' (as I previously referenced) in one of the screencaps Mr. Cobbett used. Yay.