Sunday reading #1

• Challenge avoidence - Tobold's MMORG Blog on Why do we play? - an excellent comparison of the skills demanded by the higher levels of Tetris and the perceived challenge and lack of skill required by WOW and other MMORGs.
• More gamers on the way... China must open doors to publishers via gamepolitics.com. Probably not much of a material change, but it's a hell of a lot of people on the way at some point.
• Offworld / The Games Factory images - a couple of these are so good it takes a moment to get it.
• Interesting, but not necessarily useful article on Gamasutra on visualising game mechanics. Useful for inferring mechanics and inter-relationship of game state, but not necessarily "visualization" in the illustrative sense.