WSJ.com - The Benefits of Videogames. By Jane McGonigal. Thanks j.c.f.
These examples are just the beginning of what is possible if we take advantage of the power of games to make us better and change the world. Those who understand this power will be the people who invent our future. We can create rewarding, transformative games for ourselves and our families; for our schools, businesses and neighborhoods; for an entire industry or an entirely new movement.

We can play any games we want. We can create any future we can imagine. Let the games begin.

GEARFUSE - How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The @. Thanks Ant via Boing Boing.
This is why I love Nethack and other rogue-likes so much. Rogue-likes form a genre of game that embraces the limits of what can be conveyed symbolically in ASCII text and turns those limits into strengths. By making a far greater assumption of a player’s imagination than most games — requiring that a gamer will imagine an azure equal sign to be a ring of frost, or turn a rouge semi-colon into a piranha, or a accept a lower-case p as a prancing pony, for example — rogue-likes free themselves of the development overhead that both suffer and limit other forms of video games. Money and man hours can be ignored. Rogue-like developers don’t have to draw, render, animate and give voice to every new monster, item, location or player action in their games; all they need to do is program it and assign it an alpha-numeric symbol.