It's been a busy month. Our semester at Georgia Tech let out in early May, but I've been working since then finishing up my new book. It's called Persuasive Games: Videogames and Procedural Rhetoric, a topic that should appeal directly to our readers here. I just finally sent off the manuscript yesterday, so it's out of my hair until the copyedit comes back. MIT Press will publish it around March 2007. This book should appeal to a more general readership than Unit Operations (which is fairly academic), and I'm looking forward to getting my general theory on games and rhetoric in your hands. Likewise, Gonzalo's been mired writing his doctoral thesis. So, I thought I'd kickstart things here again with a little link grab bag.

Frequent Italian videogame writer Pierluigi Casolari has a blog on new media. Among other things, he's written about Super Columbine Massacre RPG, Pervasive Gaming, Christian Games, and Anti-Advergames. Check it out (in Italian; you know what to do).

Mobile game publisher Amp'd Mobile's has announced their "first exclusive 3D mobile game" (whatever that means) is "Homeland Security: Kim Jong Il Edition." Said Am'd at E3: "Conceived and developed by producers at Amp’d, Homeland Security is designed to be edgy, cool and mature with an uncompromising storyline: the assassination of Kim Jong Il as part of a covert mission to preemptively prevent a nuclear strike." Said a spokesperson, "The 3D graphics are on par with the top mobile 3D game titles in the world and the game play will be intuitive to a cell phone while retaining strong controls." Strong controls indeed.

Wynn Williamson points us to Knuckles in ChinaLand, a Sonic-style game for Chinese language learning.

Thanks to reader Lance C. for telling us about the Danica Patrick Secret Deodorant advergame. The game, developed by Skyworks riffs off the Danica/Secret TV spot, in which she beats a bunch of preadolescent kids at an arcade driving game. She's beautiful and sweat-free, but she still didn't win at Indy last week.

Chico Queiroz reminded me that we utterly failed to cover Re-Mission, a game and community for young people with cancer. Check it out, and we'll come back to it later with more.

A few advergames by the EZ companies, that seem to make Easy Everything. To wit, Easy Cruise advergame, Easy Watch advergame, Easy Insurance advergame.

A few weeks back, the French Budget Minister Jean-Francois Cope announced the launch of an online game for the country's taxpayers to attempt to balance the budget. The game, Cyberbudget, was supposed to launch in May, but I haven't seen it yet. (more from The Guardian, and thanks to Ed DeMarco).

GameGlance is an in-game advertising network based in Thailand and focused on the Asian market. Rumor has it that they are more geared towards the agency consulting rather then a network like Massive, DoubleFusion, and IGA.