Great news for people who love birds and hate pigs: this week Rovio, developer of some of the top iPhone games, announced that it's bringing its marquee title "Angry Birds" to Facebook, adding in new features to make the game social-network-friendly.

Hackers. Most companies rue the term and the people it refers to. In many cases, this is with good reason. As an example, just this past month a multi-million-dollar security company looking for government contracts was totally destroyed by (apparently) a 16-year-old girl.

Not everyone is the biggest fan of Farmville, Frontierville, Cityville and the like -- at the very least, if you don't play them, you've almost certainly hidden them from your newsfeed to avoid the constant requests. But one indie developer, Jonathan Blow, creator of the innovative platform/puzzle game "Braid", takes this idea a little bit further. In an interview with PC Gamer Magazine, the developer described the way social games on Facebook ask you to tap your friend list as an in-game resource as "evil."

A bit of a shake-up this week with the announcement by Activision that it is putting the "Guitar Hero" franchise on hold indefinitely, and disbanding the business unit behind the games. The company is instead focusing on the success of the "Call of Duty" franchise. So let's break this down. Activision shuts down the team behind its most casual and gender-neutral games in order to redouble efforts into its first-person shooter and MMORPG. Perhaps this is indicative of a larger change in the industry?

Steam's fastest-selling new release this month isn't EA's much-hyped "Dead Space 2" (whose "Your Mom Will Hate It" ad campaign is a little puzzling for a game targeted at players aged 17+), but an indie title, ("Magicka developed by Swedish firm Arrowhead Games. The startling success of "Magicka" is a continuing part of the rise of indie game developers who, while not having multimillion-dollar project budgets, nonetheless manage to create compelling and innovative games, avoiding the pitfalls of genre and industry tropes that often bedevil big-name triple-A titles from major publishers like EA and Activision.

The handheld market had been on a rise since the original GameBoy. But 2010 was not a friendly year for handheld gaming, or rather, dedicated handheld gaming. In 2011, the two companies behind dedicated handheld systems are desperately trying to survive. I specify "dedicated handheld gaming," because yes, if you look at NPD's numbers for the Nintendo DS and the varients of Sony's PSP, the state of handhelds looks dire. But among everyone I've talked to about the subject, one of the key rationalizations for buying an iPad is the ability to play games. I'd very much argue that Apple's …

In the world of gaming, talented but amateur creators have a complicated relationship with the brands they love. Sometimes, they create new content on top of an existing game, and that content is embraced by the original developer.

Next month will bring the advent of Verizon's iPhone. This is extremely relevant for gaming, as perhaps the biggest gap between Android and the iOS devices is the maturity of their game development. The iPhone is a gaming platform that is freaking out the likes of Nintendo and Sony, and a success Microsoft desperately would like to emulate with WP7.