Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner. In the highly charged race for the new high-definition disc format, Sony's BluRay has emerged victorious. This has implications for everything from computing, where higher capacity allows for more efficient disc backups and physical transfer of data, to the obvious effects for Hollywood. Gaming too, will feel the reverberations of this sudden change in the media storage forces.

The biggest news on the casual gaming front this week seems to be Electronic Arts' latest commitment to casual and social gaming, with the creation of EA Blueprint. The big idea for Blueprint seems to be finding and supporting independent developers, supplying them with funding and project management (cash and managers, two things EA has a nearly endless supply of), to produce games based on EA intellectual properties for Facebook and other social networks.

Valve's digital platform Steam just had some big news: Steam moved to a free business model for developers. This is yet another step in the direction of Valve's transformation of PC gaming into an accessible platform that rivals the integrated characteristics of console gaming.

It says something about the medium's growth that in-game advertising was a topic for discussion at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. But unfortunately for in-game ad proponents, the talk was mostly negative.

Last week, my fellow columnist Shankar Gupta did a great job covering the drama between a conservative columnist's misunderstanding of the game "Mass Effect," and the people that had played the game. While I hate to follow up this week with the same issue, there's been a significant development that demands a revisit: "Mass Effect" has hit mass media.

t's been a busy week for video game alarmism. Unless this is the only gaming article you've read this week, you've doubtlessly heard about a pack of lies authored by conservative columnist and radio talk show host Kevin McCullough on TownHall.com, the resulting outrage, the subsequent response, the further resulting outrage, and finally a weak and weaseling apology.

I've been thinking about the new year. And movies. Yes, this is the "gaming" insider, but there are a lot of parallels between the film and game industries, and one of the emerging trends for video has me thinking about the same application for games. The buzz around digital distribution of video seems to be that rentals stand on the horizon, and will likely appear on mainstream distribution centers in 2008. This is very exciting. I've also been thinking that such a model might be a good fit for gaming, depending on the execution.

We've spent a lot of pixels in this space talking about gaming as a storytelling medium. In gaming circles this week, there's been some controversy about a game being used to tell a somewhat different story.