Public Beta has released their first book on video games titled "Difficult Questions About Videogames," a compilation of responses to several questions they asked of the games industry, academia, and beyond. Just published in November, the book aims to answer the difficult questions about video games such as: "What is a video game?" and "What is gameplay?" One of the more controversial questions asked was: "How can you tell if a video game is rubbish?"

Edited by James Newman and Iain Simons, the book contains 969 responses from 71 contributors, including many distinguished names from the games industry, such as: Warren Spector, Dave Perry, Ernest Adams, Scott Miller, Jeff Minter, Justin Hall, Nils von Barth, and Jay Bibby. Ok, so not everyone listed is well-known in the games industry, though maybe someday that will be true. =)

From Public Beta's website:

"Difficult Questions About Videogames is a unique and vital document of the state of contemporary thinking and opinion on this most pervasive, important and misunderstood of popular cultural forms.

Never before have CEOs, developers, journalists, academics and (of course) players been brought together to sweat it out over the same difficult questions.

Their answers are radical, loving, conservative, funny, mundane, controversial and emotional - what binds them together is the commitment that these questions are worth answering, because games matter."

You can order the book directly from the Public Beta site. Click.