This is great: Sony announced that it will allow universities to purchase development kits for its PSP mobile gaming platform. According to PocketGamer, twenty schools in the United Kingdom already have students working on Playstation 2 development kits running on Linux.

So why is this great? Games are getting more personal. It's the YouTubing of games. If we want this medium to grow, the industry needs to essentially open source itself - give away the tools (like some PC game makers have been doing for years) so that garage band developers can inject (much-needed) innovation. Think about it: every other medium (text, film, music, etc.) is open to creators from the general public, and games should be just as accessible.

Years ago, I visited Digipen, a videogame university in Redmond, Washington. Digipen gets funding from Nintendo. I was astonished to find that students, nevertheless, were stuck working on only the last generation of systems - so if the GameCube was out, they could only work on Nintendo 64. Of course there are proprietary considerations - bla bla bla - but with the industry reaching into the tens of billions worldwide, the next gen of developers need all the tools they can get.

So how about some Wiis for the wee developers now?