Good experience games.

Here's something extremely interesting I've found to follow. Mark Hurst has written the book Bit Literacy, addressing the frequently discussed information overload trend/phenomenon. As a UX guy he writes on his blog Good Experience about what it means to improve user experience, customer experience, and human experience - for me, this stuff really hits the spot.

On top of that, he keeps an excellent list of Good Experience Games - flash and online games that aren't there just to waste time but are genuinely entertaining and extremely well put together. We ran into the list looking for a quick way forget the fact that we've run out of Law & Order: Criminal Intent DVD episodes to watch; some 4AM later we realized we ended up finding something much more entertaining than we expected.

I got to thinking how interesting it would be to explore what the games on this list all share - what is the common user-experience thread here? I've been kind of poking around some sources, tossing some ideas around in my head, and might have some good thinking on the matter soon.