The Guardian, one of the few UK publications to understand blogging, is to launch a new games blog.

The blog, which will be available from Monday 2 August, will be written by Aleks Krotoski, former presenter of Channel 4’s “Thumb Bandits”; Greg Howson, Guardian Online’s games reviewer; and Keith Stuart, the mobile gaming expert. It will cover every game genre and every major gaming platform, including PCs, consoles, the net and mobile phones.

“Gaming is no longer just the preserve of the teenage boy. More and more of our users are taking it up and we want to provide an intelligent, interactive forum for them,” said Neil McIntosh, Assistant Editor, Guardian Unlimited.

The Guardian launched a news blog three years ago, following it up with the Online blog and then the US Elections 04 blog.

The addition of a new gaming blog marks the beginning of The Guardian’s expansion into the blog space as they intend to launch a series of new blogs over coming months.

However, as Jane Perrone, Deputy Editor for News and Politics, Guardian Unlimited, said during her presentation at BlogTalk in Vienna, there are bound to be some people who will not welcome this development, feeling that it is an intolerable ‘invasion’ of the blogosphere by big media.

A more constructive way to look at it is to realise that The Guardian’s blogs have a good record for linking to external sites, and by doing so they bring the blogosphere to the attention of a much wider audience. It’s easy to forget that blogging is not a mainstream activity yet, regardless of the rush on political blogs that is going on at the moment. Any move by a newspaper as well respected as The Guardian to familiarise more people with the high quality writing that’s being published on blogs it to be applauded.