John Carmack: Facebook offers the 'Walmart experience of gaming' [Interview]

You might not be familiar with the name John Carmack, but he is the one of the brains behind the classic video game series Doom (the other brain is John Romero who we recently interviewed), Quake, Wolfenstein 3D. Last year, Carmack released Rage HD for iOS which showed that the iPad and iPhone could be taken seriously as a gaming device. Now, he's working on Rage, a post-apocalyptic shoot-em-up that will arrive on PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 later this year.

When you talk to Carmack, you quickly get the sense that he finds an immense sense of pleasure of pushing the boundaries of hardware to create more immersive game experiences. He did that with Doom in the early '90s and then again with Rage HD for IOs. So I was naturally curious to learn what this gaming pioneer has to say about new phenomenon that has turned millions of regular people into game devotees almost overnight -- social games.