April 17, 2009 – Making Money, Terry Pratchett's Nebula-nominated, thirty-somethingth novel in Discworld series, could be a subtitled, "a comic fantasy on contemporary themes," ie the large-scale consensual fraud that is a banking system. In a sense, Making Money is Neal Stephenson's The Baroque Cycle writ small... More »
Nerd and Anti-Nerd
March 27, 2009 – Is it time to retire the term "nerd"? It's had a good run, sure, but does anyone else feel it's not what it used to be? It's lost some of its specificity and force, and maybe it needs to retire with honor. More »
Michael Chabon, Matt Fraction, and the Nerd Cultural Insurgency (NCI)
March 2, 2009 – I made it to the Michael Chabon (The Yiddish Policemen's Union) and Matt Fraction (Casanova) dual appearance at Wondercon, which was well worth it for anyone into literary comics - or comic-bookish literature. Both authors were clearly fans of one another's work; More »
Spore’s Creature Creator Lets You Seed the Galaxy with Life
June 17, 2008 – Spore, the upcoming 6+-years-in-the-making project from Will Wright (Sim City, The Sims, and Sim everything else) is releasing its fabulous alien species design tool, the Creator Creator today as a free download. More »
Return to the Future Past of “Gamma World”
March 21, 2008 – Gamma World was role-playing game company TSR's attempt at a post-apocalyptic role-playing system. TSR hit the big time with the mega-successful Dungeons and Dragons franchise, but the company's history is littered with non-starters. More »
Rise of the Passively Multiplayer Online Game
February 26, 2008 – What if everything you did online was part of a game? A company named Gamelayers is built on the idea of a PMOG, Passively Multiplayer Online Game. The idea is that everything you do while surfing earns experience points, and the play experience seamless overlays your online life. More »
Video Game Tech Increasingly Indistinguishable From Magic
February 22, 2008 – More magic toys at GDC that I would cheerfully have sold my best friend to posses when I was a child if I had had a best friend. Who knew that the future held these things? More »
Escher-like Games – a Trippy New Movement in Game Design?
February 22, 2008 – A lot of the history of games is the quest for more and more realistic worlds - from Donkey Kong to Doom to Gears of War - we've been progressing asymptotically toward the mythical photo-real total simulation, the fabled interactive movie. More »
