I’ve been reading Max Brooks’ seminal work, World War Z, for the second time this past week. If you’re not familiar, check it out. Also listen to the interview on NPR’s Talk of the Nation. It has to be one of the most captivating books I’ve ever read, and that includes classic literature. The funny […]
Last night I visited with my uncle Mike and his family — the “game uncle.” He is more enthusiastic about board games than I am, and his formidable collection is always growing. He introduced me to all the Days of Wonder games (Shadows Over Camelot, Pirate’s Cove, Ticket To Ride), and on this visit he […]
Last night my team, the Detroit Red Wings, finally bested the upstart Pittsburgh Penguins in Game 6 to win the Stanley Cup and their fourth championship in eleven seasons. I have been an ardent Detroit fan since I lived there as a child and witnessed their back-to-back sweep of the championship in ‘97 and ‘98, […]
One of the things I find most attractive about game design is the need for true multi-disciplinary thinking. A diverse mind engaged in diverse pursuits is a far more fertile designer than one that is focused, however nimble or learned that mind may be. Game designers create whole universes, and no mere education in digital […]
The other day I gave a lecture on the importance of criticism in game design, and I drew a parallel to ideas from my undergraduate study in philosophy. One of the tenets of Western philosophy is the idea of debate and defensibility as proof of merit. Simply put, philosophers debate ideas because they hold that […]
[Warning: Rant Forthcoming] The extra credit assignment I posted last week was a mysteriously unqualified failure. Not a single student submitted a ruleset. When discussing this with Brenda, we were both scratching our heads to try and understand why no one bothered even to submit a half-assed idea. All I asked for was two typed […]
I can’t recall how many times I’ve seen or heard people scorn Sudoku because, as they claim, “I’m no good at math.” Similarly, I can’t recall how many times I’ve tried to convince these people that there is no math required to play Sudoku. It’s a logic puzzle. Granted, calculation of probabilities and patterns of […]
I played WoW again the other day — it’s been nearly three years to the week that I stopped playing the first time around. I was only under the influence for about fourteen months, not counting the summertime when I didn’t have my computer. I’ve been told by many friends that the game is vastly […]
We just watched a snippet from a Discovery series on the human body, about sight and the ways in which the mind filters out noise and extraneous detail to present you an extremely narrow packet of information about the world in front of your face. It included a scene in which the host demonstrates a […]
The other night I attended a birthday party involving the oh-so-American phenomenon midnight bowling. A number of my friends were in attendance, many of them as couples. Midnight bowling is really a drinking-game version of regular bowling, so by the time the second game began people were fairly wobbly, and their feelings and attitudes towards […]