So it’s Friday. My daily post for IT World is written. Guinea pig houses are cleaned. Shopping done…in short, all my chores are done. Time for some gaming. But what to play? I have no clue. And this has become a pattern in my life; one that I’m not sure how to break. There’s ...

It was about a year ago I sat down and did the math and figured out that Werewolf is essentially a solved problem. It made me sad. Jane has a long great blog post up on the same topic. Which for some reason doesn’t make her as sad. Interestingly enough their experiment this year with their zer...

Apparently today is e-mail free Friday. I say “apparently” because I heard someone say that. I don’t know any of the details, but since when has that stopped me from opining? The idea of e-mail free friday is a futile exercise in Prisoner’s Dilemma. The idea is nice. The prob...

I don't like pitchers' duels in baseball. I like to see high-scoring games. Low-scoring games remind me too much of all the things I didn't like about pre-2005 hockey games and the old pre-free-guard-zone curling bonspiels and still don't much like about soccer. I realize that many sports fans will ...

Strange that it would take so long for me to realise what one of my biggest gripes about many computer games is: the reset. Any tabletop game, any story has failure integrated as a possibility, sometimes even as a way to move the story further or give you new options. Except computer games. Whenever...

Well, sorry for citing the same part as the original BoingBoing article: [T]here would be no point today in writing a review of Ultima IV, since it is long out of print. A useful work of criticism, however, is entirely conceivable: discussing, perhaps, its role as one of the first games to consider ...

It's Bo! In Michigan Stadium! Being Bo! Unfortunately, it's with Mitch Albom. But whatever: WolverineHistorian also has clips from the '86 Ohio State game. It's Mike Hart! Mitch Albom is thousands of miles away! (Via.) He'll grubberize the left flankenoid! Budding "television presenter" Dhani Jones ...

It was fitting that I was in Montréal the day Oscar Peterson died. It's weird, because I've actually discovered a number of interesting parallels between my life and the life of my favorite piano player. Of course, there's the obvious one in that we both loved the piano. (Though there is an e...

Below are my notes for the paper I gave yesterday about MMORPGs and Virtual Worlds, using WoW and Second Life as case studies and arguing/test driving some of the ideas JP and I have had about player agency within these games. The paper was meant as an overview of the ways in which players want to a...