Though for die-hard RPG nuts it'll have been a red letter week with the release of Bioware's Dragon Age: Origins, it hasn't been enough to wean me off my daily regimen of pushing further into the Borderlands and compulsively playing through the two levels that make up the Left 4 Dead 2 demo (above, now fully released to the public) with each character, hoping for just one more scrap of rarely-triggered dialogue to more fully flesh out just who these characters are that I'll be spending most of the winter with.

But it's without any facetiousness that I admit that there's one game release this week that's particularly pricked my ear:

Guido Núñez-Mujica, a 26-year-old Boing Boing reader in Venezuela who is an avid gamer, writes in with this extensive personal observation piece about a new law that widely criminalizes video games in the South American country. As you read the piece, please also bear in mind that publishing this sort of thing under one's full name is not done without personal risk.

These games are a cherished part of my life, they helped to shape my young mind, they gave me challenges and vastly improved my English, opening the door to a whole new world of literature, music and people from all around the world. What I have achieved, all my research, how I have been able to travel even though I'm always broke, the hard work I've done to convince people to fund a start up for cheap biotech for developing countries and regular folks, none of that would have been possible hadn't I learned English through video games.

Now, thanks to the tiny horizons of the cast of morons who govern me, thanks to the stupidity and ham-fisted authoritarianism of the local authorities, so beloved of so many liberals, my 7 year old brother's chances to do the same could be greatly impacted.

Iphone game developer Storm8 exploited an "electronic backdoor" to learn the phone numbers of players, according to a class action lawsuit filed in San Francisco.

Filed on behalf of Lynnwood, WA resident Michael Turner, the suit claims that the practice is not authorized by Apple and involves the execution of "malicious software code."

As with my earlier column on the new vanguard and returning classic franchises that are keeping point and click adventures alive a decade or more past their prime, there's one other genre that all but the hardest-of-the-core and its tight-knit community itself seem to have forgotten: the text adventure.

It's a genre that -- if you grew up gaming -- probably makes up some of your earliest memories: my own definitely revolve around waiting impatiently for the TI99/4A's cassette deck to finish screeching its way through loading Scott Adams' Adventure series (now playable online here) and pondering the etymology of "pieces of eight", continuing through my teens to the unmistakably British worlds of Graham Cluely's Jacaranda Jim and Humbug (the games that first taught me the word 'whinge').

And it's a genre that certainly is flourishing deep in the underground at places like The IFDB, the IFWiki, the yearly IFComp(etition), and the tireless work of people like Emily Short, but it took an Indiecade finalist and an iPhone app to hook me back in, with a short-list of the top games to try included below the fold.

With gaming's current trend toward the nostalgic taking us on Bit.Trips and Extreme invasions, and with indies giving us de-made versions of modern classics, it more or less follows logically that we'd eventually see the imageat top.

Recognize it? Likely not off the bat, but you'd be surprised what a little motion and original sound can do to a 15-pixel panorama. Below the fold, then, the answer to the riddle plus several handfuls more in the lowest-res high-res gallery you'll ever witness, courtesy UK animation group Alaskan Military School and their viral videos for just-completed British games festival GameCity.

Halloween 2009: Making Mario (Thanks, Jim!)

Head (Flickr) (Thanks, Eric!)

Sisters and brothers, these are the first days of a new golden age of kipple.

Ban Hammer: 3D printed (Thanks, Chris!)

Were it any other week I might be lamenting the lack of high profile retail releases, but as it happens, both the release of a demo for Valve's upcoming Left 4 Dead 2 and one other game have been eating up nearly all my spare time (and a good deal of non-spare-time as well), that game being:

Borderlands [Gearbox, Xbox 360/PS3/PC]

Gearbox's promise to deliver the first person, dungeon crawling shooter that Hellgate: London was panned for falling short of appears to have gone without a hitch -- the result is one of the most compulsive plays I've accidentally fallen into since I first thought I'd see what this whole 'Fallout 3' deal was.

Take that game and add in a dash of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (for its less overtly emphasized narrative structure, though its own barren post-apocalyptic world is more Mad Max wildstyle to the former's dreary Chernobyl hot zone) and you've got a game that's split into a series of "one more go" pursuits, as you push yourself past that next hill and then the next, hoping to stumble across that next, procedurally generated, best-gun-ever, which in turn leads you to pushing on to just see what that one is capable of.

Plato, Socrates, Nietzsche, Adam Smith... Sure, they were all great thinkers, but how long would they have lasted in Ulduar?

Continuing with the ongoing Popular Culture and Philosophy series, World of Warcraft and Philosophy, (Wrath of the Philosopher King) will be hitting bookshelves on November 1st. This collection of essays and short fiction addresses the ethics, economics, and metaphysics of Azeroth and its inhabitants. Along the way, the collection takes quick excursions on issues of gender identity, leadership, hate speech, and the likelihood of the IRS auditing a troll. Add in shoutouts to Machiavelli, Gary Gygax, and Thomas Jefferson (and, yes, even Cory Doctorow) and you've you might find yourself leveling up in intellect as well as your combat skills.

San Francisco's recent Alternative Press Expo was the last place I expected to turn up videogames, but it took less than a few minutes of circulating amongst the self-published sprawl until I stumbled on my first controller. I suppose it shouldn't have been as much a surprise as it was: the phoenix-like rise and return of indie/self-published and otherwise bedroom-coded gaming has followed near identical trajectories as indie music and publishing, it's just taken a bit longer to get here.

But surprisingly, few indies have fully mastered the art of cross-media, whether by lack of interest, resources or knowledge, even though all of the necessary tools and channels are already directly in their hands.

The few games I'm following typically have at least three waves: one for recruiting and general discussion, another for out-of-character interactions ("table talk"), and the main wave where the actual in-character gaming takes place. Individual players are also encouraged to start waves between themselves for any conversations that the GM shouldn't be privy to. Character sheets can be posted in a private wave between a player and the GM, and character biographies can go anywhere where the other players can get access to them.

The waves are persistent, accessible to anyone who's added to them, and include the ability to track changes, so they ultimately work quite well as a medium for the non-tactical parts of an RPG. A newcomer can jump right in and get up-to-speed on past interactions, and a GM or industrious player can constantly maintain the official record of play by going back and fixing errors, formatting text, adding and deleting material, and reorganizing posts. Character generation seems to work quite well in Wave, since players can develop the shared character sheet at their own pace with periodic feedback from the GM.

Unfortunately for those of us who are more into the tactical side of RPGs, it isn't yet well-suited to a game that involves either a lot of dice rolling or careful tracking of player and NPC positions. Right now, Wave bots are hard to get working reliably and widgets are scarce, which means that if you don't want to use the standard dice bot that Wave debuted with (dice bots are an old IRC favorite) then there isn't really another convenient option; rolls are either made with real dice and then posted on the honor system, or they're posted in batches and a GM then uses them in sequence.

Though it's nearly impossible to find a tidy way to sum the work of LucasArts adventure vet and Double Fine head Tim Schafer -- with a catalog that ranges from de los Muertos noir to deep-psyche introspec-/explora-tion and now to a heavy metal heaven/hell (depending on your attitudes toward the genre's aesthetic) -- one undeniable trait rings consistently true through all.

Schafer and his stellar team of artists and writers know character, and put character above all, a philosophy that lets players navigate some of gaming's most preposterous landscapes and peculiar conceits always feeling entirely grounded by the essential humanity around them.

Nowhere is that more evident than in the ancient Rock realm to which you travel in Brütal Legend: an epically monumental world inspired by the stormily apocalyptic vistas of classic metal album covers, now fully explorable and brought fantastically to life by the Bay Area studio.

And so, following the short trailer below that gives you a taste of how Legends's world would eventually form: a look at the original conceptual design behind those vistas, and especially the characters that inhabit them -- every bit as instantly recognizable (in their leather and spikes, worn-through denim and low-top All Stars) as they are awesomely ridiculous -- from Double Fine artists Scott C, Peter Chan, Nathan Stapley, Levi Ryken, Razmig Mavlian, and Mark Hamer.

セガハードメモリアルジッポーライター (via Wonderland)

Meet Koh and Yurie. They're a happily married young Japanese couple who moved from Tokyo to San Francisco a year ago due to a job transfer. In early September, while on a business trip back home, Koh bought a new game cartridge for his Nintendo DS. It was mostly out of curiosity — the Japanese Twitterati were all abuzz over a new dating sim called Love Plus, and he just wanted to see what the hype was about. "I've tried the other dating sims before just for kicks, but I never got hooked," he says. "I didn't expect this to be any different." He was wrong.

During that one week in Tokyo, Koh found himself fully committed to his virtual relationship with Rinko, a pouty, hard-ass high school girl who hung out at the library. The relationship was formal at first, consisting of awkward whispered conversations in which she sent mixed signals and called him by his last name. As things got more heated, though, she started calling him Kohichi (calling someone by the first name still carries a degree of intimacy in Japan) and became more demanding of his attention. "I felt like I might get sucked into this world," Koh, who is an engineer at a major game manufacturer by day, tells me. "It's not like any dating sim with young girls in it becomes a hit, but this one is really well-made."

An article posted on a Japanese tech site in September told the story of several women who had complained on an online bulletin about how their family lives were disrupted by husbands addicted to Konami's hit game. Last weekend, I invited Koh and Yurie over to my house to talk about Koh's virtual relationship with Rinko, and how — if at all — it had impacted their real world husband-and-wife dynamic.

We wanted a ceremony that reflected our geeky, romantic, pink aesthetic, while at the same time being profound and meaningful. Our ceremony was themed around the video game Portal and the anime series Revolutionary Girl Utena.

We incorporated lots of geeky details, from the table names (Revolution, Sierra, Katara and GLaDOS) to the choice of music. We also kept several traditional elements such as bouquets, dresses and bridesmaids. However, we both walked down the aisle unaccompanied and skipped the garter/bouquet toss.

A team of artists in Toronto created this giant rendition of The Last Supper using over 4,000 Rubik's Cubes.

Cube Works via Popped Cullture

MODERN as tomorrow morning's headlines, a newly simplified form of the game of chess has for its game board the Modern World, and for its pieces Farmers, Mechanics, Engineers and even Agitators struggling against forces symbolized by opposing Armies, Bankers, Radio, Press, Law and Middlemen trying to become Rankers.

The play, which is solely a matter of skill, centers around opposing forces trying to dominate one neutral piece called Government while either the red or white side, as the antagonists are named, is in power.

The game may be played by either two, three, or four persons and is substantially like chess. But gone are the Pawns, the Knights, and the Kings and Queens,

This week has seen a number of excellent and much publicized and high profile releases -- Rockstar's conversion of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars from DS to PSP and Gearbox's post-apocalyptic co-op sandbox shooter Borderlands -- but no game has eaten as much of my time this week than a downsized iPhone version of a rhythm favorite.

Rock Band [Harmonix/EA Mobile, iPhone]

EA Mobile's downsized port of Harmonix's rhythm-standard enters an App Store dominated by clones and competitors (the Tap Tap series chief among them), and what sets Rock Band apart from the rest is a subtle but massively important distinction. With Harmonix's access to a staggeringly large library of original masters, the iPhone game is able to do what none of the others can: make the music itself reactive to your play.

By comparison, Tap Tap plays as a transparent overlay on top of any given track: keep your hands away from the screen and the music cheerily plays on, unperturbed by your quiet failing. That Rock Band gives you its now embarrassingly too-familiar skronk on every missed note is key to sustaining the illusion that you're participating in the performance, even just by slapping a thumb onto a glass sheet.

The object is to drag colored dots of various sizes to matching colored rectangles around the perimeter of the screen. When dragging a dot you aren't allowed to bump into a dot or rectangle of a different color, or you will lose health or lives. There's more to it, of course, and the game becomes more challenging each level. The nice thing is that you can learn the rules pretty quickly by just playing it. My six-year-old caught on to the object of the game and its rules faster than I did.

DodgeDot works with the Jampaq Network (free, and accessible in the app), which gives players the ability to Follow and be Followed. Most importantly, it gives the game a new round each Sunday at midnight before Monday. All of the levels get new starting patterns (dot sizes, positions, and speeds), which really makes a huge difference in keeping the game fresh, and then we have new rankings for each Round," says Jim.

Now that my kids are in bed, I have it all to myself until morning.

DodgeDot | Follow on Twitter here

This is obviously a labor of love, as the developer knows her stuff. This game is highly allusive and drops constant references to other works like its Gaiman's Sandman. Super Mario World is its core, but set pieces, backgrounds, and enemies from assorted titles and other Mario games all make appearances. These additions are far from being a cut-and-paste hodgepodge though, as they're carefully woven together to create an enthralling experience. The nod to Tarantino and Shinichiro Watanabe is duly earned. Instead of being a pure homage, though, the game throws constant curveballs at you. I played one level where the On/Off switch actually changed the enemies in the level, and another one that was fully destructible via Mario's fireballs. These subversive quirks are made all the more apparent because they're within the Super Mario World engine, something that is so well-known and played.

The boss battles are what this hack is best known for, and they're reason enough for a download. Bosses are typically the one shortcoming in the Mario franchise, but not here. There are dozens of encounters and they're all throwbacks to various 16-bit games. Oh, and they are a lot of fun too. There is the occasional level that drags a bit, but other than that Super Nintendo fans shouldn't pass this up.

(Download MP4 video or Watch on YouTube, or view with subtitles on Dotsub).

Institute for the Future teamed up with Sun Microsystems and Boing Boing Video to co-host the Digital Open, an online tech expo for teens 17 and under around the world.

We're publishing an 8-part series of videos profiling the winners. Today, meet 16 year old Harry Lee of Melbourne Australia. He talks with us about his "Sneaky Card" game concept, which explores social interactions between people. He was inspired by ARG and indie projects like "Bite Me," by Gamelab, and Jane McGonigal's Top Secret Dance-Off, both of which we've covered previously on Boing Boing.

"I love index cards," says Harry, "And I was thinking -- hmm, how can I incorporate them into a project?" So he designed and printed these game cards, and "spread the seeds of sneakiness and espionage" into the unsuspecting pockets, math books, binders and bags and jackets of his schoolmates.

I tracked most of the cards and found, with much satisfaction, that a majority of them had been passed down at least three times. The most successful story is of the card passed from student to student three times before ending up in a math teacher's jacket. The teacher found it and gave it to another math teacher, who inserted it into a student's corrected test before giving it back to him. The card passed hands once again before I lost track of it.

Gaming blog UK Resistance has obtained several present-day photos of a depressingly bare, archaic video game arcade in Pyongyang. The person who took and submitted the photos chose to remain anonymous for safety reasons.

Speaking of North Korea, the current issue of The Paris Review has an amazing article by Barbara Demick about two young North Koreans who risked their lives to make a romantic relationship work.

Inside a North Korean arcade

Tankard O' Terror Replica Stein (via Geekologie)

He's made of 386 granny squares, each one representing 1 pixel (3.5" each) that makes up Raccoon Mario. I learned to crochet in February by watching youtube videos and recently watched another video for granny squares and got started on this project right away. I had originally thought that it would take me over 1 month to complete if I made about 10 granny squares per day.

Even in their inauspicious mobile-focused beginnings, it was clear from the start that Toronto indie Cabybara Games had a keen eye for pushing the visual boundaries on whatever platform they were given. The pixels of the handset and later iPhone version of their original debut puzzler Critter Crunch popped aggressively with a pastel palette against its warmer autumnal backgrounds, an art direction that helped earn the game its fair share of mobile awards.

More recently given the chance to bring that sensibility to the PlayStation 3, though, the team took the risk of not simply cheaply upscaling their vision to the wide-screen, but to give the game a top to toe graphic overhaul and create a full HD-res 2D animated game.

The results -- put plainly -- are basically staggering, with the soft and surreal wonder of Studio Ghibli-esque backdrops underscoring the hectic hand-animated critter-bursts on top, and are even more impressive when you learn that they're not the work of (as you might assume) a field of tirelessly slaving outsourced animators. In fact, nearly all of what you see in the game is largely the output of just two compatriots (or -- as Capy co-founder and president Nathan Vella terms them -- '2 radical dudes'): Nick "Qiqo" Stephan and Sylvain "Sylve" Coutouly, respectively responsible for character animation and background/world map art.

Documenting just what heights a tiny team can reach with vision and proper passion, then, posted here is a rare look into the conception and evolution of the world of Krunchatoa and its creatures within (and a special bonus look at main character Biggs invading other Sony/PlayStation classics), alongside the theatrical-quality animation produced by Capy to surround the launch of the game, available now on the PlayStation Network (with the launch of its free demo version due tomorrow, Oct. 22nd).

As alluded to last week with the release of Amanita's hand-drawn opus Machinarium, the era of the point and click adventure -- which reached its pinnacle throughout the 90s thanks to genre-defining works by LucasArts, Sierra and Cyan -- seemed all but forever over in the decade following, as PC prowess pushed first- and third-person to the fore.

But a new wave of adventures has recently arisen, ushered in by the re-introduction of more cursor-y consoles and handhelds (think: the literal pointing and touching of both the Wii and the iPhone), the proliferation of digital distribution channels (lowering the barrier away from gun-shy publishers unwilling to invest heavily in 'nostalgia'), and a dedicated core that's never let the classics die (via grey market ports of Lucas's SCUMM engine to basically every piece of hardware with a display device).

And so, a brief introduction to those new adventurers, and a quick guide to re-playing the classics in new ways.

Ben There, Dan That / Time Gentlemen, Please [Zombie Cow, PC]

Apart from Amanita (covered exhaustively last week), the top team keeping the spirit of click alive is the UK's Zombie Cow -- founded by Dan Marshall and aided by a small crew of consultants, most notably co-writer and -designer Ben Ward.

The pair are, as you might have guessed, the stars of Zombie Cow's first adventure outing, Ben There, Dan That, a game that manages to infuse the best of indie spirit (lean, economical, and highly stylized art and design) with the best of what LucasArts taught us made these journeys so great: razor-sharp wit and dialogue, self-aware and -referencing (and, here, Lucas-classics referencing as well) at every turn, never afraid to break the fourth wall and let the player in on the jokes.

The duo have followed in that same tradition with the recently released Time Gentlemen, Please a sequel that can be demo'd and purchased either from Zombie Cow itself or via Valve's Steam (BT,DT remains a free download). Both come highly, highly recommended, and serve as a nice tide-over while you await the studio's third chronicle: Revenge of the Balloon-Headed Mexican.

Kicking off a new series of weekly round-ups of the most essential just-released games (spanning retail, indie, downloadable, iPhone, freeware, and all otherwise), this week takes us on a trip through heavy metal fantasy, jellybean puzzle solving, rusted robot worlds, and Indian-spiced psychadelic shooters.

Brutal Legend (Double Fine, PS3/Xbox 360)

Certainly one of the highest profile games of the season, Double Fine's Brutal Legend (at top) has been garnering all the media acclaim it richly deserves following its release earlier this week.

Created by former LucasArts adventure vet Tim Schafer (Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango) and starring Jack Black alongside a league of metal legends (Judas Priest's Rob Halford, Motorhead's Lemmy Kilmister, Lita Ford, and, of course, Black Sabbath's Ozzy Osbourne), the studio's open-world/driving/lite real-time-strategy opus is every medieval-apocalypse album cover brought to glorious life, finally fulfilling the wishes of two generations of disaffected patched-jean-jacketed and notebook-cover-doodling Hessians.

Tank's team designed an apparatus in which a mouse, its head firmly held in a metal helmet, walks on the surface of a styrofoam ball. The ball is kept aloft by a jet of air, so that it functions like a multidirectional treadmill. Around it are sensors taken from optical computer mice, which read the ball's movement as the mouse runs.

Those readings were the input for the researchers' virtual reality software -- a modified version of the open source Quake 2 videogame engine, tweaked to project an image on a screen surrounding the mouse. Tank called it "a mini-IMAX theater." Mice in the study ran through a virtual maze designed in the open source Quake game editor, but rather than earning points or power-ups, they were rewarded with sips of water from a head-side nozzle.

Into the hippocampus of each mouse the researchers inserted a glass capillary just one micron wide at its tip and filled with salt water. Known as a whole-cell patch recorder, it detects electrical currents as they pulse through individual cells.

"It is difficult to overstate the importance of understanding how the dynamics of electrical activity within single neurons is related to firing patterns among collections of neurons that accompany the performance of complex tasks," wrote Douglas Nitz, a University of California at San Diego cognitive scientist, in a commentary accompanying the findings.

Scientists Scan the Brains of Mice Playing Quake

AP: "Captain Lou Albano dies at 76; wrestler appeared in Cyndi Lauper videos."

Image: detail of this photo, from LIFE. Related: one with Cyndi Lauper, and another here, 1984 (no photographer credit).

Update: Another YouTube gem. @EvilPRGuy reminds us of this fantastically bad anti-drug PSA Albano did in the '80s (in character as Mario), which warned that if you do drugs, "you'll go to hell before you die."

Point and click adventures -- one of classic gaming's most revered and, until recently, most forgotten genres -- have seen a renaissance of late. That's something I'll be exploring more fully in a future column, but, for now, it's a point best proven by what will surely be one of the highest profile indie games released this month: Amanita Design's adventure Machinarium, due for release this Friday for PC and Mac.

Best known for their early web adventure Samorost -- a game that swapped out pixel crafting for a photo-surreal landscape built on rusted cans and gnarled, mossy roots ('samorost', not coincidentally, being the word for 'gnarled' or 'twisted' in Amanita head Jakub Dvorský's native Czech) -- the studio quickly established themselves as the indie forerunners of the then-niche form with Samorost 2, and promotional games for Dallas-area glee-rockers Polyphonic Spree, Nike, and the BBC.

Machinarium looks to be the studio's most ambitious work, here fully hand-drawn as opposed to their former photo-shoppery, and digging deeper into the genre's past with inventory-based puzzling and exploration rather than rote hot-spot-hunting points and clicks.

Presented here, then, ahead of its imminent release, a rare hi-res look into the sketchbooks of Dvorský and fellow artist Adolf Lachman showing the conceptual origins and creation of its rusted iron steamworks world, alongside a selection of images of the completed product.

Machinarium can be pre-ordered directly from Amanita (which comes with a downloadable bonus soundtrack thank-you gift), or for via Direct2Drive (for PCs) and GamersGate (for the Mac), where you'll also find a demo version for each platform.

Flick user and master retrogame cupcake maker Ana Fuji has a gorgeous set of delicious-looking Super Mario sweets online, made from chocolate and fondant.

trufinhas: super mario!

(via Geekologie)

One of the highlights of this year's Austin GDC was a session by game design veteran Greg Costikyan on the 'blight or bane' of randomness in games -- a wide-ranging talk that covered the history and delicate balance of luck or chance in games, and their interplay with the idea of skill.

Of particular note were his final slides on algorithmic content: randomly or procedurally generated games, starting, of course, with the genre-defining early computer RPG Rogue, a game highly dependent on luck but also one of near infinite variety with each successive playthrough.

The idea is one that's been prevalent throughout videogame history, but it's also one that's most recently and notably being embraced by indies for its exploit-ability in adding 'cheap' (once your algorithms have been perfected) content and replayability on a tight budget and tiny team.

Derek Yu's Spelunky (at top) is easily the best example, and where all discussion of the indie embrace of procedural generation needs to start. Taking the Rogue formula and applying it to the 8-bit platformer genre, Spelunky's enduring power and charm (having been finessed for nearly a year, and only just now hitting its 1.0 release) is its ability to create "situations" rather than rote level layouts.

Apart from a loving tribute to a landmark act, Harmonix's singularly-focused rhythm game The Beatles: Rock Band is just as significant a work for being what is essentially gaming's first, best interactive documentary.

Tracing the band's rise and rise from their inauspicious Cavern Club beginnings to the Apple Corps rooftop finale, TB:RB offers a look inside the life of the band both overt (see: the traces and ephemeral snippets in the form of unlockable photos and fan club merch) and covert (see, here: the difficulty-arc-dip from their early, more technical work -- a band with something to prove -- to the remarkably simple bliss-outs as they move into their, er, higher, altered states).

But possibly its most remarkable achievement is the art and motion graphics that went in to the game, from Passion Pictures' eye-searingly gorgeous intro and outro videos, aided by Alberto Mielgo's concepts (at top), and the 'Kid Stays in the Picture'-esque interstitials by Kansas City, MO's MK12.

Below the fold, then: the best of all the above in a high-res gallery, giving you everything but the game.

That feature was fine as far as it went, but unlike other social networks, The Sims Online allowed users to declare other users untrustworthy too. The face of an untrustworthy user appeared circled in bright red among all the trustworthy faces in a user's hub.

It didn't take long for a group calling itself the Sims Mafia to figure out how to use this mechanic to shake down new users when they arrived in the game. The dialog would go something like this:

"Hi! I see from your hub that you're new to the area. Give me all your Simoleans or my friends and I will make it impossible to rent a house."

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm a member of the Sims Mafia, and we will all mark you as untrustworthy, turning your hub solid red (with no more room for green), and no one will play with you. You have five minutes to comply. If you think I'm kidding, look at your hub-three of us have already marked you red. Don't worry, we'll turn it green when you pay..."

If you think this is a fun game, think again-a typical response to this shakedown was for the user to decide that the game wasn't worth $10 a month. Playing dollhouse doesn't usually involve gangsters.

Tony sez, "Attached is a stop-motion video my filmmaker friend Justin Grizzoffi and I made a couple of years ago. It was super easy to make - we simply edited together a couple hundred still photos of Post-Its stuck to a wall and scored it using samples from an old Casio SK1 keyboard."

Post-It Note Atari (Thanks, Tony!)

Love this -- it's like one of those Sharpie pen murals crossed with the back of my Junior High notebook.

Our awesome meeting room (Thanks, Roel!)

Walkthrough, MP3 download (Thanks, Phil!)

I attended a D&D day camp around this time, 1983 or so, at Harbourfront in Toronto. We painted lead miniatures (I still love doing this) and had guest-lectures from medieval weapons freaks, a ninjitsu master, and a science fiction writer named Edward Llewellyn, who was the first published sf writer I ever met. He signed a copy of one of his books for me and I obsessively sought out and read his entire oeuvre. And of course we played lots of D&D. I still remember that as one of the most fun summer activities I ever got to participate in.

Shippensburg Adventure Game Camp ran in the summers of 1981 through 1985. There were two one-week sessions, each Sunday evening through Friday afternoon. I found out about it because the teacher we had convinced to sponsor the school D&D group got a flier for it when it was first organized.

Campers were divided into different gaming groups at the beginning of the week, with councilors doubling as DMs. There were morning lectures (seriously) with gaming in the afternoon. All the groups played through the same adventure, written specifically for the camp. It wasn't an actual tournament, but each group pretty much tried to get as far as possible before the end of the week -- a slightly rigged process as I found out once I became a councilor.

The same campers could come sign up for both weeks, but obviously that wasn't the intention because they'd be playing in the same adventure twice.

There were a lot of other summer camps going on at the Shippensburg campus at the same time: baseball, tennis, cheerleading, etc. Everybody stayed in the dorms, with different buildings for different camp groups, but lectures and afternoon gaming were in other campus buildings.

Steampunk MAME!

Here is an absolutely adorkable fan-video for Plants vs Zombies by some talented Australian plants and zombies.

A Lawn Defence at Any Hour (via Wonderland)

Bravo Gustavo

Makers Tile Game 5x5

Incredible R2D2 Hack has 8 Consoles + Projector (Thanks, Dan!)

What was the most difficult thing to get right?

I've never made a game like this, so every step had its own challenges. I spent so long thinking about things before I even wrote 1 line of code.. that the "getting it right" was done before I started. I think the hardest part, was making a whole framework... so I could add a new thing to the game without having to rewrite everything. I had to rewrite the main movement algorithms twice and I still don't think I have it's right.

Here it is: ASCIIpOrtal Launch-day interview - part 1

Zombies vs Villagers chess set (Thanks, Theeviljeremy!)

Starting with the blueprints printed at full scale (HUGE) I made cross sections out of insulation foam and glued them into place. The empty areas between sections were filled with cardboard. This formed what I called the "skeleton" of the body. The empty cavities in the skeleton were then filled in with expanding foam. After drying, the foam was carved into the shape of the main body. After this was completed (and the foam given more drying time so it would retain its shape) the entire form was covered in stretch fabric. This smoothed out a lot of the lumpiness of the foam.

Spy toy gadget maker Brando has this "Magic GIANT 12-Surface IQ Pentagon - Fantastic Edition" for $49.90.

The FANTASTIC SIZE and COMPLEX IQ Cube!! The GIANT 12 surfaces IQ Pentagon! You may never face this complicated one! Your home cannot miss this one. You may not solve it, you can just disassemble it and try it again! This is the most perfect for your Left & Right Brain Training. Let's GRAB and CHALLENGE it!

Horror stories about social networks are legion. From teenagers who announce house parties online only for hundreds of gatecrashers to show up and wreck the place to people who've been fired over pictures they posted or Facebook status updates when they're supposed to be ill... and far worse things can and do happen too. But online social networking isn't going away and age restrictions don't really keep young teenagers off websites, so Channel 4 has come up with Smokescreen, a game that teaches players about the potential pitfalls of posting their every thought and action online...

The game, created by Six to Start, uses familiar-looking social networks to tell a story. Players interact with characters in the game to solve a mystery, and while the problematic aspects of social networks are highlighted along the way, it's fun rather than didactic. So in one mission, you use 'Gaggle' search to find the 'Fakebook' and 'Tweetr' accounts of a girl your friend fancies, then dig around to see where she's going out that night, what she'll be wearing, and what her interests are, so that your friend can better chat her up. Each piece of information that she shared seemed totally innocuous until you put it all together and use it to stalk her: it's scary how easy it is, and how totally plausible.

Game neatly sidesteps social networking horrors (Wired UK)

(Disclosure: My wife, Alice Taylor, commissioned Smokescreen for Channel 4)