“In an age when showy CEOs shout hubristic, trite predictions about the inevitable future of games, The Wii U offers an understated bravado that’s far more courageous. With it, Nintendo admits, “we don’t know either.” We don’t know what video games are anymore, or what they will become. It’s a huge risk, and it’s probably the most daring move Nintendo has made in its 125-year history. Domestication through polite ferocity. Feral design.”

– Ian Bogost, “Wii Can’t Go On, Wii’ll Go On“

Welp, my colleague Quintin Smith and I have just collaborated on probably the most let’s-call-it-experimental thing I’ve probably ever published. I describe the project here a little bit, but really, you should just go and read it.

…Probably?

Happy Thanksgiving!

[latest music recos: slightly late to naomi punk, which is shocking considering how cool it makes early grunge sound again — love this track best, i think. for spotify users, i have two recent mixtapes: this one is robust and eclectic, this one is for warm drinks, frozen leaves and early sunsets.]

Do you like video games? If so, you may already qualify for your dream job. That’s right: Games journalism, the art of writing about games in order to gain fame, prestige, and free copies of things. It can also be quite lucrative, so if you’re reading this, feel free to send your boss the kiss-off email you’ve been composing in your head for years. The rest of your life is about to begin now.

I’m just back from delivering a keynote at the Boston Festival of Indie Games’ first annual event! Hey look it’s me (thanks for the picture, Elliott)! While I was there, I did some lite recon on the Boston dev culture and community to find out how the locals feel about working there these days. Read my newest article: ‘In Boston, strong community means resilience in the face of change.’

I’ve been thinking a lot about community events lately; in my latest Creators’ Project column I write about some things designers I like are doing to foster public gaming and participatory events. One of the guys I wrote about is Hokra creator Ramiro Corbetta, who I just interviewed in some depth at Gamasutra about ways to encourage design that brings people together: Check out ‘Why indie games make meaningful spectator sports‘.

People have played with simple, timeless things forever — find me someone who doesn’t know how to play tic-tac-toe, and even if you can do that, bet you they can learn it in under five minutes. Minesweeper is one of those games I’d say has reached, or nearly reached, modern folk status as far as being (along with Solitaire) a continuous feature of the PC experience. Read my new piece, Reinventing Minesweeper: It was almost purple, about how Microsoft has tapped a NY-based company to bring those classics up to date. Like, where do you even begin? How has the “casual”  audience changed?

Speaking of playing together in person, I went to Nintendo’s Wii U event. I’m still getting used to saying “Wii U.” Don’t like to say it, so I keep saying “Nintendo’s new thing.” Can’t help but think of how much we laughed at how the word Wii would never take off, right before the word Wii proceeded to be something that everyone understands to mean a Nintendo game console.

It looks like a fun thing you can play on your couch. With your girlfriend, because girls are shit at video games. Obviously I’m messing with you, but you can read my new article on “Girlfriend Mode” — a firm did a study that suggests controversial name conventions can actually be extremely useful in selling people totally reasonable and cool features.

Coincidentally, two pieces I’ve done relating to nostalgia and childhood memory have come online at about the same time. You might know I do a column in Edge magazine, and then a couple months after those hit newsstands the columns come online. Wasn’t that long ago that my last one, about how the way we cover and examine games needs to grow up, was generating some discussion on Twitter, which, by the way, I very much appreciated following!

I guess it makes sense to follow a discussion on looking ahead with one about looking back. Here, I discuss the important role nostalgia plays in both writing about and creating games. At the same time, today’s column at Gamasutra takes the idea a step further: While ultimately languishing in terminal adolescence and obsessing on the memory of what little boys used to like is one of the greatest forces holding games back, there exist some clear examples of how a selective and insightful relationship with our childhood memories can actually create more timeless and universal games.

It’s the idea of “intelligent nostalgia” — what to keep from our valuable past and what to let go of.

Despite the degree to which Formspring once exhausted me, I’ve experienced a temporary leave of my senses and opened my page up again. Fielding questions on there has let me know how much some of you miss having regular posts here at this blog, an occupation I’ve let lie since May of this year.

I stopped blogging here for a couple obvious reasons: I’ve been short on time, and now that I’m full-time freelance (editor-at-large at Gamasutra, and making contributions to other sites in the rest of my time) I need every last idea spark I can get to develop work across the platforms I serve. If it’s worth pestering you about here, it’s probably worth formalizing into something I can actually sell.

That never stopped me from blogging before, since I always thought it was important to have a one-stop repository that connects me to the people that read my work. But I’ve gotten so active on social media platforms that there’s always a home for people who want to follow me: I promote links and discussion on Twitter, have a Facebook page for people who prefer to get links and to comment there, and I even have a Google+ page if you hate Twitter and Facebook.

But a lot of people have been telling me they wish I still updated here, and if that’s what you want I’m gonna try to do that, at least until I get a proper website, an ambition I’ve kind of fruitlessly cultivated for a couple years now.

It was also nice of you guys to ask on Formspring about memep00l, sort of my first actual experiment into writing any kind of fiction in public. I’m into the social media format and am very pleased that some people care about the narrative so far. I’ll be catching up on that soon.

I’ve also been spending time with another first-for-me — I’ve always wanted to learn to do interactive fiction, since I’m such a big fan of it. I’m very slowly teaching myself Inform 7 using Aaron Reed’s excellent book, and in the meantime I thought I’d explore interactive writing using a simpler tool that lets me experiment with how to structure story and choices.

I have been enjoying playing with Inklewriter (thought I’d give it a try after writing about it here) — incidentally, it has a Future Voices competition closing in just a few days if anyone wants to try and slip an entry in under the wire. I seem to struggle with finishing large projects, but hopefully I will have a little “game” to show one of these days soon.

More recently, I’ve done an editorial on whether there’s a conflict between telling complex stories — that might not have neat or nice endings — and the player’s desire to win. Would love to know what you think. I also went in-depth with FarmVille 2‘s head designer on whether the game addresses some of the chronic and fricative design problems I’ve seen with Zynga games in the past.

Aside from that, I attended an art exhibit about cats with money, which sent me musing at Boing Boing on internet cat culture and classism.

I have loads going on in the coming weeks, as per usual, I guess, but I’ll give blogging more a shot. Thanks for everything, everyone!