Hi everyone! My GDC travelogue is still underway and should be ready for you to buy in just a couple more weeks — featuring the cover art work of someone I like a lot. It’s become a bigger, but hopefully a more interesting and broadly-relevant project than I first envisioned, aiming to show you the experience, people and stories that make traveling to events as a games writer some of the most beautiful and meaningful times in my life.

As for everything else I’ve been up to — and my first “let’s play”-type thing — !!

I’m now back in the States for a month or so, giving my grunge keynote at Different Games, speaking at Rensselaer Polytechnic’s GameFest, and keeping up on the news cycle — I examine both sides of the impassioned conversation on Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus, talk to a bunch of experts on the complicated big picture surrounding the Threes cloning controversy, and share a little about the curiously-humbled Epic Games that I met at GDC, talking about the new plan for Unreal Engine 4.

I’m also happy to share that I’ve decided to start experimenting with video, after a kind. My goal is that from now on, every Thursday, I’ll spend 15-20 minutes revisiting a classic Apple IIe/Apple IIGS game together with you, thanks to the magic of Virtual Apple, and upload it to YouTube.. To this day lots of people still say my “Gaming Made Me” column about Colossal Cave over at Rock Paper Shotgun is still their “favorite” piece of mine; the language of old, old computer games basically helped map my young brain, and I think doing some videos will be a fun way to revisit my path and talk about maps, childhood, faith, death, fear, text and all kinds of things.

Here’s my first attempt, recorded in the guest room at my parents’ Massachusetts house, where I’m crashing for a couple weeks — as time goes on I’ll learn to be more confident and to sort my audio out, but right now you’ll have to deal with me playing Death in the Caribbean kind of by ear, while my father alternately grumps at the (three) dogs and at the television every so often in the background. Hey, it’s immersive and authentic, or something. This is a game my dad taught me how to play, back when I was a little girl.

There’s a cryptoquote at the end of the video for you to solve. Hopefully via social media we can make this a crowdsourced, collaborative fun thing to do. Thanks for your patience, and I hope you enjoy!