Thanks to everyone who’s been buying, sharing thoughts and Tweeting about my book, Breathing Machine. Lately I really loved this thoughtful review from Cassandra Phillips-Sears, and Boing Boing was kind enough to do a writeup also. I’m told there will be an official audiobook coming soon, so those of you who have been asking about that, stay tuned! No, it won’t be me reading it (I just did this little promo) — probably someone professional who doesn’t lapse into a weird hybridized mid-Atlantic accent, fortunately.

I’ve been pretty busy lately:

I have mixed feelings about game journalism prizes, but two of my favorite pieces from last year have been shortlisted for this award. The piece of mine people most commonly tell me is their favorite is this “Gaming Made Me” from Rock Paper Shotgun about Colossal Cave. If you’ve read Breathing Machine, you might recognize this article as a progenitor of the early chapter about ADVENT.

I got a very cool email from a game designer named Martin Zabel, about how my Colossal Cave piece helped inspire him to make a new game:

What you wrote there, about the cave being a mystery and the opacity of the text-interface supporting the impression that there is much more to the game-world than there actually was inspired me.

After actually visiting a cave myself, I designed a game that has a choose-your-own-adventure-style interface while generating its world like a roguelike, randomly and without much in the way of mercy. That way, there is almost always a portion of the cave that remains unexplored while the game is fully capable of surprising even me, the designer, or my friend Niels, the programmer of the project.

It sounds amazing and I can’t wait to play it. Best of all, it’s free. Just look at this!

My newest Edge column to come online is about how the reliable old list article helps expose something that troubles me about how we look at games, and how indoctrinated we are to slotting things in order of “best.”

The Flappy Bird debacle has been a lot of things: sad, funny, tiresome, frustrating, many of the things the game itself is. Here is a Tumblr collating a vast array of thinkpieces about Flappy Bird. Some people think the dialogue is wonderful; some people think the Tumblr is an example of “everything wrong with game journalism”. I think it’s good that the writing is as divisive as the game itself.

For my part, you must understand I couldn’t say no when asked to write this one: A piece comparing the arc of Flappy Bird to grunge and Kurt Cobain. It’s a little tongue in cheek, at least. Don’t take me too seriously.

Or take me super seriously, as you must do whenever I write about Nintendo. My latest opinion column at Gamasutra explores why fans seem to take the company’s fate and fortunes so seriously (it ends up being my own slightly melancholy exploration of my relationship to Nintendo, too). The commenters are currently discussing my Gamer Credentials.

A half-thought Tweet I tossed into the aether yielded some unexpected fun (for once!). I noted that “beat”, as in “beat a game,” seems to be a uniquely American concept; here in England, my friends say “finished” or “completed”. I wondered if there might be something to it, and I ended up collecting a range of responses all around the world, about how people in different countries talk about what they do to games in their language. It’s super interesting — check it out! Bonus: A Macedonian reader on my Facebook page says they refer to final bosses as “Queens”. AWESOME.

FINALLY, I was super excited to get to join Terminal7′s Netrunner podcast recently. I’ve been obsessed with Netrunner ever since I started learning to play it, and on the cast we talk about my favorite corporation, surveillance-house NBN; why someone like me, who hates card games, stuck to this one, and some of the backstory I imagine about my favorite cards.

If you want to learn more about Netrunner, check out this new Shut Up & Sit Down video where Quinns tries to teach Matt Lees to play. There’s an official tutorial linked there, too, in case saucy COMEDY BRITS don’t sell you on the game.