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.