Or like an improvised play. Or like a half-written thriller novel, where you're trying to work out how it might have ended. Depends who I'm trying to explain it to, and why.

I got a job once because on the interview form, where it said to state an achievement I was most proud of, I listed a 3.5 year RPG campaign that I wrote from scratch, designed the system for and GM'med every episode on a weekly basis. When they asked me about it, I explained how this involves system design, small-team leadership, group discussion and input, fast reactions to new data and events, and a huge amount of thinking on one's feet.

What I didn't mention were the puns that could stun at 20 paces; laughing so hard that it felt like God herself had opened the top of my head and kissed my naked brain; and the ability to reduce grown men and women to genuine laughter and tears with a handful of pencilled notes on a piece of paper.

What I couldn't mention is that some things grow out of these adventures organically, and there exists no way to describe them to outsiders. There is too much context required, and you know their eyes would glaze over long before you reached the punchline. There are only a handful of people on this planet who will ever understand why: "Range to target?" "B flat!" is funny, or grok what we meant by "Warm up the anthrax cannons, the main speakers, and the rotisserie!", or know why the cry of "Death from above!" is *always* followed by the line "Chocolates from Switzerland!". And that's as it should be.

I'll never understand why anyone would care about the outcome of a game that they didn't have money riding on; the mundanes will never understand why we never stopped telling ourselves stories.

As many people have pointed out, a flying car is a bad amalgam of two vehicles that are designed to do very different things. There are a number of other alternatives for personal flight that keep popping up and just as quickly, being shut down. The Williams X-Jet, the Solotrek, the GEN H-4 personal helicopter and a handful of others that 5 minutes Googling would uncover. These are designed as point-to-point VTOL transport, suitable for short to medium range flights, and all run on standard engines, and standard fuel.

Personal flight is a game-changer. The powers that be don't really want it changed. It's not physics, engineering or fuel efficiency that's stopping it from happening - all those problems have already been solved. The only problem is people. Specifically, the people in charge. It doesn't matter how cheap this kit gets, or how safe and efficient, Joe Public will not be allowed to have one. Taxes and licences (and hardcore punishments for not having one...) will keep people earthbound, because no government on earth could cope with its people being given the freedom of the 3rd dimension. Borders and passports would become archaic reminders of a time when you used to have to ask permission from your government to be allowed to travel around. There would be diasporas from cities as people became able to live miles out of town, without the commute being an issue on narrow country roads.

Fully-functional personal flight devices - flying cars, if you like - already exist, and can cost no more than a luxury car (Gen H-4 for $60K), but the chances of you ever getting off the ground in one are slim. Red tape will keep them down much more effectively than gravity.

by Nigel Kneale of Quatermass fame. 30 years before it actually happened he nailed the whole concept of reality television. Only a B/W print survives due to the BBC being a cunch of bunts, but it almost works better that way. I've seen shooting stills, and the 1968 day-glo colours on everything might make it look dated. The shots of the sniggering proles when it all starts to go pear-shaped are still disturbing to this day.

Most depressing story I ever read, I can't remember the title of - maybe someone can help. Short story, being written from the point of someone who is Atoning. What is she Atoning for? Well, humanity found this abandoned world. All beautifully laid out, slightly odd architecture, but ready for humans to just move in. And food in abundance, with the most delicious vegetables. Who turn out to be the inhabitants, who go dormant every so often, like 17-year locusts. They wake up to find this strange alien race camped out on their planet, chowing down on their unborn children. Worse than that, they're such an advanced species, they forgive us. We weren't being evil, just very stupid. So the human race Atones by returning parts of their body to the biosphere of the world, and the reveal is that this person is largely artificial now, because she'd been on-world for so long, that she was mostly composed of local proteins.

Cracking story, totally alien aliens, and the idea that we hadn't invaded, or attacked, we'd just buggered up the evolution of an entire species that would take generations to fix, because we got it horribly wrong.

I'm sick of games using a colour palette muted to the point where a state-of-the-art game contains black, grey and 18 shades of brown.

Spec Ops: The LIne balances stunning opulence against desert ruins, but even the desert has more colours than Rage managed in the entire game.

Too many devs seem to think that colourful=cartoony, so you only get Ratchet and Clank games that actually remember your TV can actually do red, green and blue as themselves. And too many devs would rather put all the effort into extra textures and lighting, rather than using it to handle more realistic environments. I want more cars in GTA V, not just higher-res versions of the earlier ones. I want to be able to shoot out the tyres and every window, not have it be a hyper-detailed texture applied to a rolling brick.

Do many of these devs not do beta-testing? If a level is incomprehensible within the canon of the game - you designed it wrong..

Good acting is expensive. Good plotting is complex. Game-makers have limited resources. Most developers seem to want to put more effort/time/money into polishing the shiniez than producing an elegant story. Probably because the reviews will slate them solidly if the game looks a bit ropey, but weak acting, plot etc. gets much less abuse.

I was put off ever playing Heavy Rain when I learned that there's only one killer. What are you going to do - play it twice and act surprised at the ending? I'm sure it would have been technically possible to set the game up so in each new game the killer was any one of a number of possible suspects, but the amount of plot-tracking that would require means it didn't make it into the finished game.

Some games do an excellent job of combining story and plot (which aren't the same thing). Half-Life and its sequels all have a very simple plot - escape, but the story of how you go about it is beautifully detailed. Both Witcher games do an amazing job, in that the consequences of your actions aren't always visible until much, much later. Mass Effect 1 had a good try, and all the Geneforge games have huge, rich backstories running through them. But the player should drive the story, not just be subjected to large arbitrary chunks of it for no reason as in MGS4.

Video games have the same capacity for storytelling as any other entertainment medium, but the producers have to be prepared to pay for it on creation, and the public have to be prepared to pay for it on delivery.

If they've upgraded the game engine significantly, opened up the world (or at least removed the artillery insta-death wall around all the levels), and made the enemy take wounding damage and react accordingly, then yes, that's a distinct improvement over previous iterations of the franchise. If it's just what amounts to a map pack for the same engine with a short-ass totally linear single-player campaign bolted on, then it's Doom with extra shiniez and they can go phuq themselves.

I'm going to use my awesome psychic powers here to predict that it's a map pack with a 10-hour campaign bolted on, and a handful of obscure weapons added to the multiplayer. Because that's much, much cheaper than actually doing any work.

Most games companies (excluding Valve) are no longer in the business of providing top-quality entertainment. Their job now is to figure out precisely how little they can give you, and how much they can charge you, before you finally vote with your wallet and go somewhere else. You know that if the game makers came up with a 16-hour campaign, the publishers would release an 8-hour campaign, and 2 x 4-hour DLC.

I haven't bought anything in the last 6 months that wasn't on Steam. Still working through Arkham City, Psychonauts, Serious Sam 3, Braid, Rock of Ages, and Assassins Creed. I don't need or want to buy any new games at $70 or UKP equivalent - I'll just wait until they show up on Steam in a year for half that.

1998, 2002, 2007, 2011. Some upgrades - 1998 was 400MHz CPU and 64M RAM with a 12M Voodoo 2. 2011 was 6-core Phenom 2, 8G RAM and 1G 6870. All built as gaming rigs in their time. But if you build it right, it lasts a while. They're not impulse purchases. Once every 4-5 years, just replace everything. Can't be arsed trying to do partial upgrades and squeeze another few fps out of a system that's just not up to it.

And if you just want to read your email, a smartphone will do in a pinch, but a tablet will do fine. Practically anything on the market will do it - doesn't need to be a top-of-the-range iPad. So only gamers are buying PCs. Businesses aren't - we have 5 year old machines in the office that still run XP and Office just fine. We don't need multi-core setups and uber-gfx cards to do Powerpoint and Excel. We have no upgrade plans for at least 3 years and we'll probably completely leapfrog Win7 when we do. PCs got 'good enough' a while back - no wonder the market's flattened out.

I played with steam engines as a kid. I made miniature hot-air balloons, with candles and large thin paper bags. I rebuilt car and bike engines as an adult, because I understand how these things work. I don't understand electrons. I don't really know how my PC works - I built it, but it was just a question of assembling the components in the proper order and loading up a ton of software that someone else wrote. When it goes wrong, my only usual recourse is to switch off and on again, and in severe cases, re-install Windows.

I think a lot of the appeal of steampunk is that people do understand it - dirigibles, semaphore, steam and diesel engines are things you could explain to any educated person of the last few hundred years in a few minutes. Mobile phones might as well be magic boxes to 99% of the people who carry them around - Clarke's Law has kicked in with a vengeance.

Read the first issues of the comic - kudos to the creator for trying, but it wasn't very good.

Watched the first episode of the TV series, which was just utter shit. An inherent problem with zombie-based plots, is that no-one in them is allowed to have ever seen a zombie film, read a zombie comic, played House of the Dead etc. So they act stupid, which gets them killed, and if you're acting stupider than a zombie, that's pretty damn stupid. The hero finds a perfect location - a police station with its own generator, hot water supply, a supply of guns and ammo, and the closest thing to an actual fortress that you'll find in a modern city. Eminently defensible. So he leaves after taking a shower. And wanders among the zombies wearing a short-sleeved shirt. At which point, I lost all interest in the doings of anybody so retarded. He might as well have doused himself in steak sauce, shoved a sprig of parsley up his arse and laid down next to a sign reading Welcome To The All-You-Can-Eat Fuckwit Buffet.

Although you'd think zombies would be the perfect enemies for a video game, (no remorse about killing something already dead), few have been any good. Dead Rising could have been excellent, were it not for the fact that weapons broke so easily. Have you ever tried to break a crowbar? Dead Island was just appalling, and Left for Dead is ok, if you have a group of decent players, as the bots are not overly bright. It also feels a little odd - computer-controlled NPCs vs computer-controlled zombies - kinda feels like you could leave the machine on, not pick up a controller, and the game would play away quite happily without you. Not exactly the sense of total immersion I want in a game.

OMG, does this mean I can now run Crysis at 80fps instead of 75? F**k me sideways with a spastic badger, my life is now complete.

Why does anyone care that the two major card makers are still in their dick-waving war? Is it just to keep the review sites in business? Hey, look, another new top-of-the-range GFX card, not totally dis-similar to the one we reviewed last month, only we got it for free, and you'll have to part with some serious wedge if you want to have the same toys as the cool kids!

There have been no real, serious differences between any of the last dozen iterations of hardware. Anything made in the last couple of years should run any game on the market at full shiniez at decent resolution. It won't, sadly, make the gameplay any better.

Why would anyone want to play in the SW universe, if you're not going to be a Jedi? Lightsabers are cool, using the Force to do stuff is cool - everything else in the SW universe is generic space fantasy. Nothing wrong with any of it per se, but no more or less interesting than any one of a dozen other 'realities' you might choose for your gaming experience. If I'm being a bounty hunter, running fetchquests, then is it going to make the game any better if it's using some of the SW names for things? Doesn't it just devolve into Shadowrun-lite?

Actually, I have to admit, I'd love to see them do a Clone Wars game - either in the Genndy Tartakovsky cel-shaded style or the CGI style - both had their merits and were largely superior to the second trilogy. Just as long as I get to name my astromech droid RU12.

except maybe if you're on a James Cameron-level budget. The opening scenes of Avatar and the flight scenes in Apollo 13 are the only time I've ever seen anyone try and do zero-G realistically. One with a lot of CGI and wirework, the other by filming on a vomit comet. Don't want to do that? Then you have to say you've got some form of artificial gravity, to explain why the people are walking around, almost exactly as though they were at 1G. And artificial gravity is a real game-changer.

Don't want warp drive? Then you're stuck in one system, because space is big. Or the whole crew has to go into cryo-sleep for decades at a time to get anywhere. This latter could actually be fun in a TV series, where halfway through the first season, they celebrate the thousandth anniversary of leaving Earth, and realise that by the time they get home, entire civilisations will have risen and fallen.

Don't want aliens? Then humans and the environment are going to have to be the hostile forces. This can work - the RGB Mars trilogy does it well enough, but the books are a bit slow, and any adaptation would have to trim a lot out to get a watchable film into a couple of hours.

I remember being quite disappointed a while back - watching some astronauts working on the ISS on NASA TV. I've been a geek since I was even slightly sentient - I was 4 when Armstrong landed on the moon, and the first word I ever learned to write was 'zero' as it was the word that launched spaceships. So I was a bit peeved to find that watching real astronauts, working EVA on the real space station, was actually boring as hell after the initial 'Wow, they're on a space station!' had worn off. It was just some guys doing careful, methodical work, and being *really* careful not to drop their tools.

Loads of games have done bits of it. Just Cause 2 has a huge set of islands and total free-roaming anywhere within the map. Fuel has some insane amount of terrain (just wiki'd - 5,560 square miles!) because it does it with procedural generation. Red Faction has had destroyable terrain since the first game. Hydrophobia Prophecy modelled water physics correctly, because so much of the game involves using it to solve problems. Crysis did beautiful-looking foliage. Soldier of Fortune did hit location.

But so many games still can't be arsed to do it right, so things in the environment aren't things, they're lumps of terrain with a picture skin. Cars on which you can't shoot out the tyres. Or the windscreen. NPCs your gun won't shoot at, or won't hurt if you do. Glass that doesn't break, wood that doesn't burn, and magic invisible walls at the edge of the world. Or in the case of the Battlefield games, a magic invisible line with artillery insta-death just 5 seconds away if you dare to cross it.

Ramping up the triangle count just doesn't cut it any more. Yes, the face in the video is very clever - what happens when I shoot it? The water's lovely - does it make ripples when I walk through it, or splash when I jump up and down? The AI might well react to my presence - how will it react to a 9mm to the kneecap? Or a fire? Or a rocket going off 10 feet away? Are NPC soldiers all inhuman combat robots, totally unafraid of death, and 100% combat effective until their last hit point is gone?

Because, you know, I've played Doom. A super-shiny version of the exact same gameplay no longer appeals. I know there were restrictions on game design caused by having less memory for the game than my current CPU has cache. All the right things have been done at least once. Now could someone just please do them all together?

Take the guns away from the men and give the pills to the women. Accept the fact that it's going to take a couple of generations to stabilise, and there is no quick fix. In many places, the problems seem to be not poor soil, or lack of rain, but the fact that around harvest time, some asswipe rolls up in a jeep with a bunch of his buttboys and helps himself to whatever he fancies.

Accept the ugly truth that inter-uterine and infant malnutrition can directly and permanently affect brain growth. Unlike many other parts of the body, which seem able to recover, if sufficient food is presented later, the brain doesn't seem to recover. Entire areas have been hit by famine, whether caused by weather conditions or the janjaweed militia, and the damage is clear and permanent, and won't go away overnight no matter how much food you ship in.

With no appropriate infrastructure, a lot of aid ends up wasted, damaged, or just diverted to whichever local asswipe has the most guns. Aid needs to be specific. I saw a TED talk on the amazing water-purifier bottle - he scooped up some filthy muck, gave it a couple of pumps, and out came pure water. A truckload of those in the right place would probably do some good. I also remember hearing about a village where the thing that made the most difference to their food supply was teaching the local craftsman to make catapults. The local monkeys would help themselves to the crops and they lost around 30% of their crop each year. They gave the local boys catapults, so they could hit the monkeys with stones without getting too close. The problem cleared right up, as the monkeys learned that going anywhere near the fields got them nothing but a sharp stone at high speed.

The problems are not insurmountable, but they are huge in scope. Getting people to give a shit for extended periods of time might be the largest challenge of all.

and can probably prove it with an Etch-A-Sketch and 5 minutes of my time, but I can't take any of this stuff seriously. I listen to MP3s and they sound great to me. I listen to them on the bus, on the train, on my bike, in the city, all on standard earbuds, and it all sounds like it's supposed to.

It's just that after reading the absolute pure f**king snake-oil that some of the component manufacturers put out about their products in a vain attempt to justify charging ten grand for a pair of *wires*, as soon as anyone starts getting needlessly technical about audio, it all sounds like yet more snake-oil.

And so I end up grouping terms like lossless and FLAC and AAC with counter-spiral geometry, which is apparently why Audioquest can charge a thousand dollars a foot for a f**king power cable.