Also in that box: Tetris, Dwarf Fortress, Minecraft. Many, many more. That's a pretty nice box.

There's been a few very interesting takes on this really old (in terms of how long games have been a field with discussion) argument in the past few weeks:

My favorites:
http://www.raphkoster.com/2012/01/20/narrative-is-not-a-game-mechanic/
http://whatgamesare.com/2012/02/the-narrative-vs-mechanics-circus.html

My personal take? I'm a grad student working on procedural narrative, hacking the cognitive loop of story building players go through during play. So... I agree with Jaffe? It's really much more of a slider than a dichotomy. In fact...
http://whatgamesare.com/2011/12/the-four-lenses-of-game-making.html
It's a way more broad than even a single slider. I'm not even sure that Kelly's 2d graph comes close to the rich diversity of experience that can be created though video games.

That many buzzwords and brand synergies concerns me greatly.

I

get

paid

by

the

line,

just

like

Dickens.

This is my religion.

Funny, I want to redo it again so I could drink a bit MORE and have better memories.

I name my servers after Greek gods (Hestia is the HTPC), my towers after titans (Themis is my gaming box), and portable devices after muses and other members of greek mythology. All my apple stuff is named after Japanese mythology and pop-culture (pretty much just my macbook Omoikane).

I wish. They said encrypted, and warned that they could be cracked. Not that there could be a collision, but outright cracked. I have no idea why it's not standard policy EVERYWHERE just to use hashes. I'm just glad they didn't store in plaintext.

The Epic forums got hit too, with usernames and encrypted passwords. At least, the UDK forums did, and I assume the Gears and other game-specific ones did too. Got the email about that today. At least they encrypted passwords, hopefully with a good salt.

Hopefully we get more rulings like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Lopez that restrict the scope of commerce clause justifications. To me, the commerce clause expansion isn't all bad - it's original invocations were in the support of the Sherman Anti-Trust act to break up the corporate run-arounds. Rather than have a multi-state iron processing cartel they create single-state subsidiaries that would only buy or sell to each other, reinstating a vertical monopoly over the steel market. Without using the commerce clause to apply a federal law to what was now a single-state problem, Anti-Trust practices in the early 1900's would have failed. That's not a good thing in my book.

>> Go west

You cannot go west, there is a closed door there

>> Open door

You open the door

>> Go west

Damn my lack of mod points. Can somebody lend parent a +1 insightful for me?

And traditionally, they get pay raises either way.

We should've changed our mascot to Nano the Robot when we had a chance. Something that won't make the other chess or debate teams laugh. (To those who don't go to UTD, we had a pep rally - for our chess team. Scholarships instead of football FTW)

Have you had chocolate sex? Worth it. Strawberry sex is kinda meh to me though.