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(Via Rich Carlson.)

Ugh i'm on game aveyond 2 cannot beat snow queen i am stuck. Iya best spell is Warp song yes it sucks...well actually i CAN beat snow queen hepitus is the problem...:( Any ideas?

The iPhone App store is now carrying a nifty free version of Frotz.

Well, that was exciting... Apparently, our hoster, Galaxy Visions, was completely screwed by a lightning strike last night; from their email:

"Initially we were informed that the lightning had melted the transformer cables and they would need to be replaced at daylight however upon further inspection our facilities main transformer which was struck by lightning exploded and produced loss of power from Con Ed and at the same time disabling our generators. Our entire technical staff as well as electrical staff has been on site all night...

"We are in the process of having a new transformer craned onto our facility's roof and at the same time installing a redundant transformer if another act of god should happen in the future. This has been the longest outage in GalaxyVisions history..."

Which was why we were down for the day. Occasionally one is reminded that we still live in the phenomenological universe.

Traditional P&P and single player CRPGs suffer from a lack of dynamism within the players' party, especially during the early levels. A typical campaign starts with a weak fighter, unable to defeat much of anything, a weak thief who couldn't pickpocket a peasant, a mage who can barely light up a room, and maybe one or two other ineffective characters. I'm not aware of any RPG that doesn't start with an assortment of weak and powerless characters who are expected to struggle to survive in the most noobish places: the cave full of rats, or the alleyway full of thieves and rats.

Bejeweled. Not what I was expecting.

(Danny Ledonne forwarded this to me.)

A user on the Columbinegame.com forums posted this reflection today:

----------------------
prisoner416
Post subject: My Story (Or how I almost was a statistic)

I grew up with a lot of problems. I was hyperactive, and didn't fit in well socially. I was put on various medications, saw a lot of therapists, and was transferred to many schools.

The Execution/Fruit Mystery are two games that are minimally interactive and don't have any clear goals. A lot of people would say they're not games, perhaps more would say they're insolent, pretentious wastes of time. But I'm to experimental games as Jesus was to prostitutes, I like them even if I don't buy in.

I think trying to lasso a boundary of "game" and "non-game" is not very useful at all, maybe even harmful. What happens is you get things that are game-like but become classified as "non-games" in the affirmative, like how nothing can be something... man. Except they're not nothing, and they may have value to people outside the conventional audience.

What's ironic is that both of these games use procedural rhetoric that revolves around the meta-game experience, in other words instead of trying to use rules to make a point, they use a constraint about how you have to engage the game. For Execution, you're given one verb, execute, and then sort-of half-guilted for doing the only thing you could possibly do with it. For Fruit, it insults by default while your performance doesn't make a difference. (FTW, Fruit was kinda funny at the end.) It's really easy to say these are cheap cop-outs, one-offs that should be put in the dumpster and ignored after use, like disposable diapers. And maybe they should, I don't want that nasty diaper lying around.

But consider what they can teach us -- there's a dynamic outside of agency that gives meaning to interaction. This is kinda a running theme of mine, lots of games have been wholly focused on flowing agency, now we're seeing a bunch of games that are focused solely on meta-mental tricks, phantasm, whatever you want to call it. In the same way that you can dismiss a game for being generic, you can dismiss stuff like these for being artsy-fartsy, but the generic games provided and refined patterns that are straight smack math, useful to the future, and that principle works both ways.

I don't usually pick up Boingboing links, because I figure everyone in the known universe already knows about them, but this one is too cool.

Whenever anyone says something like "Bushnell's Pong started it all," someone else inevitably says "but what about Ralph Baer?", and someone inevitably tops that with a reference to Willy Higginbotham's Tennis for Two. (Except for me; I go for John Jeffery's A Journey Through Europe, but then I view digital games as merely an extention of an artistic form that has a deeper history.)

In truth, Higginbotham's game was a one-off, an outlier, an historical curiosity, and not particularly important to the evolution of the field except that it does has undeniable precedence. Still, how cool is it to find instructions on how to build your own with nothing more than an oscilloscope and a handful of of electronic components?

(And while you're at it, go play Spacewar! -- yes, Steve Russell's original PDP-1 code, running as written, inside a Java PDP-1 emulator -- quite a cute hat-trick.)

So, you may have noticed the lack of a tabletop tuesday review today. Yeah...

If there's anyone out there with a prolific knowledge of board games and indie RPGs, or hell, LARPs, we're all about having you come and write a review once or twice a month.