One of the reasons I left the world of daily media is that you so rarely get to tell interesting stories about people. Instead, our little snippets and stories paint an incomplete profiles. To wit, this short vignette of Vin Diesel is entirely unexpected: The question, though, is why is this unexpected? It’s easy to […]
A Dungeons and Dragons game breaks out in the comments section. It gets surprisingly realistic., via Reddit If you haven’t spent any time on Reddit, it’s a difficult community to explain. Suffice it to say, you enter at your own risk and you are many times rewarded with pure genius. This thread was exactly our […]
Big Bang Theory’s Kunal Nayyar: Raj Has to “Tackle His Own Demons” for Lucy, via TVGuide.com The portrayal of Dungeons & Dragons on television has almost universally been as shorthand to establish that the characters are socially awkward. It’s sloppy writing but when you’re trying to cram jokes and plot into 22-minutes, backstories fall by […]
I’ve grown quite fond of fan films throughout the years, particularly clever shorts. “Reality Forgotten” is one that is more clever than film, and anyone who has ever played D&D will recognize this particular scenario. Author Jack Vance Passed Away Author Jack Vance, who had a profound impact on Dungeons & Dragons, passed away. Here […]
Twelve years ago, I wrote a short 3-part series at Wired.com that focused on the disconnect between Appalachia and emerging technologies, particularly broadband access and high-tech business development. The crux of the issue was that rural counties far away from the national highway system had nearly no access to universal high-speed broadband coverage, which meant […]
As John and I grow closer to finishing up the Second Edition, we’ll be writing more on the blog. Instead of rehashing our work and discussing the elements that are new, we thought it would be more interesting to talk about emerging trends in today’s world that mirror a bit about what we wrote about […]
One of the themes we explored in Dungeons + Dreamers was the computer game designers attempt to graft the real-world interactive and communal experience of paper gaming with the virtual world experience. This is a powerful idea because virtual spaces remove geography and time from experience. When you remove those two elements from an experience, […]
Video Games: The Movie I just came across this Kickstarter campaign to help fund the post-production for this documentary on video games: I’ll be donating to the cause on June 1, and you should consider it as well. I never grow tired of hearing designers and developers discuss how they made games. However, I look […]
This Sunday, I’m packing up my car and heading east to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which is the home of American gun making. The reason: before the Bakers settled in Clay County, Kentucky, the family lived in Lancaster, where they helped make the Pennsylvania Rifle (also known as the Kentucky Rifle or the hog rifle). According to […]
A few years ago, it seemed as if the MMORPG world had passed Richard Garriott by. He’d had two rather contentious breakups with corporations, Electronic Arts and NCSoft, and he seemed more interested in pursuing his dream of going to outer space. Two years ago, Garriott re-emerged at the SXSW Accelerator, an event I emcee […]
As John and I work not so feverishly on the second edition of the book, we received a pleasant surprise from the guys behind Dungeons & Dragons: A Documentary. They were kind enough to ask us to participate in the project, and we were stoked enough to say “YES!” We spent three hours talking about […]
In 2001, John and I were approached by McGraw Hill with a book idea that explored the research behind video games and violence. As fate would have it, we were nearly finished with a proposal about games and communities. While we rejected the idea of a book based on violence, we did include a chapter […]