Although I’ve played way too many games for way too many hours over the way too many years I’ve been writing these histories, it’s safe to say that I haven’t spent more time with any one game than Heroes of Might and Magic II. Partly this was down to circumstance. Heroes II showed up on the syllabus just as I was embarking on one of my periodic digressions, a long series about international communications networks and how they culminated in the World Wide Web. Without the need to write in detail about a new game every fortnight, I was freer than I usually am just to play whatever I felt like playing. And what I felt like playing at that time was Heroes II. I beat every single Heroes II scenario in my Heroes of Might and Magic Millennium Edition set, some alone, some in multiplayer mode with my wife Dorte, who became almost as obsessed as I was. I must confess that my usual rule of no more than two hours of gaming per day was strained at times, shattered completely at others. But we were still in the midst of the pandemic then and there wasn’t much else for me to do with my free time, so I figured it was okay to set self-discipline aside for a while. Maybe it was even good experiential research, in that it re-familiarized me with that strange hungover feeling you get when you’ve spent hours and hours peering into an imaginary world behind your monitor screen — like butter that’s been scraped over too much bread, to steal a phrase from Tolkien. (For what it’s worth, I’ve found that the best cure for this condition is the same as that for a conventional hangover: a long walk in nature.)
Moving Forward from Hot Fable Summer
Suggestions on how to move forward on the craziest 90 days in cyber and AI history.
Temporarily Offline
A slightly unerving game on technological violence induced by pseudosimplicity and increasingly awful UI.
» The Life and Times of Maxis, Part 3: The Sims The Digital Antiquarian
I don’t think people realize how much tactical and strategic forethought goes into their daily lives. There’s a whole subconscious time-efficiency layer in our lives. In essence, real-time strategy is our lives.
Resonite
A novel digital universe with infinite possibilities. Whether you resonate with people around the world in a casual conversation, playing games and socializing. Or you riff off each other when creating anything from art to programming complex games, you'll find your place here.
Aesthetic Deception
I Fed the People Building the Metaverse
On AI, male ego, and other reasons I no longer believe technology is magic
Jevons Paradox: A personal perspective
What if the most game-optimal play in the new system is actually to become relentlessly, unapologetically you?
Designing Games to Learn
As I've been writing this series of newsletters on learning and video games, there's been a spectre lurking in the background. Video games and education. Edutainment.
» How Jordan Mechner Made a Different Sort of Interactive Movie (or, The Virtues of Restraint) The Digital Antiquarian
One can learn much about the state of computer gaming in any given period by looking to the metaphors its practitioners are embracing. In the early 1980s, when interfaces were entirely textual and graphics crude or nonexistent, text adventures like those of Infocom were heralded as the vanguard of a new interactive literature destined to augment or entirely supersede non-interactive books. That idea peaked with the mid-decade bookware boom, when just about every entertainment-software publisher (and a few traditional book publishers) were rushing to sign established authors and books to interactive projects. It then proceeded to collapse just as quickly under the weight of its own self-importance when the games proved less compelling and the public less interested than anticipated.
Games Done Quick's Long, Difficult Journey To A Better Gaming Future
Progress isn't linear, and there are no skips or shortcuts
the chronically online will become a new underclass
