Trolling for Leeches, Netting Moths & 4th of July Fireflies

My fireworks this 4th of July were following naturalists E. O. Wilson, Peter Alden and 150 others around with a video camera as they tried to identify at least 2009 species within the confines of Walden Woods – the towns of Concord, Carlisle and Lincoln, Massachusetts on Walden Biodiversity Day. We won’t know how many […]

Being There: the Game as Narrative

Narrative story telling has been part of the the human experience since we told tales of the days hunt around the fire, about what it was like to “be there” when this or that event happened. From that oral tradition, we learned to write them in pictures, then glyphs, and a succession of written languages and media […]

Spy vs. Spy

As a cold-war baby one of my favorite cartoon strips was Mad magazine’s Spy vs. Spy. That all flashed back to me a few years ago at the second Serious Games Summit in Crystal City, VA, just across the highway from the Pentagon. There, it didn’t take long to realize — with equal measures of […]