My parents bought my first video game system, an original Nintendo, over twenty years ago. I’ve been a passionate gamer ever since.
As you can imagine, that means I’ve seen a thing or two in the gaming culture. I’ve played FPS, RPG, RTS, action, adventure, sports, and MMOPRGs. I’ve spent a sizable amount of time in almost all the available genres and I’m ready to try something new.
I mentioned in an earlier post that I recently got an iPhone. Gaming has exploded on the device – with over a billion applications …

It occurred to me last evening, as I was paging through C.S. Lewis’s An Experiment in Criticism, that for some reason I was vastly enjoying the slim tome and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why. It wasn’t just Lewis’s clear and succinct prose, which I’ve always enjoyed for its ability to convey complex concepts in an understandable fashion, or even my overarching agreement with many of his observations on literature, many of which still seem relevant today, some fifty years after they were published.
No, it wasn’t …

I hate universes. Not the physical, star-filled, we-live-in-one kind, but the kind that spawns a bunch of books, movies, and other sequels.
When I was a kid I was a Star Wars fan. I loved the movies. I watched them over and over. I played the video games (Dark Forces, an early shooter, and X-Wing, a flight simulation), and read the books. Good god, did I read the books. Recently I returned to my parents’ house. While I was there, I wandered down to my old room and looked at the …