Gaming Without Going Over The "highest-bid-without-going-over" mechanic in The Price Is Right is ultimately a way to turn a lower variance game of skill into a higher variance game of chance. FIGHT ME.
Gaming Of Witchers and Child Soldiers Throughout the Witcher series, especially in the earlier anthologies and the video games, Geralt makes the claim that he no longer has proper emotional responses because of the mutagens and potions the witchers fed him as a child. As readers, I think we’re supposed to be skeptical of this
Programming Flappy Bird in Super Mario World When you understand how processors work and how to write assembly code, you can do some truly extraordinary things.
Gaming Bath Salts + Iron Man + Illegal Weaponry In Fallout 4, power armor, a heavily modded combat shotgun, and a dose of psycho jet makes for one hell of a problem solver.
Gaming Hail Mary Tonight, I played Arkham Horror for the first time. I got to play a nun with a two-handed sword.
Gaming Me IRL Fuck, man. Everything. I push buttons. I turn dials. I read numbers. Sometimes I make up little stories in my head about what the numbers mean. This screenshot from Fallout: New Vegas is one of the best descriptions I can offer of what it feels like to be a data
Gaming What Sex Feels Like There's no feeling in Magic quite like casting Rite of Replication (with the kicker) targeting Master of Waves. (Total of 96 elementals in play that were 6/5s.)
Gaming Representation Matters It may seem dumb to some of you, but the ability to play as one of my female soldiers in MGS5 really improves the experience for me. I like being able to see myself in my digital avatar, and it feels very empowering to see a woman being treated as
Gaming An Important Update Somewhere along the way, the Mass Effect universe has become one of my most favorite sci-fi properties. For a while now, I've told anyone who will listen to my fevered nerd gushings that I consider it second only to Star Trek, and honestly, I feel like the two might actually
Gaming Prediction One of my favorite time-killing past-times is hitting the middle prediction in SwiftKey on my phone to see what it comes up with. For many months, it was "I think I'm going to pass on this." Now, it has shifted to "I just got the card sleeves
Gaming Teenage Girls Are Playing Video Games. You Just Might Not Hear Them. About a quarter of the girls who play video games do play online at least once a month. Unlike boys who play video games online, however, teenage girls tend to turn off their mics. Only 28 percent of the girls who play video games online use voice chat to talk
Gaming Shared Digital Experiences So I'm sitting here at work, and suddenly found myself thinking about this point that Jerry Holkins from Penny Arcade made a few years back. I think that what happens is that, when you get, you know, enough people together who have a huge bank of shared experiences—now those
Gaming Bioware Trash I have been playing Bioware games since Baldur's Gate, and Mass Effect is one of my top two favorite sci-fi universes. If "Bioware trash" is a thing, I most definitely belong in that particular garbage can. Why BioWare’s games inspire a unique kind of fandom by Sam
Gaming Shots Fired Yesterday, I got tired of sitting in front of my computer. Conveniently, I've got my computer set up so that it can easily display to my TV. I got out my Xbox 360 controller, sat down on the couch, and fired up Fallout 3, a game I had previously only
Gaming Whoresons Don't Use Turn Signals I've been reading the Witcher books and playing the first Witcher game, and I feel like it's really only a matter of time until someone cuts me off in traffic and I lash out verbally, declaring him to be a "whoreson".
Gaming Every Day I'm Shuffling Since I only have one and half thumbs, I find it impossible to do a standard riffle shuffle of cards. In most games requiring card shuffling, I usually just give my cards to Allyson to shuffle on my behalf. When I started playing Magic, I needed to find a better
Gaming Intersections When GamerGate comes up in parts of the Internet that I enjoy and people start saying angry and hateful things about feminism and "social justice warriors," it makes me feel uneasy about even calling myself a gamer, even though I've been actively playing video games since I was
Gaming Banned and/or Restricted The latest Magic: The Gathering bans for modern lead me to believe that Wizards of the Coast would like modern to have more variance. That's a valid design choice. Both Birthing Pod and Dig Through Time provided card selection for very low costs, rewarding skilled players disproportionately. As an avowed
