I want to announce a new personality trait: I'm bad at strategy games ( Read more... )

Well, I've given up nethack for the time being. Cold turkey, since I don't seem to be able to manage any other way. I stand by everything I said about it being an excellent game that teaches good habits of mind and strong character. But I've been playing it too compulsively, just spending too much time on it. I've always been prone to going ( Read more... )

Last month I ordered a Rock Band set. I've been having a lot of fun with it! The game is a wonder of interface design. It's got Karaoke Revolution, Drum Mania, and two instances of Guitar Hero all running on the same screen, plus diagnostics for the band as a whole, and it isn't even cluttered. And of course it's hell of fun to play with all your ( Read more... )

Anybody remember this?


( Read more... )

I've started playing backgammon on Yahoo games. It's so slow and the interface is so bad that there's little chance I can waste hours on it the way I did with GNUbg. But the way it's turning out is that I'm unlikely to waste time on it because it makes me feel like I'm stupider than dirt and reduces me emotionally to the level of a tantruming child ( Read more... )

I used to waste time when I was supposed to be working -- that is, when I was trying to work but too anxious to keep my mind on it --by playing weboggle or sudoku. Later I graduated to backgammon, which is more intellectually interesting but even more compulsive. Eventually I uninstalled backgammon. After a while, I decided I was doing better with ( Read more... )

contentlove linked to http://freerice.com , one of those sites that redirects pay-per-pageview ad revenue to charity. But this one actually rocks ( Read more... )

I don't like being responsible for ruined careers, so I don't usually link to flash games. But the more I play this one, the more extraordinary it seems:

Tontie
(warning: extremely hard without a numeric keypad)

It's a whack-a-mole game from the inventor of Grow (also Grow Cube, Grow RPG, Grow Nano...). The game itself isn't amazing, though it is ( Read more... )

On saturday, I was looking for a way to procrastinate, so I opened up the backgammon game that came with my computer and learned to play. I soon realized that the AI was extremely weak, and that the interface was too clumsy to let me play as quickly as I wanted ( Read more... )

I want to run a study where people try a task, are really bad at it to start with, and then have an opportunity to improve by watching someone who's good at it. I'm thinking about using a puzzle or video game ( Read more... )