I met Joel Clark and Tavit Geudelekian in Joel's Bushwick loft. They were talking, as people so often do in these situations, about a work of great literature. Joel's well-worn copy of Moby Dick was on the coffee table, next to an Apple laptop. The computer was displaying images from the card game that they have developed based on the novel. It is called "Moby Dick, or, The Card Game."

They created the project with Andy Kopas, Mark Perloff, and John Kauderer. Today it went live for fundraising on Kickstarter, with a goal of $25,000. The game mechanics combine luck and skill, much like a 19th century whaling [...]

Back in the early 80s, the boom in arcades and entertainment made icons of the likes of Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and Q*Bert. The popularity and novelty of video games was great enough to produce a fair amount of peculiar cultural runoff. If you grew up then, you may or may not remember watching cartoon series based on the likes of Kangaroo and Space Ace, or raunchy arcade-set comedies like Hollywood Zap and Joysticks ("More Fun Than Games!"). Some dubious efforts to translate the excitement of playing video games into different mediums also happened, as seen with the ill-conceived board game above.

There was even a game show [...]

And here is something completely useless: a search engine for all 432,205 New York Times crossword clues since 1996.

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Here's my ESPN mag essay about Michael Vick & race. http://t.co/u3DRkAc I asked them not to call it What If Vick Were White but they did.Thu Aug 25 16:18:38 via Twitter for BlackBerry®TouréToure

How stupid are magazines? So stupid that the writers of the pieces for those magazines now tend to take to Twitter to denounce the packaging, headlining and illustration. (The illustration—Michael Vick whiteface—ESPN promptly removed; you can see it here.)

In any event, if you read the actual ESPN piece by Touré, [...]

By definition, being a quizmaster is about asking questions. As host of a live trivia game show, the Big Quiz Thing, I’ve spent the past eight years asking thousands of them—many good, some lousy. And in that time, countless others have approached me with questions and comments of their own—many good, some really, really stupid. Now that you’ve met the different types of people who play trivia, learn about some of the more amusing things people say to your esteemed host:

1. "I don’t know any trivia." Assuming you’re not a moron, this is nigh impossible. Everyone knows trivia, or at least a good quizmaster’s definition of trivia, which [...]

If you're like me, sometimes you're on a subway or plane ride thinking to yourself, "Oh man, I wish I could play a portable video game that has 3D effects not unlike the experience I had in the theater when I watched Avatar!" or, "Oh man, I could really go for a turkey sandwich from Torrisi right now!" Well, good news: the Nintendo 3DS now resolves at least one of those desires.

During the Sony Ericsson Open this last week, spring in Miami ended, hot storms blew in and then the pasty out-of-town visitors baked each day in the green bowl of the Crandon Tennis Center stadium. As they sat and reddened, the top three ranked men were left to play together in the three final slots.

As the sun slipped down in the penultimate men's game, Rafael Nadal, whose outfit features at least 12 visible logos (one on each side of each shoe; over the heart; the shorts; each wristband; the headband; and at least one on each sock), and who apparently cannot be provided with comfortable underwear by his sponsor [...]

The always-brutal Morning News Tournament of Books has begun. Blood will be spilled.

I finally read the Olbermann filing against his former employer, Current TV, because it's Friday and I needed a laugh. (PDF.) It's pretty dramatic and overly aggrieved and not that damning, but then all he's claiming is that contracts were breached; it's not like anyone punched him. On the plus side, at least Olbermann is represented by real lawyers—Patricia Glaser (who did well for Conan!) and litigator Jill Basinger. Among Olbermann's complaints: Olbermann was treated as if he was hired to be a puppet! Not literally, I guess, or this would be a much better read.

Remember Magic: The Gathering? It was a game very popular in the '90s, and if you were like me, you may have spent hours in your bedroom, the sounds of Nirvana or Soundgarden bouncing off the walls around you, flipping through your cards. But then it might have gotten too expensive (a pack of 15 cards went for something like five bucks then, which doesn't sound like much except you were 16, had virtually no income and always needed more, more, more cards to compete)—or maybe you just moved on. But if you didn't know, the game has been enjoying a recent resurgence, and if you need proof, you [...]

"In the 8-bit days, death meant losing all your character's attributes, all his jewels, coins, weapons and experiences. It was in some ways like real-life death (or maybe the Buddhist version of it.) You were forced to start over absolutely, from nothing. There was a certain Puritanical satisfaction in this hard reality, I must say. You must learn your lesson, the game's underlying message seemed to suggest. There is no free ride for you, not ever. (Human ingenuity being what it is, there were, and are, a number of ways to foil the unpleasant consequences of total 8-bit doom. For example, there's this gang of modern NES enthusiasts I [...]

Those who say clubbing baby seals is the cruelest activity imaginable have clearly never witnessed a group of "intellectuals" and/or "pop culture enthusiasts" try to work together in an evening of casual trivia at a local bar. With the right mix of hubris, self-doubt and pun-making, this simple game of knowledge can render an evening into a series of heated silences and hurt egos. (The only solution to which—or perhaps a cause in and of itself—is copious amounts of alcohol.)

But what makes trivia in particular socially taxing are certain traits that become manifest in our friends. Among them:

1. The friend who insists on using the same Ron [...]

The word “quale” is a noun. It comes from Latin, rhymes with Pixar’s robot, and means, most commonly, “the quality of a thing.” For instance: the particular redness of a particular McIntosh apple. According to the OED, this usage first appeared in 1675, then again in 1875, which, as far as I can tell, was also its last usage. Or it was, until a few weeks ago, when a friend of mine earned 32 points by playing the “e” on a Double Word Score in a game of the Scrabble-simulator “Words with Friends.”

More than ten million people have downloaded “Words with Friends,” and many others play similar versions: [...]

There was a slight chance we were being indoctrinated into a cult.

The night before, during a tough trivia night at the Pig and Whistle, my friend Michelle had scribbled a name and address on a cocktail napkin. “Go to 580 California Street, head up to the 16th floor and ask for the Jejune Institute.”1

“What is it?” I asked.

“I can’t tell you anything but that. Trust me, you’ll like it.” She saw me wavering. “It’ll take fifteen minutes. If you want to stop after that, you don’t have to do anything else.” And so with a few hours to kill on a rainy Saturday, my [...]

Diablo 3, a hack-and-slash role-playing game for the PC published by Blizzard (which also makes World of Warcraft), was released a month and a half ago. There was about a decade’s worth of anticipation from fans of the series who had profoundly nostalgic memories of late nights with Domino’s Pizza and cans of soda and Diablo 1 or 2 and a depressingly short AOL Instant Messenger buddy list.

Within 24 hours of Diablo 3’s May 15 release, about 3.5 million people had bought it, either that day or as a preorder. Many of them have been playing it obsessively since the release. But all is not well, because, [...]

I would like to use a stun gun on anyone who pronounces the word "expescially."

Professional Internet troll Katie Roiphe has been on a tear! (If you missed her pre-Christmas salvo, "We Like Rapey Movies Because They Help All of Us to Keep Thinking Of Ourselves as Victims Even Though None of Us Actually Are, Because Rape Is So Vanishingly Rare," well, enjoy!) Now for the new year she's back, with a column called "Turning Off the Internet Is Impossible but Even Though We Actually Can, Thanks to Cool Tools, But Really It Is Illusory, Because Our Very Minds Are Different Now, and We Will Live Only Inside the Internet Forever"! It's actually a weird plea about human helplessness, or her own [...]

A new iteration of our favorite casual game has just been released for Apple devices. (The original web version is here.) They've been working on this for some time, and to my mind, it suffers a bit from over-building. (They've crammed a lot into it! And in a sense there's too much but also too little: too many tricks to learn, and not even levels to try them out on.) But that being said, it's still pretty genius as straight-up puzzle activity, and it's also extremely handsome. And since there's nothing more shameful than playing Angry Birds on the subway—that's the cultural equivalent of blasting Huey Lewis on [...]

And here is an iPhone/iPad game called Hipster City Cycle, in which you ride your fixie through Philadelphia streets, eating cheesesteaks and being groovy, man. It's like a Farmville for the barely-employed set! But it addresses an important question in gaming now: do we really want to play games that so closely resemble our real lives? (Kidding.)

The email came with the subject line "SEMINAR ((nfltr8))." It purported to be from a group called the EPWA, a grassroots guerrilla group dedicated to overthrowing the Jejune Institute, an evil group of free-love pseudo-scientists who’ve been vying for control of San Franciscan minds since 1972. The email told me to report to the Institute's temporary offices in the Hyatt at the Embarcadero. There I was to swipe some mysterious objects called “BIOTIC-4CE GLOBES,” which I would find in a screening room. This task, the email said, was of the utmost importance. It was time to take down the horrific Jejune Institute once and for all.

So began [...]