Games

I had the pleasure of running a brief summer seminar for the online private school I’ve contracted with the last five years. It was a total of six sessions spread across three weeks, each only thirty minutes. The topic was Choose Your Own Adventure, and the handful of kids sure did exactly that. My intention was for them to create a second-person narrative in Google Slides, allowing them to easily link to different scenes within the deck. It’s a low-effort way to begin that narrows the focus on the mechanics of their story. We would have planning time, some writing time, some revision time, and cap it off by getting a quick demo of whatever they had made. We loosely followed that core plan, but what the students chose to create during this time was all over the place in the best way. ...

Hey, Pokémon Go. Yeah, I’m talking to you. Come on over here, I have something to say. Look, you’re a good game. I like you and your whole deal. Walking around, catching Pokémon, getting outside with friends, creating fun styles for my trainer. It’s all great. But I’ve hated this since the first day. The Rattata wasn’t just caught. It didn’t happen to walk sidelong into the waiting maw of a Pokéball that was hanging around in the air. ...

I enjoy hosting trivia, and have now done so twice over Zoom for a core group of friends back in San Francisco. I thought I had shared the first batch on here back in 2024, but evidently not. So, here are both rounds, obviously geared towards my interests and inside jokes among these friends. They are provided as slideshows without the answers, so test yourself and have fun. November 2024 ...

I’ve played hundreds of hours of Mario Kart 8 on the Nintendo Switch,1 and though I don’t fancy myself a leading expert on the game—I’m still short of my 10,000 hours—one picks up a thing or two after seven years of gameplay. I bought the Nintendo Switch 2 to play Mario Kart World and have played a few hours in both solo and split-screen modes. I’m conflicted by their new take on the original Grand Prix while remaining intrigued by the new Knockout Tour option, and I’m too afraid of my free time to dive into Open Roam. Since I’ve spent most of my time with traditional Grand Prix races, I’ll focus my thoughts on them. ...

My company held its second Hackathon last week, when (most) regular work pauses or slows down, so we can instead focus on new ideas aligned to our mission.1 We get to explore and build, play around, meet new people, and add to our general culture of inquisitiveness, curiosity, and hard work. I used it as an opportunity to get back to my curriculum roots. I ran text adventure Math Jams in our online classroom for three years in the same fashion I do with OHAC. The main difference is I’m working with around 200 students who are voting on what to do—it gets chaotic. ...

In OHAC 62: Push the Red Button, we played Escape the Dungeon or Die!, a text adventure I wrote with some assistance from a coworker over three years ago. I finally turned it into a proper PDF, similar to my others. I wanted to take a step forward from Dream Sequence and created what’s essentially a series of escape rooms, each with a puzzle to discover and solve. Per usual with my text adventures, a spiffy title captures much of the information about the world of the puzzle. It’s a double entendre—either you escape the dungeon or die, but is it a dungeon that you’re escaping or a six-sided die? ...

I love puzzles. I was lucky enough to coauthor a puzzle book at my job, and I’ve been fascinated by any logical, engaging game I can find. I’m no expert, but I am an enthusiast. Over the last several months, I’ve nailed down a set of puzzles that bookend each day, getting my mind working in the morning and letting me wind down in the evening. ...

Until my older sister got a Nintendo DS, the only gaming devices we had were those cheap handheld ones that had a single game on it—Sudoku, a baseball simulator—and the similarly-cheap Plug and Play TV game consoles that typically comprised a joystick, a button or two, and composite video cables. They required batteries. They were slow. I loved them. ...

I previously wrote about my excitement that Mario Kart 8 was receiving more courses. Two years later, all the courses are released and have been summarily conquered by my Gold Mario character. I have 3 star trophies across all 24 Grand Prix cups, in all available speed levels. Though I fell off playing Mario Kart regularly in the last year—that change has been for the best—it remains a relaxing activity on a lazy weekend afternoon or a fun evening game to play with Erin. There are no more explicit accomplishments left for me in the game,1 so I can launch it when it strikes me as fun, and otherwise spend my extremely self-limited gaming time playing the several other Switch games I’ve purchased over the years. Among those I’ve started and hope to complete are Cuphead, Röki, Bastion, Firewatch, and The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe. It may take me years, but I’ll make progress! ...

As a wily veteran of two pub trivia locations in San Francisco and an occasional purveyor of other events when traveling, I’d like to compare the three formats I’ve become the most familiar with: Geeks Who Drink, Trivia Mafia, and SpeedQuizzing. Consider this a pub trivia personality quiz. ...