Bit of a weird one... Now I'm all self-conscious about it. I swap between a bit, though I think I tend to use mom when talking about her and mum when talking to her. Dunno, never really thought about it - she calls my gran "mom" too, so maybe it's a family thing.

No. There's a few reasons, but primarily my sites get so few visitors per day that a day of downtime would not really be effective, and it would take a comparatively large amount of effort to arrange proportional to its impact.

SOPA and PIPA both seem very dangerous pieces of legislation, but realistically, I've got no say in it. This is an internal US issue and protests by non-US citizens/corporations are unlikely to have any sway on US representatives.

I quite like it, particularly a language I semi-understand as I get to practice my translation/comprehension and then use a translation service to see if I was close. Often I have to translate the translation first... What really drives me up the wall is when people respond to a post and start swapping languages around.

I have, but I live at the intersection of two major roads, so it's pretty easy. Depending on what direction I want to go in, I'm always on one of those roads, and being pretty rural, they just run until they meet the major major roads in the area, so it's not a major deal. I've lived in this town for... 17 years now probably, depending on if you count being away from home at uni still living there.

I would take the vacation I am taking - getting away for all the month at a nice quiet villa in Spain with a decent net connection. I'll be working, but I'll be doing it by a pool and that's my ideal vacation!

I usually play myself, but perhaps a slightly idealistic, romanticised take on what I'd do in a given situation. It's rare, but sometimes I consciously "play a role", for example by meta-gaming conversational choices, but by and large I try hard to play characters that are true to myself. Which makes moralistic dilemas such as Bastion and Deus Ex : HR really tricky.

I really loved Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series. It was like Narnia but with a huge Arthurian twist to it that really appealed. I still keep a copy of the books in my house.

For once I'm fairly stuck for an answer to this. I've got more or less everything I want, and the things that are out now that I don't have I'm not massively bothered about. iPad2 is one for example that I want to want, but I don't really; my iPad1 is doing me just fine. I guess the next thing for me will probably be the iPhone5 but that will be very dependent on the specs of it - if there isn't a compelling reason to ditch my 4, I won't.

I just got a Kinect the other day which is fun so far, and I'm set for media devices. I guess probably if I had to go out and buy something today or next week, I'd probably be looking at a 3D TV, but honestly I'm just saying that so I can stop typing.

I think probably my phone, my wallet and my Drobo. Possibly my iPad instead of my phone. All of my work etc is all backed up offsite, so really the only thing I need is the Drobo for my media library which at 2TB is not backed up offsite. I don't have that much of sentimental value, photos and such are all stored on Flickr, so realistically I can afford to be quite pragmatic in what I save and minimise the hassle of replacing ID etc.

I have an iPhone, an in-car GPS and a hand-held GPS. Why would I ever be lost?

When I was a kid, I was all about the box and the manual. Usually me and my mom would go to the mall, and I'd buy a game as one of the first things I did, and then we would sit and have lunch and I would read the manual and the back of the box and imagine what the game would be like. When we would go to America on annual vacation, I'd invariably pick up a couple of games, and pore over them for the rest of the holiday. The anticipation and the understanding of a game I'd never played were a huge part of the experience.

Then they introduced DVD cases and phased out the proper boxed versions, and a part of me died. A small part but nonetheless. Manuals became perfunctory rather than rich in lore and backstory. It was the end of an era - I still remember fondly the box for Wing Commander 1 that came packaged with blueprint schematics for all the ships.

What actually happened I think was that publishers realised that people could be made to pay more for this stuff in a "Collector's Edition", and so the normal version became increasingly utilitarian.

Today the manual server little practical purpose. Games almost always have a tutorial that will lead you by the nose through the control scheme, and the backstory included in the manual now typically doesn't stretch beyond two generic scene-setting paragraphs, and with the growing trend for digital distribution and rental games, this trend probably isn't going to reverse anytime soon.

So if a lot of consumers won't have a manual at all in their retail experience, then the material in the manual needs to be effectively duplicated in-game. And if you are already duplicating it ingame, then why do you need a manual at all?

Manuals being phased out is a natural progression, but it's giving us a much less fulfilling experience. It's ruining today's generation of little kids who read the manual like it was a bible prior to being able to play. But it's where commercialisation and technology have brought us, the inevitable end of the road we started on when games started shipping in DVD cases.

Because I forgot all about Formspring...

I need to list two for these. Spiders really freak me out, once upon a time in an old house we used to live in, I grabbed a towel off the rail and there was a spider on the back of it as I wrapped it round me. I flipped out. I wish I could get over it though because spiders are a really frequent monster in games and I really don't like that. Arachnophobia is a thing, quit fucking with me please Mr GameDev.

Also I'd like to stop feeling queasy on the stairs in my office. It has an open drop down 12 floors - 14 if I go see my boss. I like to get in and get out, but I'm not having to resort to using the lift constantly yet. It would be more convenient though not to be bothered by it. It isn't really a fear of heights so much as falls I think. I can quite happily look out of the window of a plane or from the top of a hill down to a valley, there's just something about drops that I could fall into that I get anxious about.

I read a lot so I'd carry on doing that. I enjoy playing guitar some nights, and listening to tunes, kicking back with a nice glass of wine. Cooking can take a lot of time if you want it to. There's a lot of things to do instead of watching TV or surfing. I just prefer doing those!

I think this may shortly become necessary. I'm not VERY far away from finishing my PhD (so I keep telling my supervisor :P ), and then I'll be Doctor Dicken. All these "what's your pornstar name" things people have you do? Yeah, Doctor Dicken beats them all. :(

I rarely get beyond acknowledging that I need to do something about it though before I get distracted, so suggestions on a postcard :P

For quite a while I've been fancying learning something outside the Roman alphabet. Just cos, you know, I'm a bit of a masochist. When I was quite wee I took a course in Mandarin, which I barely remember any of now. Japanese is a bit of a cliche - next thing I'll be reading manga in the original and describing things as "Kawai! >_<". The two that really tempt me are Russian and Arabic.

I've also been very tempted to pick up a proper qualification in Spanish. I can get by in a rough and ready kind of way - drop me in the middle of Madrid and I probably won't die for instance, but it would be nice to have a proper ticket in it.

"Saltwater Buddha : A Surfer's quest to Find Zen on the Sea" by Jaimal Yogis, for the n-th time. I know its a bit of a cheesy Copland-esque stereotype to be a geeky business type and be reading Zen texts - especially now I've swapped from coffee to various forms of green tea, but this is a great book.

Right now I drive a really great car - a Nissan X-Trail - that I find about as functional as I think anything would be. I don't drive so much so I don't feel particularly bad about it being an SUV and the environmental concerns that go along with it. In fact, if I had an environmentally conscious car, that would mean there was an extra SUV out there being used by someone who would likely drive a lot more than one or twice a week!

When I want to move a decent amount of gear around I can, and when I want to just have a comfortable ride somewhere, I can do that too. I don't see that there's a real reason for me to swap - I've sort of outgrown my flashy-car teenage insecurities and I've not yet hit my midlife crisis, and regardless of either of these, I've never been much into cars anyhow. They get you from A to B and provided I can plug my iDevice into the stereo, I don't really care too much beyond that.

With that said, I've really enjoyed the occasions when I've "borrowed" my dad's convertible on a nice Summer day, but those are pretty rare here in Scotland so it probably wouldn't motivate my decision too much. I also got quite enamoured with the automatic transmission and cruise control situation last year whilst road-tripping round the US. Finally, because of the problems I have with my back, I keep the seat in a really weird position that alleviates the pain for me, but is unusable for most normal people, so I'd like to get a car that has a memory on seat positions so that I can reset it to my sweet spot after someone else has borrowed it.

So really, what I'd like is more or less my car except with a few extra bells and whistles. And a loaner convertible on the side for the two nice summer days where I'm able to drive off somewhere.

Oh and if you could give me a car that wasn't painted with a substance that corroded by seagull shit, that would be epic.

I have a really old Rolling Stones shirt from a looooong time ago, from the Voodoo Lounge tour, so that would be 1994. I don't know the provenance of the shirt now - I doubt it was bought for me as I would have been 10 at the time and there's no way it would fit today (sidebar : it probably doesn't fit anyhow and I'm too fashion-insensitive to notice), but regardless, I have it and it's an original piece of merchandise not one of these River Island "oh its hip to reprint iconic things and fade them and act like we're all cool" shirts that you see every douche on the street in. Originals or STFU. If you weren't there the first time round, you don't get to wear the shirt and pretend you were because it's fashionable now.

I'm currently holding auditions for this role. If you'd like to be considered, please get in touch. :P