Not yet, but I saw Chris mention it as well. I'll have to load it up for the E3 flight.

He did.

Pretty great. I got to watch a very lost Al Franken wander aimlessly through the aisles. The show was good, too. Lots of stand-up, video skits and classy goddamn music.

The era and topic I'm currently reading about is always my favorite. I do have a weakness for Republican Rome, Elizabethan England, Napoleonic Europe, the Cold War and most of American history.

That's kind of an unsatisfying answer, but there you go.

I suspect strategy games with impersonal perspectives are simply less encumbered by expectation.

Let's suppose we have a strategy game called The United States vs. Al Qaeda and a game called Zeblax vs. The Federation of Snorfle. It stands to reason that the former game is obviously going to drag with it all kinds of baggage before the first turn is played, while the latter will act as a clean slate for the mechanics and presentation to play out.

Going back to Soren's theory, in the latter case it may be easier to cut through the audience's preconceptions and match up meaning to theme. Likewise, a theme may ultimately be more affecting to some if it is steeped in historical personification.

I don't really know if either approach allows for a greater range of stimulation. It seems like more of a stylistic choice than anything else; say, the difference between clever metaphorical storytelling or straightforward drama.

Present.

Exceedingly vain.

Thanks?

No I got stuck on a minigame and gave up

Is this a philosophical question?

I'm a community manager. What exactly is that? Well, I work in the marketing department, that's for sure. So I mostly hang out with the marketing and PR team. Lots of fun times and secondhand smoke involved.

But then I also do work for the developers/producers sometimes. And I work with sales. And legal. And IT. Pretty much the only department I haven't needed to coordinate with is the food staff.

So far in this job I have written blog posts, coordinated social networking stuff, managed forums, brainstormed (modest) initiatives, taken screenshots for magazines, written incidental dialogue, internally critiqued games, mocked up site design, conducted contests, edited interviews, cooperated with external devs on community-related issues, and provided marketing feedback. Next week, I will give game demos to press. Every day it's something new.

For that reason, I think it's a pretty awesome place to start in the industry, at least at Bethesda (CMs can be tasked with much more specific duties at other places). I get to move around and help with all sorts of stuff -- kind of a sampler course. The people I work with generally handle an infinitely larger amount of specific responsibility, and far better than I could right now. I don't know how they do it, but I enjoy helping where I can.

I don't know what that is.

Everyone was doing it.

Waffles, for many reasons, including their textural superiority and practical syrup-catching wells.

Strangely enough, it comes from StarCraft. Well, sort of. There isn't a StarCraft easter egg called "Ratsofatsorat."

When I was in middle school, my best friend and I played StarCraft every single goddamn day after school. Well, on the days we weren't playing Diablo, anyway.

As most gamers know, Battle.net requires you to enter a game name and password to make a private session. After hundreds of sessions, this inevitably becomes nonsensical garbage. One day he entered some random gobbledegook -- Ratso/Fatso -- and for whatever reason, it stuck. Our games were Ratso/Fatso from then on.

Sometime later I started using it as a username pretty regularly, with the added "Rat" depending on the length requirement. It's kind of a dumb name, but I like that it reminds me of those days, because they were good ones.

I don't often, and I have nothing to blame other than my own laziness -- that and a lack of wireless iPhone syncing. I just can not remember to consistently dock the thing, and so I never have recent stuff for my drive to work.

When on trips, I listen to This American Life almost exclusively. As for gaming stuff, I like a few podcasts (Giant Bomb, Irrational's, etc), but seldom listen to them for the above reason. I should probably get on that, too.

Not really. I played a Risk clone for a day or two. Some dudes around the office are playing Carcassonne on the iPhone. I have yet to play that game, so I should probably get on it.

I find that the more strict the scenario, the more limited the timespan, the greater the influence of the historical milieu. So, games like Total War and Hearts of Iron do sometimes approach a sense of roleplay, particularly in shorter scenarios.

But at the end of the day, there is a significant detachment between what and who I am supposed to be representing in a strategy game, and what I am actually doing. I may be playing as "Caesar," but I don't feel much like him. He's window dressing.

Civ IV designer Soren Johnson talks about this disconnect in his talk "Theme is Not Meaning" (http://www.designer-notes.com/?p=184), attributing it to the idea that few games match their mechanics to their theme. In other words, Civilization is about world history, but its gameplay does little to impart a feeling of world history.

I think he's being somewhat modest on that point; I believe Civ IV in particular does an admirable job of imparting a sense of history, of human nature and a course of events. Likewise, Hearts of Iron III does impart a small shred of the anxiety and balance that someone like FDR must have gone through during World War II, and it's brilliant for it.

But neither fully achieve a consistent impact, and Johnson is obviously correct in saying that games can do a far better job of this in general.

I'd like to see more experimentation done with shorter simulations that still allow for an in-depth range of decision making. That's one of the reasons that I'm really digging Hearts of Iron III.

Thankfully, it's amazing. As fun as working for Shacknews was at times, after a few years of working from home, you can't imagine what a relief it is to work in a building with dozens and dozens of talented, creative people.

It's also made even sweeter by the fact that, in addition to running into amazing Bethesda developers on a daily basis, I get to bug people at places like id Soft. I mean, I get to send John Carmack email. How cool is that?

And just in general, after spending those years on the outside curiously looking in, it's absolutely fascinating to view the industry from the vantage of a large publisher/developer. Even after 6+ months here, my mind is blown on a regular basis.

Everyone is really nice, there are a million cool things happening every day, and there is free Starbucks. I feel pretty lucky.

"Team of Rivals" by Doris Kearns Goodwin. It's less of a biography and more of a look at the run-up to the 1860 election and the formation (and subsequent operation) of Lincoln's cabinet.