Category: Games
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Space Gambling
Star Trek: The Next Generation is famously Gene Roddenberry’s utopian fantasy of a world without money (listen to this Marketplace episode, or read Manu Saadia’s Trekonomics or The Economics of Star Trek by Rick Webb). This idea got sidestepped in ST:DS9 with a deep dive into Ferengi culture and their love of “latinum”, but staying within TNG for a minute, how…
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Chess Lab
Like many people I got into chess during the pandemic. I’d played as a kid, I watched Queen’s Gambit, and for a while I even experimented with my own version of what I now know is called fairy chess. Trying to make my own version of chess came from two experiences. First was in 2015…
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Those Kind of Assets
In Dan Hon’s 186th issue of his newsletter, Things That Have Caught My Attention, he finds himself sitting in a suburban Starbucks thinking about the shipping container Starbucks near the Portland airport and writing about video game tourism: “Sure, the idea of videogames-as-tourism, or escapism, isn’t necessarily a new one. My anecdata points to a…
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Re-Thinking the Game of Monopoly
It would be hard to simplify capitalism further than Monopoly. The game attempts to express the ruthlessness of raw capitalism by declaring that whoever has the most money at the “end” is the winner. While it’s true our culture proclaims the rich as our greatest heroes, the method of financial gain in Monopoly is not…