Castles aren't large walled structures where people live and work, they're intricate mazes. Temples aren't places where people go to worship their various deities, they're where the ancients practiced their Booby Trap- and Death Course-making skills (and they were so good at it that they are still functional after hundreds of years without maintenance). Even places like warehouses and sewers, where the design should be fairly straightforward, are designed solely to deter intruders, even if there is no earthly reason why it should be so, and even if it utterly inconveniences non-intruders. One wonders what the regular people do.

Videogame Tropes [TV Tropes via Joystick Division]

The man who brought us Wikipedia, Jimmy Wales, is bringing us an "open-source magazine" about video games called "Gaming Wikia." Actually, there are four of these Wikia "magazines" — Music, cars, health and, as previously mentioned, games. Wired's Chris Kohler puts it best: Think NeoGAF, but run amock and with the abilities to edit content. Says company V.P. Dan Lewis,

The 'open-source magazines' we're unveiling today are focused largely around topics where passionate people have already started collaborating online. The launch of Tunes, Cars, Gaming and Health is a continuation of our mission to open-source the creation and development of content around every topic imaginable—so we are obviously not stopping here.

User generated content matters. Just take a look at our comments section. I'm curious to see how this pans out, though. Could be fantastic. Or not. Brian Ashcraft

Wikia Gaming "Mag" Press Release [Game|Life via 1Up]

When I was a little boy, my parents didn't actually let me play video games. "Rots the mind," they said. Instead, they encouraged me to use my imagination by building me a small 3x3x3 sound proof chamber that they called "Florian's Reflection Room." The walls were an unadorned white; the temperature a constant 72 degrees. Sometimes, they'd just lock me up in there for hours (although this is only a guess, since there was no way to tell time) encouraging me to expand the powers of my mind.

And expand they did! I had some just amazing adventures in that little box. For example, there was that one time when I imagined that I was an astronaut who had escaped earth seconds before it blew up, destined to float through the universe alone for the rest of my life, and no matter how much I hoped and prayed, I'd never meet another human soul as long as I lived and would die utterly alone. Or that time I imagined that I actually had thousands of little friends: imaginary spiders that scurried all over my body. You know, sometimes, in fact, I wonder if I'm not still locked in my Reflection Room, just imagining all this. But no. Solipsism's insane.

The point is that I can personally endorse this article, 'How to Play a Video Game on Paper.' Who needs a $600 console when you've got a 25 cent pencil and a piece of loose leaf? Who needs video game designers when you've got the rainbow power of imagination?

...

I never thought I'd see the day that playing video games got even more frickin' pathetic. Florian Eckhardt

How to Play a Video Game on Paper [WikiHow, via Digg]

Like Wiki? A team at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Mellon University is putting together the Game Innovation Database (GIDb), which allows users to browse and edit content much like the Wikipedia. We have created the Game Innovation Database in order to create a historical record of which innovations appeared when, and why they are important," said Professor Jesse Schell. "So many videogame innovations have occurred so fast that there is a danger that many fascinating and important innovations will be forgotten." There are four hundred entries so far, and the team is trying to rope in gamers to contribute and correct errors. It's not mistakes that ought to cause concern, but flame wars. —Brian Ashcraft

More Here [BBC] Thanks, CRAW!

The wiki's goal? Simple: "The goal of the GIDb is to classify and record every innovation in the entire history of computer and videogames."

It's an excellent idea, but it's still in its embryonic stages, and a lot of the information isn't quite correct. For example, Guitar Hero is cited as the first guitar controller for a game, which I'm pretty sure isn't true: although a cursory Googling reveals nothing, weren't there some Japanese rhythm games that used one as well?

Still, being able to easily correct inaccurate articles is what Wiki's are all about, in addition to editing pages with an editorial slant that you don't like so they only display the gaping anus of Goatsex. You're a savvy bunch of gamers, why not start loading it up?

Game Innovation Wiki

The Project Azeroth wiki has a great page translating phrases in Common Language into Horde. For example, if you want to salute one of your homeys with some pimp speak, you would type out: "ss L t A A F!" ("My NIGGA!") Want to tell that drooling corpse how you really feel about her? "b d b ee oo d a p!" ("I love you!") will get you into her mausoleum. Insult a tauren? "ppp b d b jj!" ("Vile Yeti!")

A little creativity and this handy guide will bring you a long way to healing Azeroth's racial wounds.

Project Azeroth Common -> Horde Translating Guide

We saw over at Lifehacker that a new community-based game review site called Gibbity is up and running:

Gibbity is a people-powered, game discovery engine. As a participant, you can either explore the current game listings and review stuff you find, or you could contribute games that aren't there yet and review those. That's basically all there is to it (but you're welcome to check out the lengthier description and explanation here, if you've got time to kill.) Ideally, it allows users to quickly find new (and old) games that other users have picked up and enjoyed. Kinda like Amazon.com's review/recommendation engine, except that it's smaller, simpler and doesn't ask you to pull out your wallet every other page-load.

A pretty cool idea... sort of Gamespot meets Wikipedia. The word of warning here is that a good deal of the reviews themselves tend to be just about as amateurish and indiscriminate as you'd expect, but there are a few good ones. Like the Gamefaq forums, though, expect this to soon degenerate into the fanboy humping and flaming that you expect. We'd love to see an intelligent community game review site, but without there being some sound way to shut the idiots up, we doubt that's going to happen.

Gibbity - Collaborative Game Reviews

The wiki format of StrategyWiki allows for multiple editors, thus improving the insight and quality each guide recieves. With many people able to lend their help and knowledge, guides can quickly gain depth. And with a wide range of editors, secrets are more easily dicovered and documented. Enforcing the community aspect of guide creation also serves to stifle elitism.

These guys started in December, so there isn't much content yet. But they do showcase a Zelda guide to prove how cool entries can be. If you know your shit about a particular game, help these guys out.

StrategyWiki.net [Official site]
Game strategy with StrategyWiki [LifeHacker post]