If the person you are buying a gift for already has a Kindle Fire, they really don't need a gift from you. They've got the hot new thing this Christmas. Or maybe the richer person in your family has vowed to get them the Fire, so you're just going to be the person getting them the inferior gift. What to do...
Perhaps they are the kind of person who likes video games. If they are, you can make their holidays happier with a few select gift purchases.
Money is a boring gift, but money attached to directions is an excellent one. Make your beloved Fire owner's life easier by recommending some really good video games for the thing. That's kind of weird, because their Kindle is supposed to be for reading. Whatever.
Cheapies like Cut the Rope and Angry Birds are good. Tell them to check for Panda Poet, a multiplayer riff on Boggle or Scrabble that they will think you're so smart for recommending, because they will never have heard of it. It's a Kindle favorite but may not be on the Fire yet.
($25-$500)
This one is crazy. We're talking about a science fiction horror video game that looks like it should be running on a PlayStation and already was amazing when it ran on the iPad last year. Now you can run around shooting limbs off alien monsters on the Kindle Fire, which may not be what the Kindle Fire was made for, except, the Kindle Fire was made for the people who have it to brag about to the people who don't, and there's no better "My Kindle can even do this!" thing you could tell your gift recipient to buy than this. (Watch a video of the game in action.)
Your gift is a recommendation here, since you can't gift apps to the Fire. Just suggest it and give them the money.
($6.99 - Note that you can't gift games and apps to the Kindle Fire.)
The Kindle-loving dork that you're shopping for probably loves comic books or wishes they did, if only they could figure out which ones were the good ones. Help them. The Fire was promoted, in part, as the next great reader of digital comics, even though its screen is less than half the size of a comic book page. The Fire won't display two-page comics spreads all that well, so it's not the perfect machine for digital comics yet. But its support for the popular, free Comixology app is promising (that app lets people buy digital comics and then view them across all supporting devices, including Web, Android and iOS).
But what can you gift people? We suggest Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's We3 a marvelous comic about a dog, a cat and a rabbit who were weaponized by the U.S. government and simply try to escape. It's beautiful and it will make people feel sad. Great for anyone who loves housepets and enjoys hating the military-industrial complex.
($9.99)
Books (aka video games where you have to imagine everything and the jump and shoot buttons are replaced with the page-turn button)
Jane McGonigal's Reality is Broken is a treatise on how gamers can make the world better; Extra Lives is a bunch of smart essays about Tom Bissell, a smart guy who plays video games; Halo; Glasslands and World of Warcraft: Wolfheart are the two favorite gaming-world novels of the guy on our staff who reads that stuff; 1Q84 is both the acclaimed new novel from Japanese superstar author Haruki Murakami and a tome that is much lighter digitally, if less beautiful, as a real book; and The Sense of an Ending won the Booker Prize which makes it the classy compensation for people who have just admitted they put Dead Space on their Fire because you told them to.
($12.99 and-up - Note that you can gift Kindle books)
You can contact Stephen Totilo, the author of this post, at stephentotilo@kotaku.com. You can also find him on Twitter, Facebook, and lurking around our #tips page.