"'I grew up in Berlin. The artists in Germany made a fresh start after the Hitler regime. They thought that if a society that evil came out from the art created before it, then we must invent a new way of thinking and creating.'

"The 26-song album of Game Boy music he released the following year documents the vibe of that time, just a decade after the Berlin wall came down."

Nathan Meunier documents the rise of the 8-bit music scene.

"Von Ahn observed that billions of hours of our time are sunk into games as minor as Windows solitaire. He then speculated that this wasted time could be put to practical use. In fact, Von Ahn calculated, more man-hours go into solitaire each month than were expended on building the entire Panama Canal between 1904 and 1914. If someone could come up with a methodology for harnessing these boundless intellectual energies, who knows what could be accomplished?"

Jim Rossignol explores the computational power of boredom.

"'Like death, taxes, and a reformed .38 Special playing the state fair circuit, they're something you just can't get away from," Says Richard Dansky of Ubisoft, a long time Clancy writer and designer, whose own escort missions can be found in the Ghost Recon installments Desert Siege and Island Thunder.

"'The player's failure gets predicated on something they can't control,' says Dansky, 'namely, the fact that the escortee has the self-preservation instincts of a cruller at a police precinct.'"

Russ Pitts speaks to the designers of escort missions about why escort missions suck so much ass.

"LV lost a few early battles in key sections of space, which allowed their enemies deeper into their territory. In just a few weeks, the advancing enemy destroyed LV's titan ship - the largest, most expensive ship in EVE, which takes weeks to build. Days after that battle, Lotka Volterra's directorate went missing. From that point on, LV's resistance grew weaker as they lost more and more territory. They disbanded in April 2007 but had stopped operating as an entity two months before. I tried to interview a former Lotka Volterra member about what the last few weeks were like. Before declining, he said that those were bad times."

Joel Gonzales looks inside the death of a guild.

"Independent stores might have a small budget for local cable or movie theater ads, but they can't compete with the mega-chains' marketing muscle. 'Every Sunday you open up the paper and see these circulars for Circuit City and Best Buy, and it's a downer,' Halligan says. 'Every holiday season, Toys 'R' Us does this buy-two-get-one-free videogame thing. That kills everybody. All the independent storeowners go to Toys 'R' Us, and they buy tons and tons of stuff. With that deal it's cheaper than buying it at wholesale.'"

Kyle Orland talks to independent game store owners.