Amazing video on the forgotten side of NY

An "urban historian" (not sure if that's a real thing) leads us on a tour of some hidden gems of NY City, from 200-year-old sewers to abandoned subway stations. A nicely-made little documentary - quite, beautiful at times, actually.

UNDERCITY from Andrew Wonder on Vimeo.

New post on Motivate.Play

Part two of my experience with MW2 hackers is up on Motivate.Play. See it here.

Great Carl Sagan Video

This video's an oldie but a goodie. I've been seeing more and more Carl Sagan lately, and I realize more and more how flippin' awesome the guy is. Here he talks about how astrology is a bunch of pseudoscience bullshit. I tip my hat.

Motivate.Play

So as I already mentioned, I'm one of three founding members of the blog Motivate.Play, where we talk about games and science. To be a bit more specific, we look at the intersection of gaming and the social sciences, drawing from cognitive science, psychology, economics, and more. We're still in the relatively early stages of this venture, but it's coming along nicely and is definitely worth checking out. So far I have posts on:

-Videogames as choice environments

-Zynga (the makers of Farmville)

-Alternate reality game designer Jane McGonigal

-The new strategy League of Legends is using to deal with unruly players

-The first half of the two-part story of my experience with hackers in Modern Warfare 2

-Plus a couple miscellaneous short posts

Check 'em out, please comment, and expect updates on new posts as I write them.

Starting out...

Ideally I would like to get a Wordpress blog set up, but my knowledge of MySQL databases is non-existant, so for the time being this will have to do.

I'm hoping to use this as a dashboard for getting information worth sharing out where others can find it. This means random interesting things related to my research, links to posts I make on Motivate.Play (a blog on cognitive science and gaming that I co-manage with Travis Ross and Jim Cummings), and other miscellanea.

Let's see how it goes.