"In Space Alert you and your friends make up the intrepid (doomed) crew of a Sitting Duck class exploration vessel. The way these ships work is that they’ll jump into a comedically hostile sector of space, spend 10 minutes scanning their surroundings, and then automatically jump you back out again. A game of Space Alert only ever lasts 10 real-life minutes, and during that time it’s the job of the players to listen to the ship’s hateful computer (a CD which comes bundled with the game) as it reels off what threats are approaching and from where, and then prevent these threats from destroying you in an orderly and professional manner. Surviving isn’t necessarily that hard, but the professionalism part? Impossible." Space Alert is brilliant. Even if most of our missions involved us falling over a lot, because we forgot about the screensaver. Quintin summarises it nicely.

So, I began nodding my head a tad, but then halfway through it became clear that this is born out of a somewhat large chip on a shoulder, and that chip is primarily about "social games" (as they are commonly described), and that really, I don't agree with much of this. The "you" in question is quite narrow, and cheap shots like the notion that the title 'games consultant' has "an inherent tragic quality" don't help. Experienced, outside eyes often make things better. Does that mean there's going to be a cavalcade of barely-qualified games consultants in the impending gameificationpocalypse? Of course. Does that mean McCrae's point is true? Not really. Obvious disclaimer: I know several games consultants. They are all very good at what they do. They also bear no resemblance to what McCrae describes.

"Starting a new column reprinting classic Game Developer magazine articles, this January 1994 premiere issue article goes behind the scenes of Id Software's Doom, talking to John Carmack and revealing technical specifics of the seminal game's creation." And it's cracking – lots of great detail, some neat ironies, and quite a bit about the id team's fondness for NeXT workstations.

Consolevania is over. A shame, but they make their case well, and it was lovely when it lasted.

"We’ve generated what we call the Personal Annual Report for all our users. It’s a unique-to-you PDF of data, visualisations and factoids about your travel in 2008, that we’re delivering over the next week via email to every Dopplr user who travelled in 2008. To give you an example, we thought we’d show you the Personal Annual Report of someone who’s had a very busy 2008 – President Elect Barack Obama." This is super-awesome. Can't wait for mine, no matter how small it is.

"Your argument did not address my own, but nice try". I think I'm going to need this in future.

These are lovely. The more I think about this, the more I like his Die Hard poster.

"The purpose of this analysis is to determine the evolution of gravity in the Mario video game series as video game hardware increases." Not super-accurate, but not bad; the bit when it starts the comparison against GPU word length is a little silly, perhaps. But otherwise: fun!