11 June 2005 | next
A few days ago my buddy Vig blogged a list of all-time playable video games; I chimed in with a list of my own, lamenting that I didn't have a running version of 'Seven Cities of Gold,' the game that got my Luddite dad hooked on computers.

Vig quickly linked me to emulators and ROMs, but in the course of testing different emulators, I've discovered that X11 is not properly installed on my machine. I'm wondering if it has something to do with OS X 10.4; when I try to install a fresh copy from a disk image, the installer balks, claiming there's a newer version on my machine. Huh?Games figure strongly as I'm currently reading 'Everything Bad Is Good For You,' by Steven Johnson and simultaneously listening to James Carse's seminar at the Long Now Foundation, 'Religious War In Light Of The Infinite Game.' [The Long Now Seminars are available as dowloadable audio files - I recommend all of them.] It was Malcom Gladwell's review of Johnson's book in a recent New Yorker, calling attention to thought experiments that weigh the value of games against literature, that prompted me to pick up a copy.