Golublog: An Anthropology Blog

Those of us who grew up in the tail-end of the Cold War know Greg Costikyan as the Leonardo da Vinci of serious gamer geekdom. He didn’t just _write_ games, he wrote _great_ games like Paranoia. And the games he wrote were smart, funny, and insightful. Since then he’s gone on to produce popular fiction which is equally incisive — his novel “First Contract”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812545494/sr=8-1/qid=1156573037/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-0329361-8750447?ie=UTF8 is an absolute must for any academic thinking seriously about globalization or culture contact or neoliberal governmentality. Yes really. His knowlede of the history of table top gaming is also truly staggering, and for the past couple of years his blogging and other writing on the gaming industry has been excellent.

So his latest effort “Manifesto Games”:http://www.manifestogames.com/ is something I feel biologically compelled to write about. It doesn’t take long surfing around the site to figure out exactly what is going on — an indie games program wrapped around a content delivery system wrapped around a bunch of well-designed but not Oblivion-beautiful games. Anybody who remembers the Good Old Days of Oregon Trail will find themselves at home on the sight — they even have “Taipan”:http://www.manifestogames.com/node/1058!

So… go buy something from them now!