Category: Gaming

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When you plan a vacation, you tend to ask yourself a couple of key questions:

  • Where should I stay?
  • Where and what should I eat?
  • What should I wear?

And inevitably…

  • What should I do?

How you answer that last question can differ significantly depending on your personality, but your answer to the question of how best to occupy your time tends to fall into two general categories. If you’re like me, you do a bunch of research, make lists, and try to come up with a plan based on criteria such as affordability, enjoyability, and uniqueness. However, if you’re like my husband, then you probably eschew the list-making entirely and just show up in the city. My husband revels in spontaneity, taking each hour as it comes and chatting to locals for recommendations. 

His methodology tends to stress me out, but I have grown to really appreciate hours spent wandering through an unfamiliar city, watching people go about their daily lives in random non-touristy neighborhoods. We have stumbled upon some amazing discoveries this way, ranging from architectural to anecdotal to culinary. That being said, I still need a little structure or “just wandering” leaves me wondering what I might be missing.

Bridging that travelers’ gap between structure and spontaneity is a really fun app called Stray Boots. Simply put, Stray Boots is a city tour-turned-scavenger hunt. Each Stray Boots tour guides you through a particular city district, introducing you to the history, culture, commerce, etc., of the area through a series of clever clues. You can play alone or in a team; all you need is a smart phone and a couple of hours!

Portland with Stray Boots 

I’m an unashamed, dedicated fan of The Amazing Race, so any opportunity to run around a city searching for hidden clues makes me happy. This app is particularly fantastic though for a number of reasons:

It’s a great way to get an overview of a city.
The scavenger hunt usually covers a 1-2 sq. mile radius but directs you to the most significant or most fascinating things to see and learn about while moving you along at a steady pace. Along the way you can expect to see both the “famous” parts of a city and the quieter gems off the beaten track. Because the app has no time limit, you can pause in any particular area that interests you for a longer period of time or make a note to come back another time. 


Old Town San Diego with Stray Boots 

  • It gamifies the classic tour.
    Learning about new places becomes interactive and fun through the form of a scavenger hunt. It is more likely you will remember what you learned because you weren’t just passively listening to a guide drone on. 
  • It’s a fantastic means to build community.
    While you can Stray Boots alone, they’re way more fun in a team. Whether your team is family, friends, or colleagues, it’s so much fun to try crack the puzzles together. You also learn quite a bit about your teammates and how they think or how they see the world. I’ve done all my Stray Boots experiences with family members and learned that my dad has a fantastic eye for spotting obscure details! 
  • You can meet interesting individuals.
    Besides your teammates, you also get to interact with vendors and locals on the tours to obtain answers. This is a handy way to break the ice with strangers and have a more robust conversation about their experience of the city. (Especially if you are a shy introvert like myself.)
  • You will end up with a fun set of souvenir photos from the hunt!
    I am really bad at remembering to take photos when I’m exploring cities. As part of Stray Boots, you are typically required to snap a few memorable moments with key landmarks. These assignments mean I am guaranteed to leave the city with some tangible (and postable) memories.

Pikes Market in Seattle with Stray Boots 

While Stray Boots isn’t necessarily for everyone–it’s still too much structure for my husband–they provide a great starting point for general wandering. In my family, there are several of us who stick closely to the Stray Boots path, while the others weave back and forth, forging their own destiny and occasionally crossing paths with the Stray Booters. It has proved to be the perfect vacation foundation, minimizing the urge to spend money on numerous attractions and opening up cities in fresh new ways.

So far I’ve done tours in San Diego, Portland, OR, and Seattle, and they were all amazing. I’d love to hear your experiences and see pictures from other tours. Here’s a tip: check Groupon first to see if they have any deals going on. (They usually do.) 
If you do a Stray Boots tour, let me know in the comments!

Featured image is courtesy of Wikimedia and provided for use under CC 2.0.

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This edition will be another mixture of games that were released last year and games that I just happened to play last year. I’d love to hear everyone else’s favorite games from last year because I simply did not have the time to explore as many games as I wanted. Let me know and I’ll add it to my list for post-graduation in May.

  1. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture

    I reviewed this game back when it first came out, so I recommend read that post for my expanded thoughts. In short, Rapture is a haunting and mesmerizing indie game, in which you play as somebody sent to investigate what happened in a sleepy English village after all its inhabitants suddenly disappeared. The game is experiential, rather than puzzle oriented, which threw me off at first, but I have grown to really love this genre of games that make the player slow down and let go of self as they immerse you in a new world and story. Rapture is a spectacular example of what this genre can do, from the cinematic visuals and musical score to the complex and creative character development

  2. Fallout 4
    Everyone has been talking about this game for the last couple months and for a great reason: Fallout 4 is truly fantastic. Somehow the developers made traipsing around in a post-apocalyptic nightmare version of Massachusetts while one fends off radioactive mutts and raiders reminiscent of The Road quite fun. Well actually, I’m not sure fun is the right word–the game can be pretty bleak, and it forces the player to work through some difficult decisions about the role that technology should play in human society. For instance, will you choose to treat sentient robots called “synths” as human or merely machine? The outcome of the game depends heavily on which post-war factions you decide to work with and subsequently what kind of missions you embark on. All of this, however, is built into a world that feels believable and open enough to keep a player occupied on side missions for many, many hours. If you are curious about what makes such a bleak world appealing, I recommend watching PBS Game/Show’s video “Why Do We Love Fallout 4’s Awful World?”.

  3. Gone Home
    "Gone Home" by The Fullbright Company - http://www.thefullbrightcompany.com. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons.
    “Gone Home” by The Fullbright Company – http://www.thefullbrightcompany.com. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons.
    After spending a few months abroad in Europe, you return to your family’s home to find it deserted. Where are your parents and your sister? What happened while you were gone? This game is a first person narrative puzzler in which you have to use what you find in the house to solve the mystery. What is remarkable is the compelling story and characters that emerge as you literally walk around an empty house. I have played many puzzlers in this vein, but I was not expecting to become so invested in that family and the events that unfolded in their lives. This is another example of a game that exhibits the power of the experiential gaming genre. It’s also available for Mac/PC, so even if you don’t have a console, you should be able to play it.

  4. Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery

    I actually haven’t finished playing this one, but I have really enjoyed it so far. It’s quite unlike any game I have mentioned in this post. The graphics are reminiscent of gaming’s early years–pixellated and flat. The story is simple, and the characters are not the kind to whom you become attached. But all of these simplified elements contribute to the stylized and quirky nature of the game, in which you play as a Scythian warrior conquering her quests by solving puzzles, battling mystic creatures, and exploring her dream world. In fact, the simple aesthetic is so evocative that it received several awards in the gaming world. My favorite part of this game, however, is the tongue-in-cheek dialogue and snarkily worded narrative observations. (Click for an example.)
    The game is available for iOS, so you can play this on your tablet or phone.

  5. The Nathan Drake Collection

    The Uncharted games are really familiar to most gamers, so I won’t say much here. For those who don’t know the franchise, it’s a first person adventure game where you play as Nathan Drake, a treasure hunter and pseudo-anthropologist, who traipses around the world, getting in trouble, while he tries to uncover historical secrets. It’s a bit of a modern-day Indiana Jones with lots of puzzles and an equal amount of bad guys. The Nathan Drake Collection is a rerelease of the original trilogy in which each game was remastered to match contemporary video graphic technology. Despite the many video game tropes and subtle (or perhaps not so subtle) misogyny built into these games, they’re a lot of fun and I’m looking forward to the new edition coming out this year.

Special Mention: Depression Quest
This is the game that sparked the whole Gamergate controversy. It’s a text-based, choose-your-own-adventure game about what it’s like to live with depression. I was skeptical about the game’s efficacy (though I’m very supportive of the women targeted in Gamergate), but the game proved me wrong. It’s definitely simple, but I found it to be thoughtful and enlightening. If you know anyone battling with depression, or if you think you might be depressed, I recommend checking it out. It’s a quick game that you could finish in one sitting.

I’m cheating a little bit with these next two games, but I couldn’t remember the year in which I actually played them. And they’re just too good to ignore!
Special Mention: A Dark Room
This is also text-based, but in the sense that old-school video games were text-based. There’s a whole world to be explored outside of the dark room in which the game begins. I was fascinated by how quickly I became immersed in a world described but not illustrated for me. As for the narrative, well that you just have to find out for yourself. You can play on your iPhone or tablet or via this link on your computer, so it’s very accessible for all.

Special Mention: The Room series
This is purely a puzzler with only the vaguest semblance of a story, but it is SO good. The visuals and music are so atmospheric, lending a gravity to the quest of breaking out of each room. I have played the first two, and now a third game is out which I’m excited to try.

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It is almost the end of a long semester and the end of a long year. Thanksgiving was a welcome moment of respite, but now that I am back, the reality of what I need to accomplish in these upcoming two weeks is daunting. Two significant research papers to write, two Ph.D applications to complete, a fellowship application to submit, and several large work projects to finish. So much writing! Breathe in, breathe out, take one step at a time.

The hardest part is that I can already imagine life on break. My lists of books, TV shows, and films to read and watch have exponentially grown. (Not to mention the personal projects I want to work on at home.) I’m also excited because winter break heralds Oscar season–the months when the best films of the year are released.

Winter Break Goals on my Trello board.
Some of my Winter Break Goals on my Trello board.

In short, I am faced with the constant question our generation encounters: with so much great media content out there, how do we sift through the options and decide what we wish to engage? Historically, one often found that large sections of a population were watching the same shows together or reading roughly the same literature, but the Internet and other technology has loosened the limitations of distribution and production, resulting in widely varying habits of content consumption. No two people are watching, reading, and even playing (to loop in video games) exactly all the same things. How does this change how we think about and choose our media?

I’ve been having a similar conversation with some of my students, and they’re also feeling overwhelmed by the abundance of content out there. We agree that each individual will have to figure out their own system for determining what to engage, and while I have been formulating my own philosophy on personal consumption, I am really curious as to how you decide what to watch/read/play.

So this week, I am asking for you to contribute to my blog. Send me a private message or comment below! I am especially interested in those of you who work in some branch of media production or education, where you are expected to “keep up” with what’s popular.

Here’s your question: how do you select from the cornucopia of incredible content what you will watch/read/play, and how do you manage your time accordingly to maintain a healthy balanced life?

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