Max Temkin, creator of Cards Against Humanity in an interview with Wired:

There’s something super addictive and super satisfying about just sitting down with your friends and having that real-world experience. I think a lot of the times people play Cards [Against Humanity], they have this great time and they often attribute it to the game, but it’s really just that the game was the pretext for them to sit down and have this real world interaction.

Card games typically imply real world interaction because they are (in large part) physical items. For an industry founded on arcades, schoolyard stories, and fighting over controllers, it’s funny how quickly the notion of local multi-player gaming seemed to disappear the near instant consoles integrated online multi-player. I won’t wax poetic about my recent experience playing Mario Kart 8 again, but there is a magic in local multi-player gaming.

Jessica Valenti of The Guardian on Elonis v. United States: whether threats made on social media are protected by free speech.

No one is arguing that people can’t say hateful things or call people names; the emails I get calling me a “slut” and a “feminazi” are immoral, but they’re not (and shouldn’t be) illegal. Threats and the invasion of privacy, though, are different – even in the most public of places: your right to be a “creep” doesn’t trump everyone else’s right to a life free from violence and the fear of it.

Russ Pitts:

There will be those cynical few who consider my departure an admission of some kind of failure that they, watching from the sidelines, predicted long ago. They will say, “I told you so.” And that’s OK. They’re right. They did tell us so. But that was the easy part.

Throwing rocks from the gallery at those who are trying to do something ambitious is no great accomplishment. I’d rather be the one who rolls up his sleeves and tries to accomplish something inspiring, even if it may fail. Even if it won’t last.

But there is no failure here, just change. I’ll never be ashamed of the ambitious dreams we built at Polygon, and I’ll never be afraid to try again. Hopefully my modest successes will inspire others to do their own great, ambitious things and build their own dreams.

There is a sinking feeling in my gut. No sooner had I posted this, I learn of Russ Pitts’ departure from Polygon. For those unfamiliar with Pitts, his work on Operation Supply Drop and GlassLab are nothing short of earth-shattering. There is only a bright future for such a talented writer. Godspeed.

Lorne Lanning, creator of Oddworld in an interview with Polygon:

I’m a kid who learned how to read from Sesame Street, not from school, so I believe in the power of media to make a better world.

I had an eerily similar thought this morning. I’m a kid who learned how to type from AIM, not from school, so I believe in the power of experiential learning to make a better world. This is something I believe to be at the heart of video games.

ScienceDirect:

We found support for the hypothesis that, in general, women would gain more compliance with friend requests than men. We also found support for the hypothesis that women making positive utterances would gain more compliance with friend requests than women making negative utterances, whereas men making negative utterances would gain more compliance with friend requests than men making positive utterances.

This sounds in-line with Rosalind Wiseman and Ashly Burch’s findings.