Having actually edited a magazine I should be past the point of being over-excited about getting on a cover, but check it out! I’m – or rather, my feature on Spore – is (sort of) on the cover of Seed, which is a magazine about real things, rather than chunks of light that jump when you press A. I spent an absolutely bedazzling week earlier this year interviewing the leads on Spore (as well as some otherwise brilliant people like Frank Lantz), closely followed by an utterly excruciating week trying to edit down 15,000 words of transcripts to a 2,500 word article. Hopefully they’re all kind enough to forgive me for relegating 95% of the clever things they said to my drafts folder. You don’t get a lot of fluff when you’re talking to people that smart, let me tell you. The piece was intended to focus very much on Spore’s scientific credentials, so hopefully it covers some rather different ground from what you may have read before.

And if, on reading it, you’re having interesting thoughts about using games a crowd-sourcing tools for forming models for complex, behaviour-driven systems,  you might want to check out Jane McGonigal‘s new project Superstruct, a step beyond World Without Oil which endevours to use our imaginations to understand what the impending Apocolypse might actually look like.