• Chainmail Bikini - The highly anticipated new webcomic from Shamus (who did the brilliant DM of the Rings comic) and "recovering goth" Shawn Gaston. The first comic is up, and it's great. If you liked DM of the RIngs, you'll like this too...
• Unusual Weapons Collection: My favorite is the second one.
• Perceptions of Risk: Bruce Schneier's post illustrates yet another failure in risk perception when it comes to bird flu (which hasn't killed anyone in North America, while the boring regular flu kills tens of thousands), similar to an old post of mine (which was inspired by Schneier's book).
• Why scary games are better than horror movies: Clive Thompson's recent Wired article taps into something that I think is really true: it's much easier to get tensed up and paranoid while playing a game than it is while watching a movie.

  For several years now, I've found that my favorite horror experiences aren't coming from movies any more. They're coming from games.
  
  Why? Partly it's because films have become much less artistically interesting. With a choice few exceptions -- like the superb The Ring -- I've found that modern horror movies have been offering less and less suspense, and more and more gore. Maybe it's due to the rampaging success of Saw, which gave birth to the current trend toward torture-chic and metric tonnage of blood in scary movies.
  
  In contrast, the best scary-game designers have quietly perfected the interplay of tension and release that makes for a truly cardiac horror experience. They have, in a sense, become even more faithful interpreters of the horror tradition movies than Hollywood directors.

  In some cases, it's because the atmosphere is scary, in others it's just because you feel that your character is an extension of yourself (this is apparently much easier to achieve with video games because you are actually controlling your character - it's much more difficult to do this in movies, which are more passive). In particular, I remember thinking this while playing Aliens vs. Predator 2 a few years ago. That game absolutely freaked me out, every time I played it. Of course, that game plays on the tension established in the movies (especially the nerve wracking motion detector from Aliens), but they did a really good job of establishing a creepy (and yet familiar) atmosphere. It doesn't help that Aliens are absurdly fast and come from surprising directions. I might just have to reinstall that game...
• I Feel So Special: James Grimmelmann had a paper break into the top 10 downloaded papers at a legal website. It was downloade 12 times. "To put that in perspective, this video of a hamster eating Cheerios was viewed ten thousand times in an hour yesterday." Hehe.

One reason a scary game is scarier than a scary movie is because playing a game is an active experience. Watching a movie is passive.

When it's a game, you actually have to decide what to do, and what happens isn't predetermined. That raises the adrenaline level about three notches.

I remember that one of the scariest moments I ever had playing a computer game was in XCOM, the first time I tried to invade an alien base. I had no idea what to expect. It's astounding that a turn-based game could terrify me so much.

Oh, my gods, yes! X-Com!

I second that. I always rename my best characters in X-Com so that I can remember who is most likely to make a tough shot. The drawback is that I become a little more personally attached to those characters (since I usually name them after people I know). The first time I went into a base and it was completely blacked out, and half of the characters were people I knew, plus myself?

And that creepy music...

Oi! Tension!

Yeah, Thompson goes into detail about the whole active/passive thing and how forcing the player to make choices can ratchet up the tension.

He also talks about how the tension begins to wear off in games as you figure out all the tricks. A recent experience for me was the Hitman: Blood Money game. I'd never played any of the previous installments, so all of their refined techniques really worked a number on me the first time I played it. They do this thing where security guards eye you suspiciously and follow you around, making you think that you've been caught. Eventually, this wears off, but the first time I saw it, it totally put me on edge.

And now it's time for a shocking Kaedrin confession: I've never played X-Com! When I ever get around to doing my video game retrospective for the PC, I'll have to mention that one as a "Should have played."

The first XCOM game is a classic, one of the best turn-based strat games ever. But I always had one really, really big gripe with it: why is it that the troop transport didn't have any windows? Why, after the thing had landed, couldn't my guys see outside before they disembarked?

That never made any sense.

I'm more concerned with the bugs which plagued XCOM and became more pronounced the longer the game continued. After a certain amount of gameplay it became impossible to continue due to crashes. Something bad accumulated in the game state.