How the Choose Your Own Adventure series began.

When people ask what I like so much about being from the Midwest, I get to tell them: I know the architecture of the wind. I know the violence it blows in and out. I like to keep my survival as simple as I can.

The phrase ‘adult beginner’ can sound patronising. It implies you are learning something you should have mastered as a child. But learning is not just for the young.

Developed by early computer engineers in their spare time, improved in University comp-sci labs, and ultimately sold in coffeeshops for ten cents per game. Inside one of the most influential games ever played.

One possible (if depressing) conclusion to take from this is that strategy is just an illusory abstraction that we have invented to give meaning to that which has none. We use it as a retrospective framing device to explain a complex series of events (of our own making but mostly of external provenance) that we do not understand. So maybe strategic theory is really just an gussied up form of conspiracy theory. We need to impose order on the world and believe that someone, somewhere, knows that the hell is going on.

A Wisconsin basement gave birth to one of the most influential narratives of our times – Dungeons and Dragons – sending its creator, E. Gary Gygax, on a strange and perilous journey of his own.

A profile of Henry Hook, the world’s best crossword puzzler, who died this week.

The inner thoughts and worries of a Bingo player.

"Phyllis didn’t need to focus when she was daubing her numbers. Her mind could wander. She could think of all of the fortune she’d had in her life, all the loving family that surrounded her, even if their visits fell few and far between. As the next BINGO was called, she ripped off her top sheet and placed it into her trash bag. She remembered when she’d started coming to play, how she’d thought what a waste it was that each player had their own plastic trash bag, but it wasn’t long before she’d blinded herself to this detail, too."

Teens struggle to find their bearings in both their fantasy lives and their real ones.

"He sits behind his screen, which he’s ordered us never to touch. We never do, not even when he's at detention. He shuffles some papers—his maps and grids. Dice click in his stubby hand. Behind him, on the wall, hang Dr. Varelli's diplomas. The diplomas say that he’s a child psychiatrist, but he never brings patients here, and I’m not sure he ever leaves the house."

A childhood evening in a barrio.

"Now they’re bossing all the kids around. Just because they have the nicest soccer ball in all of Cuatro de Marzo, they think they can slave-drive the other kids to make the soccer field, to carve it out from the dirt street. They think they can practically reinvent the game. The ball is pretty nice. Nobody knows exactly where they got it, but they never let it out of their sight. They take turns guarding it, sleeping with it at night. It’s the same kind the Guadalajara Chivas use, one that looks official—all red, white and blue with their coat of arms on the side."

After a breakup, a man begins to transform his apartment into a retro arcade.

"I ask him what he plans to do with the games. Is he going to start an arcade? Is he going to fix them and sell them? Matt shrugs and tells me it’s just a hobby now. It’s good that you’ve distracted yourself from Sarah, I tell him, and he says yeah, he’s enjoying his abdication—abdication, as if he’s resigning from the presidency or something. He says it makes him feel like a kid again and I nod. Video games will do that. Nostalgia. But Matt shakes his head, like I’m not understanding him."

As part of a contest, a barbarian permits himself to be possessed by a god.

"He had slain wizards. He had collapsed gates through which the old ones sought reentry to our roads, our cities, our hearths. He had cut down beasts born of the necromantic arts, some grown from flesh and bone, others crafted with cog and spring. The Sundering Game was a simple affair by comparison. Gotchimus would be possessed by the spirit of an old god. The god might kill its mortal host, and it might drive him mad—or Gotchimus would drive it off before it could do either."

A “crude table-tennis arcade game” called Pong and the birth of the video game industry.

A father and daughter engage in an elaborate deception in a roadside diner.

"I followed him, stretching my legs to match his stride. I swung my arms, too, catching the shiny rhythm of the way he walked when he was excited about something. I copied the bounce in his step. Even though I was just an eleven-year-old girl, I promised myself that I, too, would someday ride trains and sit around campfires listening to old hobos telling stories. Even if I had to dress like a man to do it, I wanted that kind of experience, even more than being a war nurse. Before he got to the front door, I caught up. 'Let’s play deaf again.' 'Okay, squirt.' He zippered his lips with his fingers. 'Mum’s the word.'"

In this curious world, a young couple find their lives filled with strange cats and a consuming video game.

"They did not stroll alone. When they left the apartment they’d see the marmalade perched beside a newspaper stand across the street or slinking in through the complex door as they walked out. Along with the cosmopolitan pigeons and robins, and the urban rats and mad squirrels, cats were stationed at odd intervals on their meandering route. One night an olive green and basalt cat sat perched on its haunches in the ruby umbrella of light cast by a low street lamp on Carmine St. Laura and Eric would swear that the same cat had sat as still as stone on the corner of Commerce St. and Cherry Lane the evening before. In a shadowed alcove on Bedford St. a giant tabby guarded a litter of three sable kittens, its marble eyes mirroring the random lights of the city night."

Friendship between two quirky outsiders turns into a tumultuous love.

"He got her screenname from one of the other members of the group and started sending her jokes and one-liners, nothing too creepy or personal. Nothing threatening. He told her that he was part of their little group. He told her to guess who he was. There was no fear in this. Norm was a true original. He’d been locked away so long that he had no real sense of how others viewed him."

Aftermath of a hookup, told in the form of an interactive fiction game.

"It is possible that you did not sleep with her, but here she is, next to you, wearing your clothes. She also has your socks, a pristine new pair of tube socks, on her hands. That was probably enormously funny at the time. Some other time. Not at all funny now, what with you being naked. There are closed doors to the EAST and NORTH."

A grandmaster on the computers that have bested him and how we have misunderstood the implications of artificial intelligence.

How virtual worlds like Ultima Online form economies and the sellers who make a living in digital goods.

How the mind behind Lemmings and Grand Theft Auto plans to push gaming further.

Movies about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have failed to connect with viewers, but video games on the topic have broken sales records.