Hello Everyone! I hope that you've all had a terrific Christmas and New Year break, and are as excited as I am about the possibilities and promise of 2013. I've been absent from Armchair Arcade for too long (again... job-related...), and am working on some articles to remedy that. (I still owe you good people the last article on the Houston Arcade Expo.) For now though, since it's the time of year that people tend get all gooey and sentimental, reflecting on the past so that they might get a better grip on the future, I thought I'd chat a bit about a topic near and dear to our hearts as gamers in the 21st century: SaaS - Software As A Service.

Hello everyone. I'm back after another long hiatus, brought on by that pesky "Real Life" stuff. This time, I'm coming at you with another multi-part article. In it, I want to discuss two concepts which should be near and dear to any gamer's heart:

• Zero-sum games, or zero-sum outcomes
• The danger and difficulty of "Truly Random"

In the past several weeks I've become hopelessly obsessed with these two concepts. I've thought about them so much, and contemplated how they fit (and how they don't fit) into my concepts of "Good Game Design", that I'm practically humming with nerdly thought-energy. I'm also itching to get as much feedback and as many opinions on the issue as I can. So please chime in with your thoughts, your experiences, and any anecdotes and stories which you can muster.

There's lots of interesting news in my Google Reader today. Perhaps the best place to start is an article on Gamasutra called Will 'Casual' Games Dominate the Future of the Industry?. This is a question Bill and I have been asking a lot lately on AA, and it's interesting to see how the opinions of the "professional analysts" GS pulled together compare with our own. I also have some news about upcoming Wii remakes, news of another "eye-based" controller, and more funny ads from GameSetWatch.