Clive Thompson on Weight Watchers as an RPG (role playing game).
As with an RPG, you roll a virtual character, manage your inventory and resources, and try to achieve a goal. Weight Watchers' points function precisely like hit points; each bite of food does damage until you've used up your daily amount, so you sleep and start all over again. Play well and you level up -- by losing weight! And the more you play it, the more you discover interesting combinations of the rules that aren't apparent at first. Hey, if I eat a fruit-granola breakfast and an egg-and-romaine lunch, I'll have enough points to survive a greasy hamburger dinner for a treat!
Clive Thompson on the new way to make it big in the music biz: spend hours a day communicating with your fans via the web. "Virtually everyone bemoaned the relentless and often boring slog of keyboarding. It is, of course, precisely the sort of administrative toil that people join rock bands to avoid."
Update: Related: How to Be a Star in a YouTube World.
Clive Thompson on the invention of new sports. "Why don't more people invent new sports? After all, we live in a golden age of play. The video-game industry is bristling with innovation." When I was in the Caribbean a few months ago, some folks on the beach were playing this newish game that they called Golf Toss. It's also called Ladder Ball and is kind of like horseshoes except your throw two golf balls on a rope instead of a horseshoe.
Clive Thompson on Life Hackers in the NY Times. I'd informally heard about the benefit of larger screens on productivity (I feel more productive with a larger screen), but this article describes some study results: "On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly - and some as much as 44 percent more quickly."
Clive Thompson enjoys the miniest of mini games, one-button games (more here and here): "video games that have a single button to control all the action". Many of the mini games in Wario Ware use only one control and only last 3-4 seconds.
Don Watson and Clive Thompson on the assembly-lining of thought and discourse via modern jargon. "That's the true malaise of modern jargon: It forces people to treat any subject as if it were always a managerial problem of inputs and outputs."
