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The astonishing thing about these maps of video game worlds is how much smaller and less complicated they look when you see them this way. (Kottkettish.)

Best ever. Adrian H has recorded a gypsy jazz version of the Super Mario Bros. 2 main theme, and it’s crazy delicious, much like the game itself.

SMB2 was the unsung Super Mario Bros. game, and I could never figure out why. The feminist in me always appreciated that the Princess in SMB2 was finally given some agency beyond being the helpless, fainting damsel in distress that drives the plot in most Mario games. And she had the power of levitation, which was much cooler than Mario’s janky raccoon tail in SMB3. (Although his cape in Super Mario World was excellent.) The game also had a very cool, cute, recognizably Japanese aesthetic about it. And something about plucking and chucking vegetables was oddly comforting. Two thumbs up, to the game, and its gypsy jazz revival.

But this one’s free! Someone try out Enemy Nations and tell us if it’s any good. According to TRFJ, it’s “billed as

The WaPo shut off comments on its meta-blog today, making it the latest victim of Internet trollery in a long trail that stretches from LA to North Carolina and beyond.

An angel dies every time this happens. The folks in news organizations who are already against the idea of strengthening the relationship between the editors in the newsroom and the ones outside it just feel vindicated by setbacks like this. In the news world, the Wikipedia Wars are actually only battles in a wider conflict. Many journalists still believe our only role can be telling folks what we think they need to hear. I, of course, come down on the side of those who believe all these hassles are worth it if it means a true dialogue with the “people formerly known as the audience.”

As we get smarter about creating platforms for interactivity, incidents like those that burned the WaPo and the LA Times will happen less frequently. An intelligent approach to the Web doesn’t involve either totally free, unmitigated chaos or rigid hierarchical control.

I remember being all bummed out when Lifehacker introduced comments by invitation only. The other day, my itch to comment on an LH thread was so strong that I actually — gasp — used the e-mail feedback link and sent in my comment the old “letter to the editor” way. Moments later, I received an e-mail from LH associate editor Adam Pash inviting me to sign up as a Lifehacker commenter. So the threshold is seriously low to be a commenter on Lifehacker, but I imagine it’s the simplest possible thing for the editors to close the account of someone who’s become a problem contributor. Call this approach Domesticated Chaos.

Of course, news sites probably can’t vet every person who wants to contribute, and I don’t think they’d need to. If only one registered users of WashingtonPost.com could comment, and if their comment histories were linked from their profiles — as is the case on a blog like MetaFilter — that would make contributors much more accountable for their words. And it would make it much easier for site administrators to ban the small minority of troublemakers who tend to ruin forums like these for the majority.

If WaPo editors want even more filters than that, they could institute a Kuro5hin-esque system of comment ratings. (Scoop is free, after all.) Since WaPo.com’s editors are so concerned about the level of discourse in their forums, why are they using TypePad, of all things? Why not implement a system that’s 1) free and 2) much better suited for sorting wheat from chaff?

The folks behind these sites are smart cookies, though. I imagine they’ll hit on a solution soon, and open up comments again. I hope so.

Oh, and WaPo.com? Your slip is showing. (In case it’s fixed, here’s a screenshot.)

Plus: More on trollery, by David Pogue.

If:book presents a fun, intelligent metaphor for thinking of Wikipedia: it’s the “ask the audience” lifeline from “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?”

PS: I never saw this NY Times graphic before, but it’s my new favorite thing.

Fresno Famous has been redesigned and Drupalized and is a wonder to behold.

What’s wrong with this photograph? (Answer in the extended entry.)

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I started reading this post by Chris Bateman about theories of play and got sucked in despite the jargon, and I’m quite happy about it. It ends up framing a very interesting discussion about games in a light I’d never considered before.

Imagine that “play” is a continuum stretching from freeform, imaginative anarchy (“paidia”) at one end to rules-based order (“ludus”) at the other. As children, we start out with a natural tendency towards paidia — we play nonsense games with dolls, we build worlds out of Legos, we bat about aimlessly with sticks, with no rules or direction in mind. (Although one theorist mentioned in the post argues that the unspoken cultural ‘rules’ underpinning these games are stricter and more elaborate than those you’d find in an instruction manual.) Paidia tends to be short-lived, generally evolving into ludus. As we play with our dolls and our Legos and our sticks, we start developing more and more rules and logical structures for our play. The dolls start acting out a scenario. The sticks find a target and a purpose.

As we age, we tend to skip paidia altogether and head straight for the ludus. Adults play card games and sports and board games with rulesets that are complicated from the outset. And the geeks among us prize those games with incredibly Byzantine engineering — turn-based role-playing games, for example. These are games that have been carefully designed to incorporate many different patterns of play — strategy, chance, competition, mimicry — into a seamless whole.

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Grant McCracken riffs on three models for how the Net is changing the world: 1) It’s cutting out the middlemen. 2) It’s allowing microcultures to flourish. 3) It’s reforming the idea of the idea. The post isn’t really dense or light, but slightly abstract and pretty interesting. McCracken doesn’t necessarily contend that all or any of these models is actually true.

Search Web comics! (Via Google Blogoscoped.)