As we get closer to spring break, my projects have been kicked into high gear — I’m currently entering a pile of World of Warcraft data, analyzing discussion threads about The Legend of Zelda, and piloting an expertise study on Guitar Hero. I’ll have more to say on those when the projects reach fruition, but for now I can’t say much.

In terms of online writing, I’ve spent a fair amount of my time finding interesting things to post about over at Joystick101, a community blog that I have been a contributing writer for since its relaunch last month. The site is clearly still finding its legs, but check it out if you’re interested in games, gaming culture, and learning. I see myself as mainly just providing links to what other people are talking about on gaming and media blogs rather than being the kind of guy who writes a lot of long features. So, if you’re looking for shorter posts by me specifically on the topic of games and learning, you’ll find them there in my post archive. Anyone is welcome to register and submit a post — though it’s a WordPress blog, the site is transitioning into being more of a community site, and soon it should break out into having a larger reader and writer base. Look for good things here in the future.

Also, since I haven’t written voluminously on my own site yet, I’ll use this post to publically force myself to pin down what my next few blog posts will be about. My former students know that similar promises of mine in the classroom rarely worked out (e.g. “I swear, I’ll get those papers back to you next week, and, oh yeah, those other papers to you the week after that”). But, hope springs eternal, I suppose.

With that said, here are a few topics I’ve been mulling over for some longer posts:

• Will Wright! If you poke into my Joystick101 archive, you’ll see that I posted about Will Wright’s SXSW talk last week. There are a number of provocative ideas in Wright’s talk that need discussing, so I plan on taking a stab at a few of his ideas on narrative and science in games.
• Harry Potter! I just finished The Half-Blood Prince last weekend, and am finally caught up. I have a lot to say (and theorize) about how this series of books works, and will try to devote a post this week to the topic.
• Newspaper Blackout Poems! My friend (and former student) Austin Kleon is doing some amazing, awesome work which reminds me a lot of Oulipo and Oubapo experiments in constructing literature and comics.
• Fantasy baseball! It’s springtime (thankfully!), and I’m commissioner in our local Games+Learning+Society group’s fantasy baseball league. We start up next weekend with a draft, and then it’s several months of me staring at statistics to figure out how to better predict which middle relievers will be a surprisingly dominant closer when shifted into that role mid-season. Also, I’m going to be a participant for a colleague’s new study on fantasy baseball and competition, so that should provide me a few posts of baseball geekery.
• PMOG! That’s “Passively Multiplayer Online Game,” a new Justin Hall creation that a lot of people I know are playing with. It’s really buggy, superfluous, and occasionally embarassing — but, um, it’s fun. I think? I’m not sure yet, and I’ll hopefully work out my thoughts about this with a post to my weblog.
• lolcats! I am reading I Can Has Cheezburger pretty much every day, and I don’t understand why. This is another one of those “I sense something signficant is going on in a context that is ridiculous,” but I’m as yet not sure what I want to say about it.

So, hopefully some of these topics are interesting to you. If not, delete your bookmark now! Before it’s too late!