Do you know who Nina Freeman is? You should! She's pioneering a very different kind of video game that's caught hold of the indie gaming scene. Ben Coleman talked to her about the anti-first-person-shooter, the challenges of making autobiographical work, and her new game, Cibele. From their conversation:

Freeman's games typically encompass only a single scene or theme, and you can play through her entire back-catalog in under an hour. In How Do You Do It?, for example, the player controls a pair of unclothed dolls in the hands of an 11-year-old girl while she ruminates on the nature of physical intimacy. "It's frequent that people come up to us and are like, 'Whoa, I didn't know a game could be about something like this,'" Freeman says. Which is sort of the point for Freeman and Butler: "The story comes first, and then the mechanics grow out of that."

Remember the Oregon Trail? The only childhood computer game to indifferently tell you, "You have died of dysentery"? Journalist Rinker Buck took a ride on the real one (yep, it still exists, sort of), so the rest of us don't have to! He reads from his memoir about the trip, The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey, at Powell's tomorrow. In the meantime, here's a snippet of my review of the book, which was DELIGHTFUL:

In 2011, facing divorce and the decline of his newspaper, with neuroses at peak control-freak and self-esteem headed south, Buck did what's fast becoming the norm in a particular juncture between memoir and travel writing: He went on a crazy, impractical journey—in this case, traveling the Oregon Trail in an actual covered wagon driven by a team of mules, with his brother and a dog named Olive Oyl.

If you're wondering if Buck's book fits into the sorta-memoir, sorta-adventure genre characterized by writers like Cheryl Strayed and even (UNPOPULAR OPINION ALERT) the actually okay Elizabeth Gilbert, it does. It's a meandering journey into histories both personal and collective. It's also just a wonderful jaunt, with mules!

Meanwhile, Robert Ham caught up with Joe Mande, who's written for Parks & Recreation and Kroll Show, and who we should all thank profusely for the glory that is Look at This Fucking Hipster. Mande talked about the challenges of being a comedian who's more famous for his Twitter account than for, you know, COMEDY:

When he's not retweeting insane messages from corporations and pissing off low-level celebrities like Fox News personality Greta Van Susteren and former NBA player Gilbert Arenas (both blocked him), he engages in ridiculous stunts like buying a million followers via companies in Moldova and Sri Lanka.

"I'm not psyched about it," Mande says of his Twitter-based infamy. "But that's also why I'm excited to do these shows, so people can see that I'm actually a comedian rather than just a faceless angry voice on the internet. That really doesn't reflect how I am as a human being."

Mande's at Mississippi Studios Saturday night. Get off Twitter and go see him!