Addictive Tower Defense

I’m headed out of town for a few days, so I’ll leave you with yet another dangerously addictive game: Tower Defense. A friend of mine at work was spirited away by this game for a week. Each morning he would come in to work and explain to us his newest strategies for penetrating ever higher levels, enthusiastically diagramming his level designs at the white board. When he finally came out of his game-induced fugue state, he had no memory of the lost week. Just you consider that before you light-heartedly click that link.

Tower Defense was cited on TechCrunch, signifying its status as a genuine phenomenon. Naturally there is a collection of documentary YouTube videos where you can watch the pros at work.

I am fascinated by how sites like YouTube are quickly recruited by ad hoc communities to promote participation and set norms. A few months ago I saw a talk by instructables co-founder Eric Wilhelm on how that site supports the Knex gun community. That is to say, there is a group of people distributed across the world that specializes in making guns out of Knex toys. Want to see a Knex machine gun in action? Look at this video (YouTube, of course). And if you’re the kind of person who can be seduced by the idea of making Knex guns, you’ve now been infected.