The Twelfth Annual Interactive Fiction Competition begins today. Non-contestants can take part in the proceedings by grabbing a torrent of the competing games and judging them over the next six weeks. If you're new to interactive fiction, Emily Short's "How to Play" will acquaint you with its conventions. And if you're enough of an I.F. expert that even a full slate of Comp games won't satisfy you, you can find every competition entry since 1995 archived at Baf's Guide.
posted by Iridic on Oct 1, 2006 - 3 comments

Ars Magna hosts The Anagrammy Awards, a monthly anagram competition. This got me thinking that we could "rearrange" the big acronym thread from a few weeks ago so that the first word or phrase of a comment would be an anagram of the last word or phrase of the previous comment. Sort of like this.
posted by coudal on Aug 22, 2003 - 25 comments

Need a job? The winner of the Google Puzzle Contest might recieve a prestigious spot in the Google engineering labs. So whip out all your old Martin Gardner books and get practicing, because the competition is on May 1st (and registration closes today).
posted by kaibutsu on May 29, 2003 - 6 comments

It starts with Delaware... Over at Google Answers, a Microsoft Games Studio employee has posted a most interesting puzzle to solve. Over the course of the last twenty months a list of states has been gradually revealed by his boss, but under what criteria are they listed? He's giving $200.00 to the winner; just think of what you could buy. The fine folks at the Straight Dope are already on the case. To the Googlemobile! [via Cardhouse]
posted by thewittyname on Aug 22, 2002 - 75 comments

The origin of "It's not a bug -- it's a feature."
Blame the Intellivision.
posted by NortonDC on Apr 17, 2002 - 15 comments

At first I found Junkyard Wars (imported) and thought it was the funniest show on TV. Then I found Iron Chef (also imported) and it was even better. I got hooked. Now I've found BattleBots (homegrown! Buy American!), and I have to wonder if TV has any more pleasant surprises for me. As long as I stay away from the big networks I seem to do fine.
posted by Steven Den Beste on Feb 25, 2001 - 21 comments

Sega is giving free Dreamcast consoles to anyone who signs up for their new Internet service.
posted by jjg on Apr 3, 2000 - 5 comments