Welcome to the first post on Aliens in the Desert. This is yet another blog about game design, games as culture, and games as art. I will also be using it to chronicle the Save the Aliens project which I will describe in more detail in the near future. I am Heather Logas. I have just graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology with a master's degree in Information Design and Technology, where my focus was on game design and theory. While there, I helped establish and facilitate the Experimental Game Lab, a cross-departmental laboratory for exploring games and new modes of gameplay. Despite this background, I doubt the writing here will be especially academic. So what will you find here? I hope to be able to offer ramblings and rants that will encourage thought in the reader. I also would like to provide book reviews and game reviews for books and games I think would be important to the game researcher. I also would like to be able to make people aware of game-art related events and other things of note for those really interested in studying games. My areas of greatest interest include games as art, gamings' relationship with culture, independant development, "experimental" or "quirky" gameplay, gender issues in gaming, MMORPGs and role-playing in general, and the preservation of game history. Other blogs about gaming and how this one is different: Grand-Text Auto includes a much wider scope than just games, and is fairly academic in tone. Ludology.org is a fun site by a fun guy, but you will find my opinions on some matters to be much different than Gonzalo's. Game Girl Advance is a group blog that explores some similar themes to this one, but my blog will probably address more design issues. Games * Design * Art * Culture ... hey, that sounds like the beginning of this post. Greg Costikyan is amazing, and has some really great writing. This blog will be less industry-esque though, and hopefully with less vitriol. GameDevBlog is very design oriented. This blog will contain a much wider range of material. And, of course, all those blogs have a white background, whereas mine is more mysterious and harder to print. However, you should read all of these too, cuz very smart people write very smart things in them.