In this TED talk, Jane McGonigal argues that that complex games like World of Warcraft teach players important critical thinking skills and weave a social problem-solving fabric. She goes on to point out that humans have spent 5.9 million collective years playing World of Warcraft online, and that harnessing that sort of intense collaborative focus could actually precipitate solutions to real-world problems, if you build the right online games. She goes on to describe her latest effort, called Evoke.

I would also contend that this phenomenon holds true in large part for other social games that I spent a good bit of middle school immersed in: Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons. More recently, my friends and family have taken up German-style board games like Settlers of Catan. Obviously with these paper-based games, you don’t get to leverage the huge numbers of players and massive amount of information they can process in an online environment, but the immersive, collaborative, analytic elements are all there.

The unsettling element of her talk simply being another potential reason to open a WoW account.

NPR of course offers a spiffy web-based station finder map for scoring your closest Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me! or All Things Considered fix. But it’s a little too full-featured to work on a dinky mobile browser. But let’s also not kid ourselves about functionality here; this was an excuse to learn some super-basic PHP:

http://appratt.com/npr/

We’ll call this version 1.0 because it lacks anything resembling a design; it doesn’t verify that you’re feeding it ZIP codes or return appropriate error messages if nothing is in range; and it doesn’t indicate station strength (though station strength is something you can figure out pretty quickly with your tuner).

What is does do is query the NPR API and return a list of the closest stations with city and call number, ranked in order of proximity. Which is all you need when you know you’re missing Michelle Norris and all you can find is Delilah.

Some recent additions: Ida Maria, which @lauraolin reminded me of, brings an additional dose of dancearoundwithyourarmsintheair power. As well, any proper spring mix needs something that makes you feel like you could be sitting on a sunny stoop on Sesame Street: hence the Cat Stevens.

I developed some serious qualms with Pete and the Pirates, mainly because they’re not very good musicians, and listening to them in concert with groups like the Violent Femmes, who can not only harmonize three strange male voices and create more melody with a tenth as many notes, really doesn’t do the former band any justice. But I’m giving Pete the benefit of the season and keeping the sprightly tune in.

Now on many occasions, I’ve tried to engineer mixes that take you up, ease you down, and then roar back to a crescendo. That end, the I’ve kicked in some more juice with a double shot of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and what seemed like a necessity for a spring mix: Le Tigre.

As much as some of these new tracks could have made great closers, I took Kristen’s advice seriously and stayed with the Avett Bros. at the caboose. The transition from “All This Time” into “Paper Planes” was too good to lose though, so I kept M.I.A. I would have worried about leaving a single hip-hop track floating alone, but I’ve ended up with a enough variety between rock, folk, punk, indie, and riot grrrl, that I’m not too worried. I attempted to fold in some funk and R&B, but it wasn’t working. There will be plenty of room for James Brown on the next mix.

Here’s the final, which I’ve decided to entitle “Sunglasses,” for obvious reasons:

http://www.appratt.com/mixtapes/sunglasses/

Muxtape was a brilliant minimalist web app that allowed you to upload songs and share them in a cute playlist on a web page. The RIAA was all over that and shut it down after a brief, shining run.

So here’s the current version of the list (it’s not embeddable): http://www.appratt.com/mixtapes/spring09/

Got any suggestions? Leave them in the comments.

P.S.: If you are teaching a screen writing class in the near future, consider using Nick and Norah as an example of how to take the framework from a mediocre book and turn it into a decent movie script.