Vince Reid was interested in learning why one of the games he played on a regular basis had become so successful. He also wanted to find out whether other game designers were starting to adopt a similar approach. His Web searches led him to an online article that discussed the issue of game design in depth and that had a series of comments from readers.

Vince saved a copy of this article. Then he followed the links in it to related materials and saved those as well. Later, he printed a copy and highlighted key passages.