Although Benny Torres recently graduated from college with a degree in psychology and advertising, he got his current job simply by being himself: a 23-year-old guy who's totally into videogames.

Torres spends most of his waking hours playing the latest games and reading all the latest gaming news and gossip online. And since last year, he's been doing it from a cubicle in the Chicago headquarters of ad agency Leo Burnett.

Torres first joined Burnett as an intern last June—and quickly became known as the go-to guy on videogames. Creatives on the Nintendo account turned to Torres for answers on everything from the key plot points of games to the types of fonts that were used in them. By fall, he had a full-time staff job as an associate planner. That's his official title, but unofficially, he's still the go-to guy on videogames.

"We just realized what an incredible wealth of knowledge he had about Nintendo, about gamers, about their habits, about where they talk and where they live," says Rose Cameron, senior vice president and planning director for Leo Burnett.

Now, Torres' job is to research any games that Burnett is going to develop ads for. He pulls together a "game brief" on how it's played, its history, and the advance buzz about it from the dozens of videogame-related websites, blogs, and message boards that he reads on a regular basis.

"I basically scour the Web for anything and everything that I can possibly find about it," says Torres. He also relies on the connections he's built from blogging about gaming in the past and from attending industry events and conferences.

Torres' game brief was instrumental in the development of a recent television ad for Mario Kart Wii, a cart-driving game. In the commercial, a huckster named Cowboy Jed enthusiastically tells viewers to check out all the carts they can drive in the game as banjo music jangles in the background.

"I made sure our whole team understood this whole game is all about the mayhem and the frenzy and just the craziness of racing," Torres says. The resulting ad was "very true to the spirit of the game," he adds.

The Miami native got his first game system, a Nintendo Entertainment System, when he was not yet 5-years old, and even recalls seeing the delivery truck pull up to his house from his bedroom window. His parents had been avid Atari players when they were younger, and their enthusiasm for videogames rubbed off on him (Torres remembers playing Wheel of Fortune with his mom until late into the night on one occasion).

Torres says his favorite game remains the 1998 action-adventure game, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, for the Nintendo 64. The bestselling game, in which the player has to travel through time to defeat an evil king, was one of the first to incorporate high-quality 3-D graphics. "It's almost like the Gone With the Wind of videogames," Torres says. "It was the first game, for me, that created an immersive world that I truly lost myself in."

Torres realizes that getting to play and talk about games like Zelda and its successors is a dream gig, and he credits the videogame industry for being one that inspires such enthusiastic consumers.

"Honestly, I feel just really lucky to be given the opportunity," he says. "I don’t think there's much of a passionate fan base for laundry detergent."

For our photo contest this week, we're taking it back to basics. We want you to take a cue from Miles Davis and show us your kind of blue.

Use the Reddit widget below to submit your best blue photo and vote for your favorite among the other submissions. The 10 highest-ranked photos will appear in a gallery on the Wired.com homepage. Show us buckets of sapphires dumped into deep pools of azure. Show us your tongue turned neon blue from electric Kool-Aid. Show us what happens when you take the blue pill.

The photo must be your own, and by submitting it you are giving us permission to use it on Wired.com and in Wired magazine. Please submit images that are relatively large, the ideal size being 800 to 1200 pixels or larger on the longest side. Please include a description of your photo, which may include exposure information, equipment used, etc.

We don't host the photos, so you'll have to upload it somewhere else and submit a link to it. If you're using Flickr, Picasa or another photo-sharing site to host your image, please provide a link to the image directly and not just to the photo page where it's displayed. If your photo doesn't show up, it's because the URL you have entered is incorrect. Check it and make sure it ends with the image file name (XXXXXX.jpg).

Please bookmark this page and check back periodically over the next two weeks to vote on new submissions!

Also, check out the winner's galleries from our previous contests: Holga, Red, Self-Portrait, Night, Macro, Transportation and Black and White.

Vote on blue photos submitted by other readers.

Show entries that are: hot | new | top-rated. Submit your blue photo.

Submit your blue photo.

(No more than one every 30 minutes. No HTML allowed.)

Back to top

• The iPhone's processor thinks almost twice as fast as the Sony PSP's brain.
• Its touchscreen is more responsive than the Nintendo DS's, recognizing subtle finger taps, pinches, and spreads.
• The three-axis accelerometer, like the one in the Wiimote, could replace the thumbstick — Sega has already exploited this ability for an iPhone port of Super Monkey Ball.
• Wi-Fi could make for mean multiplayer mayhem.
• Cell-tower triangulation could be used for location-aware games.
• Attention developers: Get to work!

After two weeks of being either tantalized or disgusted by the submissions in our food photo contest, Wired.com readers have selected 10 winners. Eirikso takes home the gold with his photo of eggs on the back of a motorcycle (left). Eirikso will receive a subscription to Wired magazine and a digital picture frame for his desk.

Since there were so many great photos that we thought should've received more votes, we've also compiled a gallery of the Top 10 Wired.com Food Photos, Decided by Us.

Our next twice-monthly photo contest is blue. We want you to exploit this color of introspection. Check out the contest page for more information.

Left:

One mistake and this turns into scrambled eggs.
Submitted by eirikso

Photographer's comment:

"With the current fuel prices it's too expensive to drive twice.”

Bannanannaana
Submitted by alex

Photographer's comment:

"A banana treat at the infamous Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo.”

Late-night ramen
Submitted by Janne

Photographer's comment:

"Late-night ramen stand in Namba, Osaka," Japan.

Watching the pot
Submitted by anonymous

Photographer's comment:

"Street food in the walled city of Xian, China."

How to put gyoza in the pan
Submitted by Elena Chesta Schwarz

Photographer's comment:

"My Japanese friend Sumi taught me how to place gyoza as a flower in an extremely hot greased pan. This photo shows how to make the first round in the middle of the pan, then you need to make the second and maybe the third round in the same way, going 'round and filling the holes."

Spice is nice!
Submitted by Andrew Wilson

Photographer's comment:

"Shot from a European farmer's market. Colorful, to say the least."

Yum!
Submitted by Rob Webster

Photographer's comment:

"International favorite!"

Spice souq
Submitted by John A. B.

Photographer's comment:

"Daydreaming in the spice souq. Taken in the old city of Sana'a," Yemen.

Infused vodka
Submitted by Bald Monk

Photographer's comment:

"Lime, chocolate and olive vodka splash."

Mercat de la Boqueria
Submitted by Olimax

Photographer's comment:

"Mercat de la Boqueria, Barcelona," Spain.

Though Wired.com readers selected 10 excellent photos in our food photo contest, we here at the Photo Department like to fight for the underdog. Here are our 10 favorite submissions that we think deserved more attention.

Our next twice-monthly photo contest is blue. We want you to exploit this infamous color of introspection. Check out the contest page for more information.

Left:

Bread crash
Submitted by PDB

Photographer's comment:

"Montevideo, Uruguay 35mm.”

Moules avec Crabes
Submitted by Dennis Flood

Photographer's comment:

"Dining on the square in Saint Mere Eglise (of D-Day fame). A tasty dish of moules turned a bit crunchy as the mussels had all eaten tiny little crabs. It tasted very well by the way."

Soup!!!
Submitted by dosyoyas

Photographer's comment:

"Mmmmm … tasty!"

Summertime BBQ
Submitted by AmsterS@m

Photographer's comment:

"BBQ in the park in Amsterdam, shot with my Sony Ericsson S700i mobile phone cam."

bird food
Submitted by pdw

Photographer's comment:

"Sometimes birds feed us, too."

Just a tourist in Miami, enjoying cold gelato on a hot day!
Submitted by Codisinc.com

Photographer's comment:

"Canon 5d 70-200mm L IS."

Sugary Goodness
Submitted by Elli

Photographer's comment:

"Froot Loops"

washing machine
Submitted by lkc45

Photographer's comment:

"Forks, knives, spoons, dishes, pans..."

Tsukiji Fishmarket, Tokyo
Submitted by Matthias Frey, komakino.ch

Photographer's comment:

"Auction at world's biggest fish market, Tsukiji, Tokyo."

Gloucester Old Spot
Submitted by Olimax

Photographer's comment:

"Gloucester Old Spot, rare-breed pig's head, main ingredient of Hure De Porc. See Larousse Gastronomique; Pork; Potted head."

1850: Florida physician John Gorrie uses his mechanical ice-maker to astonish the guests at a party. It's America's first public demonstration of ice made by refrigeration.

William Cullen had demonstrated the principle of artificial refrigeration in a University of Glasgow laboratory in 1748, by allowing ethyl ether to boil into a vacuum. American Oliver Evans designed in 1805 -- but never built -- a refrigeration machine that used vapor instead of liquid. Jacob Perkins used Evans' concept for an experimental volatile-liquid, closed-cycle compressor in 1834.

Nonetheless, mid-century cooling in the tropics and subtropics -- and in the temperate summer -- relied on natural ice blocks carved from frozen lakes and rivers in the North, kept in shaded sheds and cellars under layers of sawdust for insulation, and often delivered at great expense by specially fitted ice ships.

Gorrie was born in the tropics, on the Caribbean island of Nevis. He received his medical education in New York state before settling in the Florida cotton-shipping port of Apalachicola. There, he served at various times as mayor, justice of the peace, postmaster and bank president, besides carrying on his medical practice.

It would be another half-century before the causes of the killer diseases malaria and yellow fever were discovered, but Dr. Gorrie knew they relied on heat and moisture to propagate. He urged the draining of swamps and the enforcement of hygiene in the town's food market.

Gorrie also sought to improve the survival rate of his feverish patients by cooling them down. He suspended pans of ice water high in their sickrooms, so the cooled, heavy air would flow downward.

Gorrie began tinkering with compressor-coolers and had a working model by the mid 1840s. The power source was irrelevant to his invention: It could be driven by wind, water, steam or the brute force of an animal.

He applied for patents in 1848 and had a prototype built in Ohio by the Cincinnati Iron Works. It was described in Scientific American the following year, but Gorrie still had to attract venture capital to fight the existing ice-block industry.

He arranged a dramatic demonstration of his machine for a social, rather than medical, occasion. It was a muggy July in Florida. Ice from the North had been exhausted. Gorrie attended an afternoon reception given by the French consul to honor Bastille Day.

The doctor first complained about drinking warm wine in hot weather, then suddenly announced, "On Bastille Day, France gave her citizens what they wanted. [Consul] Rosan gives his guests what they want, cool wines! Even if it demands a miracle!"

Then he signaled for waiters to enter with bottles of sparkling wine on trays of ice. Mechanically made ice in the sweltering Florida summer: It was a sensation. Smithsonian magazine dubbed that party the "chilly reception."

Gorrie received a British patent a month later and U.S. patent 8,080 on May 6, 1851, but he failed at business. His business partner died, and Gorrie's inefficient, leaky machines were mocked in the press by the ice-shipping establishment. He died in poverty and ill health in 1855, still in his early 50s. It would take Frenchman Ferdinand P.E. Carre's closed, ammonia-absorption system (patented in 1860) to make way for practical, widespread mechanical refrigeration.

Florida has honored Gorrie by placing his statue in the National Statuary Hall collection in the U.S. Capitol. (The other Florida statue is Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith.)

So, have a happy Bastille Day (or joyeux Fête Nationale), chill out and lift a cold one to the father of refrigeration. You can use the very words spoken 158 years ago: "Let us drink to the man who made the ice: Dr. Gorrie."

Source: Smithsonian, John Gorrie State Museum

If you've ever played a really horrible game, you've probably thought: Wow, the people who made this are talentless. You fume at the derivative, seen-it-before gameplay; you complain that the levels are far too monotonous, or far too unmanageable. After a while, you throw down your controller and boast: Hell, I could make a game better than this.

Ah, but could you?

I recently found out when I spent some time with Blast Works, a brilliant new Wii title that allows you to create your own games. What I discovered is, as you might expect, it's pretty damn hard to make a fun game. You'll probably fail.

But in the process of doing so, you'll learn a ton about what makes a good game good. Or to put it another way: Designing games makes you a better connoisseur of them.

On the surface, Blast Works is a side-scrolling, spaceship-blasting game with a clever twist. Much like Gradius, you drift inexorably rightward, ever beset by blocky, polygonal enemies. But when you blast them into pieces, you can -- much as with Katamari Damacy -- swoop in and scoop up any loose parts, which then stick to your spaceship. Turrets from enemy guns remain functional, so you quickly can amass a huge, unruly mess of weapons that jut out from every direction. If you did nothing else but play the single-player component, you'd have fun.

But if you stopped there, you'd miss out on the philosophically rich treats to come.

Because also embedded inside Blast Works is an amazingly full-featured editor that lets you create customized spaceships, bullets and levels. Almost everything, from physics to camera zoom, is tweakable. Objects can be designed down to the last pixel if you're obsessed enough. Basically, it's everything you need to craft your own side-scrolling shooter.

Hot damn, I thought. I plunged into the editor and decided to try crafting a shooter with a nutty electric-guitar aesthetic. At first, it seemed really easy. In barely 10 minutes, I designed a crude Flying V-style ship. I crafted a couple of even more crude-looking enemies: Weak ones were shaped like guitar picks, and more-ferocious killers were shaped like ... well, big lumps of something or other. Hey, I'm tolerable at design, but only barely. And in any case, I was getting impatient to try out my creation. How would it play?

I loaded the game, hit Start, and when the Flying V ship drifted onscreen, I was hit with a giddy jolt of pride. Dude! I'm playing my own game!

But my pride quickly deflated, upon a sober realization: My game sucked.

I'd clustered the enemies far too closely together, making it impossible to avoid their attacks. Hell, I didn't even leave enough breathing space. The first notes of the ominous they're-here music had barely started when the armada arrived and sliced through me like I was soft cheese. I went back in and tinkered with the attack spacings, but found I quickly tipped into the opposite problem: Now the game was too easy. Hmmm.

Over the next few hours, two things happened. I got deep into the weeds of my game, tweaking and teasing the enemies and the landscape to try and balance things out. More important, I gained an amazingly rich sense of just how remarkable truly good game design is -- the talent that's necessary to reach that tightrope balance point where something's optimally challenging without being controller-chucking frustrating. I mean, if I was having this much trouble crafting a simple side-scroller -- one of the most rudimentary genres -- imagine trying to create a complex online world, an immersive shooter or a mystery game. How the hell do Blizzard, Bungie and Cyan do it?

Creating a game, in other words, makes you a better consumer of games, because it forces you to think concretely about the linguistics of the craft: balance, collisions, human motivation, camera work, artwork, physics. It's like how being required to write speeches and short stories in elementary school trains you to appreciate a truly spectacular novel or bit of oratory -- or how knowing how to play an instrument, even poorly, gives you a deeper insight into true musical genius.

But the fascinating thing is that there are lots of people out there who are pretty good at game design. If you go over to the Blast Works website, you can download ships, enemies, weapons and entire levels that gamers have created, and try them for yourself. The creativity is occasionally stunning.

There are re-creations of famous Nintendo characters like Mario and Link; there's even a precise rendition of the original Super Mario Bros. Someone assembled a hilariously spot-on homage to Star Wars. And one gamer, amazingly, re-created the look of Space Invaders by crafting a level so narrow it doesn't scroll -- and you thus remain on one screen.

I'm not suggesting that these are addictive, must-play games. No, they're more like fan fiction -- a way of thinking about what game design really is. They remind me of how new-media artists like Cory Arcangel have plundered old-school game environments as a form of cultural commentary. (Indeed, I've even now been inspired with my own quasi-artistic idea: I'm designing a Blast Works level that has no enemies at all -- just a backdrop of buildings that will slowly spell out a message in enormous letters as you scroll by. It's Gradius as a form of text messaging!)

Of course, Blast Works isn't entirely new: Many previous games have offered modding and editing tools before. But I've never seen any game that mixed such flexibility with relative simplicity -- and offered such a quick way to share your design ideas with others.

And at the very least, it allows you to finally answer your own windy boast: Man, I could do that.

Well, sure. Just try.

- - -

Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, collision detection.

Although Benny Torres recently graduated from college with a degree in psychology and advertising, he got his current job simply by being himself: a 23-year-old guy who's totally into videogames.

Torres spends most of his waking hours playing the latest games and reading all the latest gaming news and gossip online. And since last year, he's been doing it from a cubicle in the Chicago headquarters of ad agency Leo Burnett.

Torres first joined Burnett as an intern last June—and quickly became known as the go-to guy on videogames. Creatives on the Nintendo account turned to Torres for answers on everything from the key plot points of games to the types of fonts that were used in them. By fall, he had a full-time staff job as an associate planner. That's his official title, but unofficially, he's still the go-to guy on videogames.

"We just realized what an incredible wealth of knowledge he had about Nintendo, about gamers, about their habits, about where they talk and where they live," says Rose Cameron, senior vice president and planning director for Leo Burnett.

Now, Torres' job is to research any games that Burnett is going to develop ads for. He pulls together a "game brief" on how it's played, its history, and the advance buzz about it from the dozens of videogame-related websites, blogs, and message boards that he reads on a regular basis.

"I basically scour the Web for anything and everything that I can possibly find about it," says Torres. He also relies on the connections he's built from blogging about gaming in the past and from attending industry events and conferences.

Torres' game brief was instrumental in the development of a recent television ad for Mario Kart Wii, a cart-driving game. In the commercial, a huckster named Cowboy Jed enthusiastically tells viewers to check out all the carts they can drive in the game as banjo music jangles in the background.

"I made sure our whole team understood this whole game is all about the mayhem and the frenzy and just the craziness of racing," Torres says. The resulting ad was "very true to the spirit of the game," he adds.

The Miami native got his first game system, a Nintendo Entertainment System, when he was not yet 5-years old, and even recalls seeing the delivery truck pull up to his house from his bedroom window. His parents had been avid Atari players when they were younger, and their enthusiasm for videogames rubbed off on him (Torres remembers playing Wheel of Fortune with his mom until late into the night on one occasion).

Torres says his favorite game remains the 1998 action-adventure game, The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, for the Nintendo 64. The bestselling game, in which the player has to travel through time to defeat an evil king, was one of the first to incorporate high-quality 3-D graphics. "It's almost like the Gone With the Wind of videogames," Torres says. "It was the first game, for me, that created an immersive world that I truly lost myself in."

Torres realizes that getting to play and talk about games like Zelda and its successors is a dream gig, and he credits the videogame industry for being one that inspires such enthusiastic consumers.

"Honestly, I feel just really lucky to be given the opportunity," he says. "I don’t think there's much of a passionate fan base for laundry detergent."

For our photo contest this week, we're taking it back to basics. We want you to take a cue from Miles Davis and show us your kind of blue.

Use the Reddit widget below to submit your best blue photo and vote for your favorite among the other submissions. The 10 highest-ranked photos will appear in a gallery on the Wired.com homepage. Show us buckets of sapphires dumped into deep pools of azure. Show us your tongue turned neon blue from electric Kool-Aid. Show us what happens when you take the blue pill.

The photo must be your own, and by submitting it you are giving us permission to use it on Wired.com and in Wired magazine. Please submit images that are relatively large, the ideal size being 800 to 1200 pixels or larger on the longest side. Please include a description of your photo, which may include exposure information, equipment used, etc.

We don't host the photos, so you'll have to upload it somewhere else and submit a link to it. If you're using Flickr, Picasa or another photo-sharing site to host your image, please provide a link to the image directly and not just to the photo page where it's displayed. If your photo doesn't show up, it's because the URL you have entered is incorrect. Check it and make sure it ends with the image file name (XXXXXX.jpg).

Please bookmark this page and check back periodically over the next two weeks to vote on new submissions!

Also, check out the winner's galleries from our previous contests: Holga, Red, Self-Portrait, Night, Macro, Transportation and Black and White.

Vote on blue photos submitted by other readers.

Show entries that are: hot | new | top-rated. Submit your blue photo.

Submit your blue photo.

(No more than one every 30 minutes. No HTML allowed.)

Back to top

• The iPhone's processor thinks almost twice as fast as the Sony PSP's brain.
• Its touchscreen is more responsive than the Nintendo DS's, recognizing subtle finger taps, pinches, and spreads.
• The three-axis accelerometer, like the one in the Wiimote, could replace the thumbstick — Sega has already exploited this ability for an iPhone port of Super Monkey Ball.
• Wi-Fi could make for mean multiplayer mayhem.
• Cell-tower triangulation could be used for location-aware games.
• Attention developers: Get to work!

After two weeks of being either tantalized or disgusted by the submissions in our food photo contest, Wired.com readers have selected 10 winners. Eirikso takes home the gold with his photo of eggs on the back of a motorcycle (left). Eirikso will receive a subscription to Wired magazine and a digital picture frame for his desk.

Since there were so many great photos that we thought should've received more votes, we've also compiled a gallery of the Top 10 Wired.com Food Photos, Decided by Us.

Our next twice-monthly photo contest is blue. We want you to exploit this color of introspection. Check out the contest page for more information.

Left:

One mistake and this turns into scrambled eggs.
Submitted by eirikso

Photographer's comment:

"With the current fuel prices it's too expensive to drive twice.”

Bannanannaana
Submitted by alex

Photographer's comment:

"A banana treat at the infamous Yasukuni shrine in Tokyo.”

Late-night ramen
Submitted by Janne

Photographer's comment:

"Late-night ramen stand in Namba, Osaka," Japan.

Watching the pot
Submitted by anonymous

Photographer's comment:

"Street food in the walled city of Xian, China."

How to put gyoza in the pan
Submitted by Elena Chesta Schwarz

Photographer's comment:

"My Japanese friend Sumi taught me how to place gyoza as a flower in an extremely hot greased pan. This photo shows how to make the first round in the middle of the pan, then you need to make the second and maybe the third round in the same way, going 'round and filling the holes."

Spice is nice!
Submitted by Andrew Wilson

Photographer's comment:

"Shot from a European farmer's market. Colorful, to say the least."

Yum!
Submitted by Rob Webster

Photographer's comment:

"International favorite!"

Spice souq
Submitted by John A. B.

Photographer's comment:

"Daydreaming in the spice souq. Taken in the old city of Sana'a," Yemen.

Infused vodka
Submitted by Bald Monk

Photographer's comment:

"Lime, chocolate and olive vodka splash."

Mercat de la Boqueria
Submitted by Olimax

Photographer's comment:

"Mercat de la Boqueria, Barcelona," Spain.

Though Wired.com readers selected 10 excellent photos in our food photo contest, we here at the Photo Department like to fight for the underdog. Here are our 10 favorite submissions that we think deserved more attention.

Our next twice-monthly photo contest is blue. We want you to exploit this infamous color of introspection. Check out the contest page for more information.

Left:

Bread crash
Submitted by PDB

Photographer's comment:

"Montevideo, Uruguay 35mm.”

Moules avec Crabes
Submitted by Dennis Flood

Photographer's comment:

"Dining on the square in Saint Mere Eglise (of D-Day fame). A tasty dish of moules turned a bit crunchy as the mussels had all eaten tiny little crabs. It tasted very well by the way."

Soup!!!
Submitted by dosyoyas

Photographer's comment:

"Mmmmm … tasty!"

Summertime BBQ
Submitted by AmsterS@m

Photographer's comment:

"BBQ in the park in Amsterdam, shot with my Sony Ericsson S700i mobile phone cam."

bird food
Submitted by pdw

Photographer's comment:

"Sometimes birds feed us, too."

Just a tourist in Miami, enjoying cold gelato on a hot day!
Submitted by Codisinc.com

Photographer's comment:

"Canon 5d 70-200mm L IS."

Sugary Goodness
Submitted by Elli

Photographer's comment:

"Froot Loops"

washing machine
Submitted by lkc45

Photographer's comment:

"Forks, knives, spoons, dishes, pans..."

Tsukiji Fishmarket, Tokyo
Submitted by Matthias Frey, komakino.ch

Photographer's comment:

"Auction at world's biggest fish market, Tsukiji, Tokyo."

Gloucester Old Spot
Submitted by Olimax

Photographer's comment:

"Gloucester Old Spot, rare-breed pig's head, main ingredient of Hure De Porc. See Larousse Gastronomique; Pork; Potted head."

1850: Florida physician John Gorrie uses his mechanical ice-maker to astonish the guests at a party. It's America's first public demonstration of ice made by refrigeration.

William Cullen had demonstrated the principle of artificial refrigeration in a University of Glasgow laboratory in 1748, by allowing ethyl ether to boil into a vacuum. American Oliver Evans designed in 1805 -- but never built -- a refrigeration machine that used vapor instead of liquid. Jacob Perkins used Evans' concept for an experimental volatile-liquid, closed-cycle compressor in 1834.

Nonetheless, mid-century cooling in the tropics and subtropics -- and in the temperate summer -- relied on natural ice blocks carved from frozen lakes and rivers in the North, kept in shaded sheds and cellars under layers of sawdust for insulation, and often delivered at great expense by specially fitted ice ships.

Gorrie was born in the tropics, on the Caribbean island of Nevis. He received his medical education in New York state before settling in the Florida cotton-shipping port of Apalachicola. There, he served at various times as mayor, justice of the peace, postmaster and bank president, besides carrying on his medical practice.

It would be another half-century before the causes of the killer diseases malaria and yellow fever were discovered, but Dr. Gorrie knew they relied on heat and moisture to propagate. He urged the draining of swamps and the enforcement of hygiene in the town's food market.

Gorrie also sought to improve the survival rate of his feverish patients by cooling them down. He suspended pans of ice water high in their sickrooms, so the cooled, heavy air would flow downward.

Gorrie began tinkering with compressor-coolers and had a working model by the mid 1840s. The power source was irrelevant to his invention: It could be driven by wind, water, steam or the brute force of an animal.

He applied for patents in 1848 and had a prototype built in Ohio by the Cincinnati Iron Works. It was described in Scientific American the following year, but Gorrie still had to attract venture capital to fight the existing ice-block industry.

He arranged a dramatic demonstration of his machine for a social, rather than medical, occasion. It was a muggy July in Florida. Ice from the North had been exhausted. Gorrie attended an afternoon reception given by the French consul to honor Bastille Day.

The doctor first complained about drinking warm wine in hot weather, then suddenly announced, "On Bastille Day, France gave her citizens what they wanted. [Consul] Rosan gives his guests what they want, cool wines! Even if it demands a miracle!"

Then he signaled for waiters to enter with bottles of sparkling wine on trays of ice. Mechanically made ice in the sweltering Florida summer: It was a sensation. Smithsonian magazine dubbed that party the "chilly reception."

Gorrie received a British patent a month later and U.S. patent 8,080 on May 6, 1851, but he failed at business. His business partner died, and Gorrie's inefficient, leaky machines were mocked in the press by the ice-shipping establishment. He died in poverty and ill health in 1855, still in his early 50s. It would take Frenchman Ferdinand P.E. Carre's closed, ammonia-absorption system (patented in 1860) to make way for practical, widespread mechanical refrigeration.

Florida has honored Gorrie by placing his statue in the National Statuary Hall collection in the U.S. Capitol. (The other Florida statue is Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith.)

So, have a happy Bastille Day (or joyeux Fête Nationale), chill out and lift a cold one to the father of refrigeration. You can use the very words spoken 158 years ago: "Let us drink to the man who made the ice: Dr. Gorrie."

Source: Smithsonian, John Gorrie State Museum

If you've ever played a really horrible game, you've probably thought: Wow, the people who made this are talentless. You fume at the derivative, seen-it-before gameplay; you complain that the levels are far too monotonous, or far too unmanageable. After a while, you throw down your controller and boast: Hell, I could make a game better than this.

Ah, but could you?

I recently found out when I spent some time with Blast Works, a brilliant new Wii title that allows you to create your own games. What I discovered is, as you might expect, it's pretty damn hard to make a fun game. You'll probably fail.

But in the process of doing so, you'll learn a ton about what makes a good game good. Or to put it another way: Designing games makes you a better connoisseur of them.

On the surface, Blast Works is a side-scrolling, spaceship-blasting game with a clever twist. Much like Gradius, you drift inexorably rightward, ever beset by blocky, polygonal enemies. But when you blast them into pieces, you can -- much as with Katamari Damacy -- swoop in and scoop up any loose parts, which then stick to your spaceship. Turrets from enemy guns remain functional, so you quickly can amass a huge, unruly mess of weapons that jut out from every direction. If you did nothing else but play the single-player component, you'd have fun.

But if you stopped there, you'd miss out on the philosophically rich treats to come.

Because also embedded inside Blast Works is an amazingly full-featured editor that lets you create customized spaceships, bullets and levels. Almost everything, from physics to camera zoom, is tweakable. Objects can be designed down to the last pixel if you're obsessed enough. Basically, it's everything you need to craft your own side-scrolling shooter.

Hot damn, I thought. I plunged into the editor and decided to try crafting a shooter with a nutty electric-guitar aesthetic. At first, it seemed really easy. In barely 10 minutes, I designed a crude Flying V-style ship. I crafted a couple of even more crude-looking enemies: Weak ones were shaped like guitar picks, and more-ferocious killers were shaped like ... well, big lumps of something or other. Hey, I'm tolerable at design, but only barely. And in any case, I was getting impatient to try out my creation. How would it play?

I loaded the game, hit Start, and when the Flying V ship drifted onscreen, I was hit with a giddy jolt of pride. Dude! I'm playing my own game!

But my pride quickly deflated, upon a sober realization: My game sucked.

I'd clustered the enemies far too closely together, making it impossible to avoid their attacks. Hell, I didn't even leave enough breathing space. The first notes of the ominous they're-here music had barely started when the armada arrived and sliced through me like I was soft cheese. I went back in and tinkered with the attack spacings, but found I quickly tipped into the opposite problem: Now the game was too easy. Hmmm.

Over the next few hours, two things happened. I got deep into the weeds of my game, tweaking and teasing the enemies and the landscape to try and balance things out. More important, I gained an amazingly rich sense of just how remarkable truly good game design is -- the talent that's necessary to reach that tightrope balance point where something's optimally challenging without being controller-chucking frustrating. I mean, if I was having this much trouble crafting a simple side-scroller -- one of the most rudimentary genres -- imagine trying to create a complex online world, an immersive shooter or a mystery game. How the hell do Blizzard, Bungie and Cyan do it?

Creating a game, in other words, makes you a better consumer of games, because it forces you to think concretely about the linguistics of the craft: balance, collisions, human motivation, camera work, artwork, physics. It's like how being required to write speeches and short stories in elementary school trains you to appreciate a truly spectacular novel or bit of oratory -- or how knowing how to play an instrument, even poorly, gives you a deeper insight into true musical genius.

But the fascinating thing is that there are lots of people out there who are pretty good at game design. If you go over to the Blast Works website, you can download ships, enemies, weapons and entire levels that gamers have created, and try them for yourself. The creativity is occasionally stunning.

There are re-creations of famous Nintendo characters like Mario and Link; there's even a precise rendition of the original Super Mario Bros. Someone assembled a hilariously spot-on homage to Star Wars. And one gamer, amazingly, re-created the look of Space Invaders by crafting a level so narrow it doesn't scroll -- and you thus remain on one screen.

I'm not suggesting that these are addictive, must-play games. No, they're more like fan fiction -- a way of thinking about what game design really is. They remind me of how new-media artists like Cory Arcangel have plundered old-school game environments as a form of cultural commentary. (Indeed, I've even now been inspired with my own quasi-artistic idea: I'm designing a Blast Works level that has no enemies at all -- just a backdrop of buildings that will slowly spell out a message in enormous letters as you scroll by. It's Gradius as a form of text messaging!)

Of course, Blast Works isn't entirely new: Many previous games have offered modding and editing tools before. But I've never seen any game that mixed such flexibility with relative simplicity -- and offered such a quick way to share your design ideas with others.

And at the very least, it allows you to finally answer your own windy boast: Man, I could do that.

Well, sure. Just try.

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Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, collision detection.