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Welcome to Freeware Friday, a weekly column showcasing excellent games that you can play free of charge!

It's not often that a game with the sort of clever manipulation of the environment like Portal comes along. For those keen on their history, though, there is Narbacular Drop, which was created by the Portal team while attending Digipen and shares the same sort of gameplay. This article is not about Narbacular Drop (although a future one might be!), but rather Tag: The Power of Paint, a game that brings to mind all the excellent gameplay innovations that Narbacular Drop displayed. It is one-of-a-kind, and here's hoping that a company like Valve takes notice, especially after it was one of the IGF Student Showcase finalists.

Welcome to the first installment of Big Ideas, where we'll talk about all aspects of our favorite hobby: video gaming. For an opening topic, let's take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Rather than discuss games in specific, judging the merits of one title over another, we'll ask the question that people who don't share our pastime inevitably put to us: Why do we play video games?

At the risk of seeming trite, an apt quote from Star Trek's Captain Kirk applies extremely well here: "The more complex the mind, the greater the need for the simplicity of play." The need for play is a primary component of human development (and possibly alien development as well, judging by the now-you-see-us, now-you-don't hijinks that lead to UFO sightings), and has been with us since the dawn of intelligence. Even in the less-sophisticated brains of animals can be seen the impetus that leads to play. So before we tackle video gaming, we should assess why we, as a species, need playtime so strongly.