Ed: Welcome to iMore’s author spotlight column. Every Friday, we’ll be bringing you the perspective and charm of the best and brightest minds in the Apple and tech community. This week: Games journalist and podcaster Maddy Myers.

While walking home the other day with a well-read friend of mine who doesn’t identify as a “gamer” — but has an Angry Birds history on his iPhone that would argue otherwise — I brought up BioShock: Infinite. I had assumed, given my friend’s interest in activism and politics, that he’d be interested in hearing about the game’s attempts at social critique, however ham-fisted. We never got that far.

“What do you mean, it has a sad ending?” he interrupted. “Do you mean you lost?”

“No, no – I beat it,” I said. “Everybody gets the same ending.”

“That’s impossible!” he sputtered. “You should try it again, just in case!”

I walked in a lot of conversational circles as I explained that actually the game was meant to be a very serious narrative experience, and that many games of this type often only give you one ending. Call of Duty games only have one ending, I told him, and everybody sees the same cut-scenes. Same goes for The Last Of Us, and all the Halo games …

“But when I play Tetris, it’s different every time,” he said. “If everybody gets the same ending, how is that even a game? Maybe you’re supposed to look up a cheat code? I mean… I don’t know, I’m not a gamer.”

It’s hard to say which of us is a really a “gamer” when neither of us would agree on what is or isn’t a “game,” though, right?

I jest, but that exact argument has dominated my insular games industry world for years now. Videogame academics debate the definition of game-hood, game critics wax poetic about “gamer identity,” and game developers try to innovate upon their art while still hoping to appeal to the diverse expectations of “gamers” and “non-gamers” alike. But most “non-gamers” I know play plenty of games: They just don’t identify under that “gamer” label, and as such, often get shut out of the “hardcore” gaming space whether they want to be or not.

There are some technical and financial barriers to entry in the world of digital console games, but most of the barriers that I see for “non-gamers” are psychological. I very often hear friends say, “I’m not a gamer” right before listing off the reams of games they have played. I could blame their behavior on some faceless “gamer culture,” and say that videogame marketing has created a stereotype of gamers that doesn’t fit reality … but I think I deserve a little blame, too.

As I wrote this piece, I cringed to remember the dates I’ve gone on with people who struggled through co-op games with me, back when I thought that Gears of War mastery meant having the chops to be a great life partner (not true, by the way). I tried and failed to get my current significant other to play a single Halo campaign, and in shame I now recall my inability to mask my own frustration when he told me it wasn’t ever going to be fun for him. I remember my mother begging me to watch her play the Doctor Who Google doodle: She thought I would have some idea of how to help her beat it faster because I’m a “gamer.” I remember telling her that just because I’m a “gamer” doesn’t mean I automatically excel at all games, and that she was actually doing a fantastic job, really. I meant it. She didn’t believe me.

Our “non-gaming” friends are not stupid – but they have been led to believe that they are. Perhaps it was some frustrated friend who ripped the controller from their hands and said “just let me do it,” or a game commercial packed with slang terms they didn’t understand and people who didn’t look like them, or a bevy of sarcastic forum-goers, or intimidating online multiplayer lobbies, or the sense that not being able to afford games as a kid meant that they’d never be able to “catch up” as an adult… or all of the above.

This story doesn’t end with me overcoming my jerky “gamer” attitude and convincing my significant other to play Halo with me after all. Instead, it ends with us bonding over a game that we both didn’t know how to play particularly well at first: Street Fighter. Neither of us has become a Street Fighter expert in the past year, but because we learned together, we’ve progressed at more or less the same rate. There’s so much depth to Street Fighter that we’ll probably never be done learning, and even at this point, I wouldn’t classify either one of us as “good.” But that’s exactly why it’s become a mainstay of our date nights: we’re both equally bad. So, everybody wins – and loses. It’s 50/50.

So if you really want to get your non-gaming friend into a game, choose one that you don’t know anything about. Remember what it’s like to feel vulnerable. Let them see you screw up. Look up a walk-through together. Show them how much of gaming is about trial and error and learning – and that learning doesn’t take a lifetime. (Maybe just an hour or two.)

Nike today updated their long-standing FuelBand app to offer integration with Apple’s Health app and services. In the process, the FuelBand app also dropped what has long been a requirement for the app to function: the Nike FuelBand itself. Accordingly, the app is now just “Nike+ Fuel”.

Users of the iPhone 5s and newer can now use the built-in constant motion tracking of the M-series co-processor to log their activity information in the form of NikeFuel points in both the FuelBand app and into Health.

The move to drop the requirement for the FuelBand isn’t a huge surprise, given that the most recent FuelBand edition was announced back in October of 2013, followed by Nike closing their hardware development shop in April of last year.

Apart from Health integration and dropping the FuelBand tracker requirement, the FuelBand app also includes a new feed tracker that pulls in integrations with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Nike+ (and posts out to them) to create something of a meta social experience.

• Free – Download Now

The newly-released Sift app for iPhone and iPad offers yet another gesture-based method for sorting through your emails. The app, which presents you with one email at a time offers you the option to swipe up, down, left, or right to trigger options including marking the email as read, keeping it, deleting it, adding a star and more. Think of it as Tinder, but for your email.

Sift follows up on the two-option Triage email sorting by throwing in four directions and a multitude of options. You choices are:

• Keep
• Snooze
• Mark as read
• Archive
• Delete
• Star
• Mark as spam

You can also easily tap on the reply button in the top right corner of an email to, well, send a reply (or forward said email).

There’s a free lite version of Sift with support for a single email account, while the $2.99 paid version offers multiple accounts (with their own colors and grouping).

• Sift Life (Free) – Download Now
• Sift ($2.99) – Download Now

WhatsApp is one of the most popular messaging clients around, especially for Windows Phone users. One limitation though with the app is the inability to send particular videos due to their size. Whatsapp force-edits (shortens) your video to meet the 16 MB requirement for sending videos, which is a bit odd.

Luckily, there is now a solution through a free third-party app called WhatsApp Video Optimizer.

After taking a few months off, Microsoft is going after Apple’s Siri digital assistant once again with two new videos posted on its Lumia YouTube channel. Both of them have a Valentine’s Day theme and show people who have “broken up” with Siri in favor of their new love, Microsoft’s Cortana.

Happy Friday, everyone! Hope you are all looking forward to the weekend. Although, if you live in New England, like I do, you have another foot or more of snow on the way.

Oh well, que sera, sera. Here are your 5 Intriguing Apps for Windows 8.1 for the week.

It’s no secret that Microsoft has done pretty well with low-priced, budget spec Windows Phones. The Lumia 520 to this date is still one of the most popular Windows Phones of all time, and there have been several since. Joining the likes of the 530, 535 and 630/635 now is this, the Lumia 435. And with a drop down from 5 to 4, it’s easy to presume that this is the new standard for the entry level device.

Announced with the 532 as only the second (and third) devices to come with the Microsoft badge over the old Nokia one, the 435 enters a crowded space. And it’s crowded through Microsoft’s own doing. There’s such a selection at the budget end that it’s hard to choose an outright winner. The Lumia 435 has to compete against several of its own siblings, and it’s capable of holding its own.

Read on for our first impressions.

Microsoft has now unlocked all of the premium features for its PC desktop version of OneNote 2013 for Windows 7 and 8.1. The company previously made its note-taking application free for personal use for PC desktop owners but until today certain features did require an subscription to Office 365.

The Microsoft Store site has a special President’s Day sale on the ASUS X205 notebook with Windows 8.1. From now until Monday, Feb. 16, the 11.6-inch laptop is priced at just $149, or $50 lower than its already cheap cost of $199.

The federal government of the United States is picking up support for Apple Pay, on both sides of the equation. Not only are Apple Pay-compatible payment terminals coming to your friendly neighborhood federal government agency office, but the federal government is poised to start paying for things with Apple Pay as well.

The federal government actually has their own credit cards to employees for official expenses (GSA SmartPay from the General Services Administration) as well as Direct Express debit cards given to those receiving Social Security and veterans benefits payments. And the government’s working on making those cards Apple Pay compatible.

So all the parties involved are working to make this happen:

Apple, Visa, MasterCard, Comerica Bank and U.S. Bank are committed to working together to make Apple Pay, a tokenized, encrypted service, available for users of federal payment cards, including DirectExpress and GSA SmartPay cards.

As you can imagine, with the federal government involved this likely won’t happen quickly or simply. Your author has used a GSA SmartPay card before to purchase fuel for a government vehicle and, let me tell you, it’s a process (there’s a code on the card that you have to enter at the pump, and it also demands the mileage of the vehicle that’s associated with that card — yes, the card’s issued to a vehicle and not a person). But it’s a good sign to see even the federal government looking at an emerging technology like contactless payments and wanting to hop on the bandwagon.

Source: White House; Via: Bloomberg