Click, zoom in, and individual dots pop up from the nearest clusters: Everybody's Gone to the Rapture (2015), Red Dead Redemption (2010), Nancy Drew Dossier: Lights, Camera, Curses (2008). This is GameSpace, an experimental online tool designed to help you find the next video game to play. It won't just work for gamers, though – it could soon make life a bit better for anyone looking for the next great book or movie. Like the rest of us, gamers can't keep up with all the new titles constantly being published. "There are thousands and thousands of games," says James Ryan at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Nataliia Dmytriievska was 15 years old and enveloped by flames when she first heard the call of outer space. A year earlier her boyfriend had taught her the basics of poi, a Maori dance in which performers swing flaming, tethered weights to describe bright geometric shapes in the dark. Despite the burns and bruises she earned, Dmytriievska was a determined pupil. She would practice for hours each day, drawing flowers and other outlines around her body using dummy weights, before attempting the same perilous tricks using fire. Although money was never the primary motivation – "I simply love the fire; there is something magical when you feel like it's in your control," she said – after a few years Dmytriievska turned semi-professional. She joined a circus troupe in her home city of Kiev, Ukraine to help support her university studies. In June 2007, the troupe began rehearsals for an interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe's poem, The Raven. As the backing music sounded out for the first time – a pipe organ, played rhythmically, as if calling people to worship, soon joined by galloping guitars and a furious drumbeat – Dmytriievska took to the stage. But her mind was not on the performance. As soon as she finished the routine she left the stage, walked up to her friend on the mixing desk and asked: "Where is that music from?" Eve Online: how a virtual world went to the edge of apocalypse and back. The track, he said, came from Eve Online, a science-fiction video game. It is, he explained, a game set in a vast galaxy comprised of tens of thousands of stars and planets, and inhabited by half a million or so people from around the world, who explore and do battle together daily via the internet.