Category: Uncategorized

Games, “Narrative,” and Gameplay

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I’m not going to link the article that spawned this essay, mostly because the headline, which provoked everyone, was slightly misleading compared to the content of the article. The gist was the article had a title like “Narrative-focused games should drop the hours of combat,” which most gamers understand to be part of the games-journo advocacy of games that don’t have gameplay. This has been going on for years, and I have been addressing it for years. The odd thing is, the games industry has been addressing this concern, despite the fact that the market already solved this problem and…

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Idols

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Idols are a problem to western society. No, I’m not writing today about the Japanese phenomenon surrounding teenage girls. What I’m thinking of is the idolatrous obsession over certain concepts that, through constant attempts to appease as if they are deities, inhibit discourse, clear thinking, and can even cause stumbling on your path to heaven. One of these, which I’ve talked about already, is Democracy. The idea that democracy as some unmitigated good is not just accepted as fact in the body politic, attempts to even suggest that it might merely be a conditional good, that is one that is…

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Games Preservation going forward

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I have a bigger predictions article in mind, but in the meantime, I just want to take the time to point out a big one: It’s going to get harder to game. Particularly, I am thinking of vintage, retro, classic games, etc. While I think lots of companies have made good efforts in bringing classic games over to new platforms, either in the form of simple ports (like the final fantasy games, particularly 7 and 9), or in the form of overhauls (the many “remastered” editions), there are many, many games that are not in such a place. This might…

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How to self-publish a book

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Occasionally, I get messages from people trying to break into the “traditional” (as in 20th century) publishing industry, and they always seem to be under some distress. In fact, the messages often come off like the pleading of abuse victims, with authors talking publicly on twitter sounding like battered women excusing their abuser. Everybody is aware of how lame it is to “pay” an agent (in reality, they pay you, and you better hope they are honest, unlike Chuck Palahniuk’s agent, who left him broke) to have coffee with someone at the publishing imprint, who then takes years to make…

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Schools and COVID

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As the new school year approaches, there are lots of concerns over Coronavirus spreading through schools. While the virus isn’t dangerous to children, it is potentially dangerous to those they might be in contact with, such as grandparents and other relatives with high-risk profiles. This has caused lots of scrambling. How can we continue the current school arrangement when schools are and always have been a giant pathological petri dish? If we abandon the current paradigm of grouping children by age in small boxes, how will they get “socialized”? How will our children learn without school? This pulls the mask…

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3 Easy Ways to Keep Short Fiction Short

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This was part of a response to a free audiobook of one of my short works (about 12k) words, which you can listen to for free below. The comment was concerning how to keep short fiction short. Writing short fiction is really a different beast than writing long fiction, and the skills are a different set. If you want to limit length, here are a few easy things: 1) Limit the scope. A few locations, or one, rather than many. A few characters, or even one, rather than many. 2) Keep it to one plot. “A” story only, no sub-plots.…

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The death cult forgets its mask

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I’m fairly certain they deleted the tweet because they realize they weren’t wearing their mask, so here is a screenshot: Murdering babies is badass you say? Something cool kids do? Too bad those uncool Spanish Christians put a stop to such a badass and admirable practice. Truly, the European man is evil for wiping such a badass cultural practice off the face of the earth. No respect for the religious beliefs of others, those wicked conquistadors. People wonder why I call it the death cult. It’s because they’re obsessed with death and promote it endlessly. If it’s not infanticide, it’s…

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Tolerance, “The Good” and the Social Order

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When it comes to assessing what kind of behavior ought to be accepted, tolerated, or punished, I find it useful to consider the categories of behavior in a social context. Keep in mind that this ordering is mostly in the context of the greater discussion of state power and its moral use, as well as the difficult question of what “the good” actually is. When it comes to undesirable behavior, that is behavior that the greater culture does not want or does not itself exercise, there are three categories: antisocial behavior, delinquent behavior, and deviant/degenerate behavior. Antisocial behavior is that…

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Portland

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Portland is a sanctuary city with no Latinos living in it. That’s a simple statement, but it sums up everything about the city’s culture – it’s all about signaling. And it’s the kind of signaling that’s an inversion of a regular business sign. A sign in front of a fruit stand advertises that they have a certain fruit because they have that fruit want you to come in and buy that fruit. The signaling the people of Portland do is pointed towards what they lack – virtue, taste, uniqueness, and quality. Virtue signaling is always a sure sign that virtue…

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Color: The Key to Impact and Emotion

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Time for something different – some tips on choosing the right colors for art, ad copy, and things like book covers. Let’s start with some examples of great fantasy art by Kerem Beyit: Kerem’s proficiencies are many, but one of the reasons his art has such a vivid “pop” and stands out so much is his use of color, specifically limited color range centered on two different (but rarely complementary) colors. Rather than attempting to go for some “realistic” approach to color representation, he distills things down to a few charged areas. The result is really eye catching. Notice in…

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