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Once Upon a WTF
Okay, so generally I've been getting pretty into "Once Upon a Time", and though the dialogue is terrible terrible terrible, the plotting is interesting and many of you know my love of retellings and it's pushing a lot of buttons so don't judge. [Spoilers for stuff that is already rotten, believe me.]
Until. The Snow White/Prince Charming storyline, which in its attempt to do both Destined Love and ( Read more... ) -
Oh well.
[Spoiler (click to open)]They threw beams of light at each other until a deus ex machina Jenora became the pesky light inside the darkness and was extracted to recreate Rava without destroying Jenora WHAT
Oh well. -
Fixing Korra
While holed up with a pretty high fever, I dreamed/thought of a way to ‘fix’ some of my concerns with Legend of Korra Season 2: The Inevitable Light Vs. Dark Storyline. I have a ton of problems with it, as you can tell from my renaming, chief of which is how the main conflict boils down to The Ultimate Spirit of Good fighting The Ultimate Spirit ( Read more... ) -
The Kavajava Post
If you've been following me on Twitter or Facebook for the last few weeks, you'll know that on finishing up Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy I got curious about kava root and, specifically, the 'kavajava' combination with coffee that appears in Green and Blue Mars. In the series one character facilitates Mars' first real political convention, ( Read more... ) -
Musings around Tools as Distributed Knowledge
[crossposted from textuality.org]
I'm reading the forward to the very academic book The Ecology of Games: Connecting Youth, Games, and Learning, edited by Katie Salen as part of The John D. and Catherine T. Macarthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning. I've nothing to report on the book itself yet, but a synopsis from the Introduction ( Read more... ) -
Games of Skill, of Chance, and of Labor
[crossposted to textuality.org]
There are many ways to categorize games, but one keeps coming up for me lately given the kinds of games I have been playing, and I haven't found a good concise post to link to. So here it is.
There is a classic dichotomy in game analysis between games of skill and games of chance. Winning a game "of skill" requires ( Read more... ) -
Farmville and Glitch: Exogenous and Endogenous Game Mechanics
I'm warning you, behind the cut is a bit of an epic post. I've been playing a game called Glitch lately, and I'm really enjoying it ... despite the fact that so many of its core game mechanics felt invasive, insidious, and irritating when I played them in FarmVille and CityVille. I was ready for Glitch to be terrible but with high production ( Read more... ) -
Play Log: Minecraft 1.8: Playing with friends
As I told my patient and usually-interested coworkers about my adventures in geography and spelunking, we soon decided to set up a server so that we could play in a shared world. One of them had space on an Amazon server he was using to test an original Facebook game, set it up, and we were off.
( Social adventures behind the cut ) -
Play Log: Minecraft 1.8: Adventure Time 2
Soon after I picked up Minecraft's latest update, I had an evening play session with two discreet adventures in it. I wrote about the emergence of geography in my last entry; this second is about emergent narrative.
( Spontaneous Generation of narrative ) -
Play log: Minecraft Beta 1.8.1 - Adventure Time!
[cross-posted to textuality.org]
No, Finn and Jake did not appear to me in Minecraft. However, an interesting set of elements combined last night to make two real adventures emerge during my play session. I'll even say that they shared many qualities with tabletop RPG sessions, albeit ones run by a very open-ended and open-minded GM. What amazed ( Read more... )