At the close of my previous post, the most consistent comment I got was ‘I had hoped for more of a story’, or ‘I wish you had gone more in depth into your experience’. And really, I hadn’t planned to. Why? Because stories about me are — I feel — inherently boring. I rarely do inner turmoil. I’m pretty focused, driven, and single-minded. There are a few things I do feel conflict about it, and until 2 or 3 years ago, I had thought race to be outside of that. So gather around, and I’ll tell you a story, the spiritual successor to my previous story, or perhaps what it was meant to be. I had the words to say, but it wasn’t until I was given the right inspiration that I know how to say them. So while this is a story, it is also an homage, and the stylistic similarities are both intentional and the sincerest form of flattery.
Temple in the Sands: A Musical Teaser
I’ve been working on a module for Call of Cthulhu for several years now, and I’ve finally found a model I like for organizing my written content. It’s not fancy, and I’ll have to alter a few things eventually when I get around to posting maps and pictures alongside the text, but it will mean that other people can play the game that I’ve made without me running it for them. But the module isn’t done yet, and is already far longer than most of our posts. So with that in mind…
Games Are Art
As the title says, games are art. I begin with this because I have gone through multiple false starts in getting this argument going. While I believe most other gamers would agree with me, making this topic seem rather pointless, I have also noticed that a good deal of the rest of the world still does not acknowledge games as an artistic medium. The debate over the artistic merit of games was quite loud years ago when Roger Ebert declared, “Games can never be art.” and since it has quieted down. Unfortunately I think the quiet only really occurred because the only people speaking were gamers. Well, that’s still going to be true today, but perhaps I can at least outline my argument well enough that if a non-gamer comes across it they can begin to understand what this medium means to us.
To begin I think it would actually be valuable for everyone to first watch Kellee Santiago’s TED Talk to which Ebert’s article responds to, and then to read Ebert’s article.
The Daylight War, by Peter V. Brett
The Daylight War is the third installment in Peter V. Brett‘s slowly growing Demon Cycle. I enjoyed it, though my reading of it was rudely interrupted by HPMoR rearing its really rather fetching head. While not as horrifyingly addictive as its fanfic competitor, The Daylight War does offer a great deal of demon fighting, moderate doses of political intriguing, and a few dashes of vaguely awkward sex scenes. Oh, and I guess I wasn’t paying attention when I read the first two books several years ago, but there’s a decent helping of weird cultural stuff going on too. Maybe I’m not being fair?
Now This Is A Story All About How…
I got to where I am right now
So I’d like to take a minute; just sit right there:
I’ll tell you how I got to the set of sociocultural beliefs I’m at right now and why I think it’s important (especially for gamers) to confront sexism/racism/homophobia within our community because minority groups are already not really taken seriously so all of their bad actions reflect on them whereas bad actions of ‘normal’ people just reflect on people which is why things like Steubenville don’t make the majority of our culture say ‘see, I knew football players were no good’ whereas things like this make people say ‘see, I knew gamers were no good’ when really both of them should lead us to the belief that we live in a self-propagating rape culture
…and I did this all after going to high school in a town called Bel-Air?
HPMoR: Its Appeal is Surprisingly Reasonable
Early last week I finally gave in to the steadily building pile of recommendations and started reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. By Friday I had barely managed to keep up with my other commitments and had forcibly redistributed my sleep cycle; but I finished all 87 chapters that are presently out, and was left wanting more. I hadn’t understood why so many other people had thought that I would like the story: I’m not normally attracted to any sort of fanfic, and while I enjoyed the Harry Potter series I didn’t think it was the alpha and omega of wizardly fiction. But now…
Character of the Week: Jason’s Jackmerius
I’m piggybacking off of Mattias’ article because in our discussions before he published it, certain parts of his character caught my fancy, and it inspired me to try my hand at my own iteration. The core of the idea at the time in our discussions was: Demon hunter who uses magic. After more discussion Mattias mentioned how he was playing around with the idea of multiple personalities and the He Who Fights Monsters trope. My thought: What if this were literal?
Held at Gunpoint
There’s a lovely new game that came out very recently. It’s called Gunpoint. Perhaps you may have heard of it…
Character of the Week: Jackmerius
Mostly, I’m a GM; so when friends of mine said that he was setting up a group of campaigns and needed manpower, I thought he meant he needed extra GMs. But lo and behold, he needed a player! I was excited and awaited the details for the setting, which turned out to be little more than ‘basically D&D’, so I didn’t have too much setting to ground my character in. For many people, this is a boon! They have character ideas galore and settings only restrict them. After all, they want to play a character who does magic based on rituals, or based on some anime, or whatever, and the campaign just doesn’t fit that.
But for me, it’s the opposite. Given a lack of prompting, I feel unjustified with any details. I don’t have a character idea that I then fit into a campaign; I build an idea FROM the setting. Without a setting, I feel like I have no non-generic ideas.
And so when I started character creation, I was scared. And then I realized something. My fear made no sense. I was applying a standard from my old-school GMing (what if my characters don’t fit the setting) that didn’t even fit my new-school GMing style. I wanted to let players drive games, and yet here I was, a player, afraid to drive a game! I’d like to say that I overcame this fear right away and dove into character creation. But really, I didn’t until that fateful moment when the GM turned to me and said ‘so tell me about your character’. Until that moment, my character had just been a series of numbers, and character creation had been IMPOSSIBLE. But let’s back up a moment…
Choose Your Own Adventure!
Edit: Part 2a has been written, and can be found here. Part 2b has been written as well, and can be found here.
I made this short choose-your-own-adventure story a while back, and only just realized that I could try to put it together in a functioning format on this site. I haven’t managed to separate the sections as much as I’d like, so if you want the full experience try to avoid reading more than one segment at a time. The uppermost section is the one to keep your eyes on. Have fun!
You come to your senses after a long night of studying in the library and find yourself standing on a narrow dirt path running through the woods. You don’t know how you got here, and it doesn’t look like any place that you’ve ever been before. After wandering along for a brief while, you hear hoofbeats behind you. Do you:
a) Hide behind a nearby tree. Paranoia is the best survival trait after all.
b) Stand on the side of the road. Horses move quickly and you don’t want to be in their way.
Fistful of Wits 