Star Crossed Musing

UPDATE, 8/1: Heading out tomorrow for GenCon, so I'm closing comments. Thanks to everyone for their thoughtful replies. I'm back from Rare Book School and so I'm just now getting to this -- my apologies. This is long and I go through a bit of social construction/community game theory to get there, but I think it's really valuable. Bear with me. ---------------------------------------------------------- Okay, so once upon a time I came up with a list of currency types in communities, the sort of thing that determines status and the types of actions that garner those varieties of status. In particular, I was thinking about online communities, but there's a lot of cross-over into real life. They were: expertise, service, activity, investment, proximity to source, and celebrity. So for example, let's say you're dealing with an online fan community. Expertise is a currency earned by knowing all the tiny details about whatever. If your fan group is about W...

I cannot stay silent. Silence is assent. Two new names are on this list. Add in the police officers shot in Dallas. Add in the protestors who were also shot (but thankfully, not killed). This is not the way we should live. This is not what we should be. I fear for my students, for my children, for their friends, for their parents, because this touches everyone. This is why Black Lives Matter. This is why we cannot accept easy answers. This is why we have to dismantle the system, address racism, train our officers to do better and be better, and hold them accountable to a higher standard. This is why we must invest in inner-city neighborhoods instead of leaving them to rot. This is why we must examine hiring practices to ensure we aren't excluding minorities just because. This is why we must always strive to be better than who we are -- because who we are as a society kills people. Join the ACLU. Join the NAACP (you don't have to be African-American, and if that makes yo...

So, despite the fact that I need to be dissertating (and I am, I promise!), I keep having ideas for games. Some people do this with short stories; some people do this with article ideas, or crafting ideas, or whatever. I've gotten to the point that I do it with games. Now, I'm a person who believes that it's not the idea, but the execution that makes something awesome, so I don't mind talking about my ideas. I also think there's only a couple of people in the industry I know of who might be willing to take them and run with them, so it's not like there's a huge risk. As such, I'm going to list out my game ideas and hope that they'll leave me alone until next year, when I can actually start to do something about some of them. If, of course, some of my fair readers wants to comment on some of these ideas and tell me what they think, I'd be interested. Do note, these are mostly working titles. Vovetas: My Game Chef entry from last year -- a r...