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...

Their registration system is awful, but they've got a cute mascot! So we're back from Origins. Matt covers some of the general stuff that he did as well as the administrative headache stuff we experienced  here in his blog . I'm not going to retread a lot of that, because I lived it once and my stress levels don't need to repeat the experience at this point. I am deeply sad my "All My Circuits: A Tragedy in Five Acts" hack didn't get any players -- I chose the theme for the game to be in keeping with the theme for the con, and it looked like it was going to be a lot of fun. Now, that being said, what did we do at Origins? I worked the booth a lot, spent a lot of time I wanted to socialize off in my room by myself, which makes me sad too (stealthy pine nuts, I abjure thee! Cigarette smoke, my bronchitis-affected lungs abjure thee as well!). I didn't get to do anything like as many things or talk to as many people as I wanted to. That said, there w...

I did not Game Chef this year. I wanted to, and thought I might, but then this whole bronchitis/hives/low potassium/dissertation thing happened and I was like, yeah, maybe not. And so I didn't. No one in the McFarland household did, although my stepdaughter at least came up with an idea. From what I've seen on G+, a lot of people were really taken with the theme and ingredients, though, and there look to be a number of fun entries to come out of it, which is awesome.  One of the things I've been musing on since I decided not to do Game Chef this year, though, is how high the bar to entry actually is for making room in game design for new designers. I mean, on the face of it, it's simple. Anyone can design a game, any time. But in reality, game design is a time sink. You need free time to think, to plan, to come up with mock-ups, to play, to write. You need stability and space and a way to find at least an hour every few days to yourself when you're not so exh...

In what is undoubtedly the biggest change in my life in years, my oldest son (now 18) has moved in with Matt and I. He's going to finish high school here with us, and then we'll see where he ends up for college and whatnot. It's strange having him here, but good. Like most teenagers, he must be lured out of his room with food and activity, drawn back inevitably like the tide when these things are finished. Between being introverted and having his own room for the first time in ages and ages, he's busy inhabiting his space and has little time for anything else if given his druthers. As for me, I have assumed the mom mantle again like a familiar robe, slipping it on even as I attempt to treat him more as an adult. Some of my efforts to do so are made more difficult by the issues that brought him out to me again, admittedly, issues that have to do with his ability to handle adult life and school and time management and environments too full of sound and fury, to be p...

So I'm doing this taxonomy thing, and I have an urge to post progress somewhere so I won't lose all sight of it in the morass of sadness that is this particular form of archive creation. I have finished the object/term listing for what I consider the opening section of Robinson Crusoe, wherein he is a man-child trying to go to Sea in defiance of God and Father and everyone with sense. I am now into parsing his time as a slave, which goes much faster. I'm pretty sure I'm recording things that aren't anything like the objects I'm supposed to be focusing on, but honestly... rather do it and not need it than need it and have to go back and do it, right? And I know that making an archive is a pain, but even the work I've done this far tells me that it's necessary to do. I also did one for Swift's "Lady's Dressing Room," but as that's a not-overly-long poem, it wasn't too taxing (hah hah). In addition to potential objects, I'm...