The Sunday Poem: The State of Poetry

 Posted by (Visited 6273 times)  The Sunday Poem
Oct 292006
 

Posting the Sunday Poem each week has become an interesting exercise. For one, few of you read them. For another, it’s something alien enough to the game world that I doubt most regular readers of the blog have any interest. I am sure that the various marketing types who hang out here would tell me that it “dilutes the brand” to some degree, because blogs that are tightly focused (and unambiguous, and full of bullet points!) are the ones that quickly get lots of traffic. Ah, the odd ways in which commerce intrudes.

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WYSIWYG loot

 Posted by (Visited 14931 times)  Game talk
Oct 272006
 

It’s been a while since I did a straight-up design topic, and both Sara Jensen (at her new blog!) and Brian Green jumped in to reply to Ryan Shwayder’s original post on the subject, so why not perpetuate it?

Basically, the issue is this: when you kill some dude standing around in pink tights, a floppy hat, and elfin chain mail, do you get the pink tights, floppy hat, and chain mail? Or do you get something else, if anything?

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GAmes and politics — in a different way

 Posted by (Visited 5562 times)  Game talk
Oct 272006
 

Here’s a nice way for games to poke a hornet’s nest! MyBrainTrainer is a web-based version of the popular “brain training” style games that have crossed from Japan, notably on the Nintendo DS. The web version offers a wide array of tests, ongoing tracking, age bracketing and other benefits that come from having a large database to make comparisons against.

Now, in the election season, it’s comparing the cognitive function of Republicans and Democrats.

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The Medium That Ate the World with extra Yee PARC

 Posted by (Visited 5354 times)  Game talk
Oct 262006
 

I was feeling guilty about not having posted much lately (and what I have been posting is mostly reblogs!) and I realized that I probably had stuff lingering on the hard drive that I’d been meaning to upload to the site. One of the first things I stumbled across was the slides from the PARC Forum I gave (PDF). I previously posted links to the audio download (MP3) and video stream as well as a liveblogged summary, but somehow forgot to post the slides themselves. Oops.

This is a good chance to point to Nick Yee’s PARC Forum from earlier this year, too, entitled “The Blurring Boundaries of Play: Labor, Genocide, and Addiction.” Worth checking out.

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