Bleeeeeh. It's been one of those weeks: mysterious, game-destroying bugs that show up and cripple progress for 24 hours, and then someone who's not me finds the one-line fix. We're closing in on the end--and by the end I mean something alpha-beta-ish that people are actually going to see, followed by lots of stressful bug-fixing--but it feels ( Read more... )

A brief taking stock of my digital environment ( Read more... )

I had a tenuous post lined up along the lines of "argh there's no escape from history, it's just waiting until you've forgotten the mistakes your parents made so you can make them yourself," but recent events have somewhat dampened my cynicism. Tim Burke has a little to spare! Though I do like seeing recent events as part of a steady pattern of ( Read more... )

I tried playing the latest RIFT beta, and... even without whatever issues it was having with my video drivers, it was tough going. I've been in too many newbie zones in my life; as it turns out, I just don't have the stomach for another one.

Supposedly the game is a fairly enjoyable incremental change, and its mix-and-match approach to classes ( Read more... )

Phil Broughton (of Funranium Labs, best known for his hand-crafted apocalyptic super-coffee), has a guest post at Warren Ellis's about how it feels to work at a nuclear weapons lab:With what they already know that is classified, they are capable of thinking entirely new, instantly classified thoughts and to speak them out loud in an uncleared area ( Read more... )

Oh, Holbo. His latest post on Crooked Timber, on how to sell a weaker intellectual property regime to the American people suffers from a bit of framism, the idea that your political preferences will surely win out if only you can "frame" them properly. (I got enough of this in the Bush era. To me it smacks of looking for your keys under the ( Read more... )

Trent Polack takes issue with Mass Effect 2"...whatever shallow or complex character I create in the dialogue/story bits of Mass Effect 2 is entirely irrelevant to the character I play as during the overly abundant shooty bits of Mass Effect 2. It’s not a matter of ludonarrative dissonance, it’s ludonarrative irrelevance ( Read more... )

Recent events in Homestuck! My basic reaction is along the lines of (spoiler) :( and ;___;, with a side of oh well and *sigh* (though it gets major points for the deinterlacing, which is clever)

There's a bit of a related furor on tumblr. It's mostly interesting because it demonstrates just how shitty tumblr is at supporting conversation. It ( Read more... )

(am still pretty much in work mode, cobbling together vital but unexciting systems. why am i so bad at organizing collections of files? i don't know, but i know that i am)

I'm basically just reading Terra Nova for Tim Burke these days--his recent invocation of Minecraft against the 'virtual worlds' purists (in comments) was pretty sweet--but I ( Read more... )

John Lassiter at Slate's year-end gaming club (one of Slate's finer innovations) celebrates difficulty:For me, difficulty is central to what's interesting about games. My day job is writing novels, and in that area, the idea of difficulty as a virtue has died, in my adult lifetime. Books would once upon a time be praised for being difficult, for ( Read more... )