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Gaming Friday
Shaterri and I arrived just in time to watch the tail end of a two-player game of CanCan, an abstract tile-laying color-matching game. A tile is only legal if matching colors touch on all sides. Players start with equal numbers of tiles and get to play up to four a turn, plus possibly more if they match adjacent shapes. Whoever’s played the most ( Read more... ) -
Gaming Friday
Game night was just me and Orbus, so we dipped into his pile of favorite two-player games.
First up was Hive. It’s an abstract, vaguely chess-like game. Both players have a variety of hexagonal pieces with distinct movement rules. The first player to surround the opposing leader piece wins. The entire match was a tense game of “Oh god, oh god, I ( Read more... ) -
ism
Sexism and racism - or, at least, their elements - are prevalent everywhere, even in places that aren’t immediately obvious.
Pac-Man was designed around an eating theme (and given colorful, non-threatening graphics) because the designer was trying to appeal to female players, who were an untapped market at the time. He couldn’t come up with a good ( Read more... ) -
Gaming...Wednesday?
Shaterri got a spare invite for me to attend a semi-open board game night at Popcap’s downtown office. It’s apparently only the second time they’ve done this. They had a stack of games and invited people to bring their own as well. Beer, soda, and pizza were on them. Also tea, but the only cups I could find were compostable plastic and melted with ( Read more... ) -
Gaming Friday
It was crowded this time. Six of us played a large game of King of Tokyo waiting for even more folks to show up. I won by damage, thanks to a powerup that made my attacks hurt everyone else no matter where I was.
After that, we split into two groups. One played Montage, which needs two teams of two. It’s an elegant PvP crossword game. I like the ( Read more... ) -
GDC 2013 notes
I've posted my notes for some interesting GDC panels I attended. The only one of general interest would be the one on addressing the scapegoating of video games in the media, so that one's first.
notes in a Google Doc
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avec comic
[Vincent] Connare took inspiration [for the Comic Sans typeface] from books such as Batman: The Dark Knight Returns … and Watchmen….
-Muse (a science magazine for children ages 9-14), vol. 16, no. 1.
P.S. Okay, okay, that's a little out of context. The inspiration he took was how "these books blend art and text almost perfectly, so that neither ( Read more... ) -
tax and cactus
I live in the Seattle area, but my family is all on the East Coast. When I was home for Christmas, my ten year old niece waxed eloquent about the things her school was in the midst of teaching her about “the Western Region of the United States”. Or, rather, that’s what she did once she’d struggled to recall whether Washington State is in the “west ( Read more... ) -
the gold standard of art
Libertarians - and staunch conservatives in general, actually - take an extreme stance on property. In their view, anything you make or earn is 100% yours to control, and you are the only entity with a legitimate say in how any of it gets used. “Taxation is theft,” they say, because in taxation, an outside agency takes something you earned and ( Read more... ) -
GDC
I spent most of the last week of March in San Francisco for the 2013 Game Developers Conference. Three coworkers and I flew out Sunday morning, early enough that I had the alarm set to 4:15 am. The flight was uneventful.
Our hotel was several blocks from the convention center, and about a third the cost of a closer one. There’s a good reason for ( Read more... )