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The third article in my series Walking the Planes has just been published over at The Ontological Geek. It’s about the Planescape setting and how its emphasis on diversity and plurality has affected me, both in discovering the setting as a teen, and nowadays. I’m not really sure yet what the next episode is going to be about, as I have multiple half-finished ideas bouncing around in my head. You’ll have to wait and see! […Read more…] 
Recently, I had the honour of being guest editor on Memory Insufficient, the games history ezine. I edited the special issue on Language and Games. You can read the editorial from the issue below, but really you should just go and download the whole issue here [pdf], because it’s free. […Read more…] 
Let me take you to the magical realm that is the 1990s of my youth. It’s OK. People were cool back then, you’ll see. Somewhere in that mythical land of boundless peak-capitalist optimism, not to mention actually the best music ever — feel free to try to debate me on this and run away screaming — we had something called a Cheezer. […Read more…] 
This open letter is a reply to Cameron Kunzelman’s piece “On Video Games, Content, and Expression”. It is about cake (layered and unlayered), salad, music, opera, analogies, and about games. Anyone is free to reply here or on their own blog. […Read more…] 
Recently, I’ve become more and more interested in book design and typesetting, and I decided that I wanted to become better at it, and offer it as a service to other people. In the growing world of e-books and digital reading, there is something of a dearth of good design, and the aesthetics that I admire in printed books have for the most part not found their way into the digital realm. As an exercise, I’ve started playing around with some public domain fantasy literature that I wanted to read anyway, such as the (early) works of Lord Dunsany. In that spirit, I’ve recently completed a PDF setting of The Sword of Welleran And Other Stories, originally published in 1908. […Read more…] 
Mouths are weird. They’re not quite like other parts of our body, most of which are ‘objects’ in themselves, even though they are sometimes reducible to smaller parts. A hand has fingers, a palm, and so forth, but is also what it is: a hand. A mouth has lips, teeth, gums, a tongue, but it is nothing in itself. A mouth is an emptiness. […Read more…] 
Having recently finished Dragon Age: Inquisition — the main storyline and pretty much all of the single player sidequests, that is — some aspects of the game’s approach to hunting animals and beasts keep sticking in the back of my mind. I’ll try to disentangle them here, briefly. […Read more…] 
In this piece, I wanted to briefly discuss some ways in which players create subgames in videogames, and what they say about the nature of various types of play and game spaces. I’ll start with a discussion of approaches to ‘ghost’ and pacifist playstyles in stealth games, and how these playstyles have become incorporated or re-appropriated in the rules of various host games. Afterwards, I’ll discuss how roleplaying in multiplayer videogames is practically always a subgame enacted outside of the digitally arbitrated game rules. Finally, just to mess with you, I’ll attempt to stretch my own model by talking about particular subgames I’ve tried to play within the roleplaying subgame. […Read more…] 
A personal piece about waking dreams, mysticism, and verticality in Scandinavian theatre and videogames. I discuss Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder and When We Dead Awaken, next to a special level from Nifflas’ Knytt Stories. […Read more…] 
Over on First Person Scholar, I’ve published an extensive book review of Nordic Larp, an impressive and beautiful overview of the Nordic live-action roleplaying scene. In it I discuss how the book shows the diversity and experimental drive of the LARP scene in Scandinavia, and approach it briefly from a play-theoretical perspective. […Read more…] |
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