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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…] 
This one took a bit longer to write, but finally the second article in my planar series is out, in which I give an overview of the planes in the history of Dungeons & Dragons. Next time, I’ll be diving into Planescape properly for the first time. […Read more…] 
After a hiatus, we’re back with Ontological Geek podcasts again. This time, Aaron Gotzon and I had former editor-in-chief Bill Coberly and Amsel von Spreckelsen as guests, and our main topic was bodies as a locus of morality in games, particularly sections where control in taken away from bodies and they are destroyed in a spectacle, which at the same time is the outcome of a moral judgment, such as at the end of a duel, like in Mortal Kombat‘s ‘finish hem/her’ sections. Besides that, we talk about Darren Korb’s music in Bastion and Transistor, and a variety of other games. […Read more…] 
I’ve started a Let’s Play of the 1993 sci-fi roleplaying game Whale’s Voyage over on my YouTube channel. I’ll collect the episodes on this page. Check back soon for new instalments, and/or subscribe to my YouTube channel to be notified when the new episodes come online. Also, feel free to leave any comments here or on twitter. Hope you enjoy! […Read more…] |
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