Thanks to Boing Boing making the site melt down with popularity, creating a new #1 post of all time, I see that A Theory of Fun also climbed up the charts, hitting #1 in the abstruse category of
Books > Subjects > Computers & Internet > Games & Strategy Guides > Programming. Woo hoo!

This does make it the #5 best selling game book, though, behind the strategy guides and atlases for Sims 2, EQ2, and WoW.

Johnny Wilson has gotten around to posting extensive notes on the Living Game Worlds symposium I attended a few weeks ago, including some notes on what I said.

• Game Gospel: Living Game Worlds 2006 (Part I)

• Game Gospel: Living Game Worlds 2006 (Part II)

Gamasutra is posting the letters they got in response to Dave Sirlin’s Soapbox on WoW.

The discussions on the lessons make me curious.

What is it you want? Not in terms of exhaustive mechanics, specific and highly detailed setting information, and so on, but the spirit of it.

(Not that I think you’re necessarily a representative bunch…!)

Just noting this to remind me to look at it at some point: John Kirk’s Design Patterns of Successful Roleplaying Games… it’s a free PDF download.

Sometimes he spent hours
Pulling the thin ribbons of wild chives
From the clasp of earth,
And holding them in front of his face.
Each green vein wandered its traced line
From bulb to tapered tip, until
He brushed the dirt off and bit
The stalk in half, leaving frayed ends
Brushing his lips with sting.

There he’d lay, under the lilac
Bushes that grew tortuous like shadow-figure fingers -
I don’t remember what he saw
In the wild chives hidden in the lilacs
But who can blame him if at that moment
The world was bounded by his body
And even the paths of light down spicy veins
Were open to his understanding.

He stayed for some hours more, hunting
Raspberries, but by then the damage was done.

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Over the last few days, we finally finished watching Scrapped Princess. Coincidentally, a Hugo plug for Spin over at Making Light, a site I always forget to read regularly, reminded me that I had picked it up in hardback when it first came out. So I read that today.

Oddly, they are both about the world being stuffed in a box.

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Lone heroes can’t slay dragons. It takes an army.

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Shannon Appelcline has posted a fantastic hit list of the best articles over the last six years from the many regular columns over at Skotos.

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…and does so whilst invoking my name.

Oh boy.

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