A few months back, I got to aprticipate in a very very cool conference called “Ludium I,” organized by Ted Castronova. And today comes word that the Arden Institute webpage is now live, with the resulting conference report, institute whitepaper, and a 22 minute documentary on the conference.
I’m off to have dinner with the family and Cory Doctorow. In honor of that occasion and the fact that I won’t be writing any lengthy essays tonight, here’s an open thread.
Alan sanded the house on Wales Avenue. It took six months, and the whole time it was the smell of the sawdust, ancient and sweet, and the reek of chemical stripper and the damp smell of rusting steel wool.
Alan took possession of the house on January 1, and paid for it in full by means of an e-gold transfer. He had to do a fair bit of hand-holding with the realtor to get her set up and running on e-gold, but he loved to do that sort of thing, loved to sit at the elbow of a novitiate and guide her through the clicks and taps and forms. He loved to break off for impromptu lectures on the underlying principles of the transaction, and so he treated the poor realtor lady to a dozen addresses on the nature of international currency markets, the value of precious metal as a kind of financial lingua franca to which any currency could be converted, the poetry of vault shelves in a hundred banks around the world piled with the heaviest of metals, glinting dully in the fluorescent tube lighting, tended by gnomish bankers who spoke a hundred languages but communicated with one another by means of this universal tongue of weights and measures and purity.
–opening paragraphs of Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town
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The best sort of shark,
Chasing longfins too large
To mouth, graceful grey,
Paint fleck fins, a lofty
Catfish, small, not big
Enough to eat but proud
Of hunting, his name
An attitude, a look, and
All the teeth he needs.
It’s been a while since I made a book post. I have actually been reading, but only in fits and starts, rather than my usual “swallow a novel whole in two hours” mode. While I was on vacation in Florida, my brother gave me a bunch of books, and I just finally finished reading them; I also never wrote about one that I took with me and finished while I was out there.
What it really makes me want to talk about intersects with games, and that’s the impoverishment of the fantasy imagination that certainly afflicts fantasy games and fortunately doesn’t much afflict these books.
Read More “Briefly noted: Dave Duncan, Sharon Shinn”
A comment on a previous post prompted me to dig into an issue that has been tossed around a lot on the blogosphere, most recently in Jason Booth’s blog.
A long time ago now, I wrote in an essay called “On Socialization and Convenience” that
On LegendMUD (a fairly GoP environment, fundamentally) we added a socialization area with a bunch of nifty social facilities. The Wild Boar Tavern offers a lounge for chatting, goofy food to buy, an auditorium, a gift shop to buy goofy items like birthday cards, a wedding shop for in-game events, etc. You can reach it instantly from anywhere by merely typing “OOC.” It was there in an instant for anyone who wanted it.
It doesn’t get used.
On UO we had taverns with NPCs, dart boards, chess boards, backgammon, dice. There were multiple ones in every town. You know as well as I how crowded they were.
Leisure time in a mud is pointless time in players’ eyes, and only a small subset of your players will be looking to spend pointless time. (emphasis added)
