• Is there an intermediate gamer?

    Hours Categories Game talk
    Comments 11 Comments

    BBC News | At-a-glance | State of Play has a bunch of neat stats about the UK gamer — nice job, Alice! I love the graphs.

    The thing that always jumps out at me about these is that once you include “light” games, puzzle games, etc, the overwhelming majority of folks consider themselves gamers.

    And the secondary thought that there’s a really big gap between the extravaganzas like most blockbuster PC and console games, with their complexity, their millions spent on presentation, their demand of dedicated hardware, and so on — and the light casual games, which are derisively referred to as “minigames” by the more hardcore.

    Where’s the on-ramp? Where are the games that are intermediate in difficulty, in complexity, in demands on reflexes? As people age, the trend for their play right now seems to be out of the typical blockbuster market, which is equivalent in so many ways to the summer movie blockbuster market.

    For that matter, why aren’t there more games that are like winter movies: artistically demanding, but perhaps not blockbusters; labors of love, intended for prestige?

  • Monthly report: November 2005

    Hours Categories Misc
    Comments 22 Comments

    I’m home sick this morning, feeling miserable enough that I can’t focus on anything but well enough to surf the Web… I’d like feedback on the site. But each time I ask, I put it at the bottom of some other post, and everyone ignores the request. So I thought I’d make a post just to talk about the last month of the site, and try to demand that you answer me! To make it worth your while, here’s a bunch of fun stats.

    Read More “Monthly report: November 2005”

  • Smax

    Hours Categories Reading
    Comments 3 Comments

    I’m feeling tired, and sick (still fighting off some bug I picked up while on vacation in Florida), and the idea of more derring-do with Dave Duncan’s King’s Blades exhausted me. My brother gave me six of these, and they’re great (and I’ll write about them later, once I finish them) but tonight I needed something lighter.

    So I grabbed another one of the books that Jim Lee sent — Alan Moore’s Smax. I was only a few pages into it when I spotted a Tron lightcycle in the traffic (something that the highly detailed annotation manages to not identify.

    That led me on a merry hunt through the whole book finding everything. Radiskull! 1/3 of Totoro! A heck of a lot of Neil Gaiman references — although technically, one was to the Little Endless! And are those pixie sticks on the dinner table along with the mermaid, the blind mice, the unicorn (with an apple on its horn), the three pigs (little, of course), the roast cherubs, and the stuffed goose with the golden eggs? That would be pixies on a stick, naturally. Stick up the ass, naturally.

    Moore reputedly describes everything in every panel. Yikes. Nice light fantasy reference library described here. I think you can probably read the annotations without spoiling the comic, so have at, if it means you’ll go buy the book afterwards. 🙂

    Oh, and for all you gamers — Myst, Oddworld, Quake… yep, they get nods too.

    EDIT: Reputedly describes everything: yep!

    PAGE 1.
    PANEL 1.
    OKAY WE JUST HAVE ONE BIG PANEL TO OPEN WITH, ZANDER. WE ARE UP ABOVE
    THE MOSTLY-FORESTED AREA WHERE THE INN THAT ROBYN AND JEFF ARE STAYING
    AT IS SITUATED, BUT WE MAY NOT BE ABLE TO SEE THE INN HERE ON ACCOUNT
    OF THE SPREADING CANOPY OF TREES THAT TAKES UP MOST OF THIS FIRST PAGE,
    AS SEEN FROM THE DISTANCE, UP TOWARDS THE TOP OF THE PAGE, WE MAYBE
    SEE DISTANT LAKES AND MOUNTAINS BEYOND THE FOREST, BUT OUR MAIN
    ATTENTION IS ON THE IMMENSE SPREAD OF THE FOREST CANOPY DOWN BENEATH
    US, FROM WHENCE SMAX’S LOUD, BELLOWING WORD BALLOONS ARE THE LOUD
    SOUND OF SMAX’S VOICE, A LARGE CLOUD OF FLYING THINGS ERUPT UPWARDS OUT
    OF THE FOREST. MOST OF THESE ARE BIRDS OR BATS, BUT THERE ARE ALSO A
    LARGE NUMBER OF FLYING THINGS FROM FANTASY STORIES (PEGASUS, THE EVIL
    FLYING MONKEYS FROM WIZARD OF OZ, THAT STUPID LOOKING THING FROM NEVER ENDING STORY, FAIRIES, GRIFFINS, THE FLYING NUN … ANYTHING YOU CAN
    THINK OF, BASICALLY) ALL ERUPTING UP STARTLED FROM THE FOREST INTO THE
    MOSTLY CLEAR SKY UP IS NOW THE MORNING AFTER THE FUNERAL OF SMAX’S
    UNCLE MACK. THE LOGO AND THE EPISODE TITLE (ANOTHER SYD BARRETT QUOTE,
    LIKE OUR PREVIOUS TWO) GO DOWN TOWARDS THE BOTTOM OF THE PAGE