The presentation that most people have mentioned to me as changing the way they think about something was Joi Ito's talk on gaming. Me? I loved it, but then the talk was about World of Warcraft, and I'm a player. ("Hi, my name's Adam Tinworth and I'm a night elf druid").
Ito started of with a crowd-pleasing assault on the perception of gaming in society as a whole.
"We still say 'addicted to games'," he said. "We don't say 'addicted to church' if people go to church every week."
He's quite right - it's a non-useful way of viewing the situation. It's rooted, he explained, in the way we use language around the internet, at least in the English-speaking world. We have this word "cyberspace", which implies a separation between the online world and the "real" world. We have "real" friends and "virtual" friends.
"For kids the internet is ubiquitous. It's not something you log into or out of," said Ito. And, to them, gaming is certainly not the "masturbation-like activity" many adults seem to view it as. For one thing, people are often interacting with existing friends in the game...
So what is it?
When your teenage years comes back to haunt you:
Found via Workbench
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For those of a geeky persuasion:
Gamethink is a new gaming blog of impeccable pedigree. It should be a great read, once it builds up a head of steam.
The All New! All Different! Howling Curmudgeons takes a combination of comic-esque typography, a fun attitude and some insightful writing and applies it to the comics world - with both fists! Better fun than most comics blogs.
A voice from the distant past on Wraith-l resurfaces to reply to my comments on RPG reviewing made some time ago.
Lea responds to my ideas thus:
Adam argues for "a single source of good, edited, commissioned reviews run by skilled people and provided by a team of experienced gamers and writers." I'm not sure this is practical. It takes time and effort to deliver the kind of analysis that Adam wants, something that few experienced gamers and writers, with many other calls on their time, would be able to commit to.This is, of course, the main argument for a professional RPG mag, with a team of writers who are paid for their work. However, since the RPG market seems determined to make such an enterprise completely unprofitable, that isn't going to happen. Luckily, Lea has a technology-based solution to the social problem at work here.That's not to say that few people could or would deliver good reviews or criticism. The problem with Adam's proposal, I think, is that it puts the onus on a small circle of people. If the community wants "Basements and Bugbears" reviewed, the editors have to commission someone to review "Basements and Bugbears." This is hard work for both the editors and the reviewer
My good friend Bruce Baugh says what really needs saying about Call of Cthulhu
Gaming Reflections, 1: Call of Cthulhu
Rock on, Bruce.
Bryant (of Population: One) has set up a new group gaming blog, which has got off to a good start:
Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to talk about reviews. You see, a good friend of mine, Mr Bruce Baugh, is busy undergoing a firestorm of mixed messages on his latest project, the D20 edition of Gamma World. This is an almost inevitable side effect of the internet age. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, true enough. What most people fail to realise is that they are not entitled to have that opinion taken seriously. The ability to bash out a few hundred barely coherent words and post them on the internet does not automatically make your opinion worthy. That respect has to be earned.
How do you get this respect? To answer that question, let's take a little step back into the past.
