The room was empty except for one person when we walked in. I had a bag full of the special FUDGE dice, the two Dresden Files RPG rulebooks and a folder of pre-generated characters and cheat sheets. I was stressed and nervous and felt ill-prepared. I’d had the PDFs for a few months, since I’d [...]
I began my week still having Nier, Blur, and Red Dead Redemption. Nier got moved up the Gamefly list, and Blur is on it waiting for Tam’s approval/desire for it. I’ll play it when she gets it, but I’m not feeling pressed to play it; it’s not like I’ll do any of the online [...]
Given my schedule, I only have a few nights a week to focus on gaming, but tend to get a lot of gaming in on the weekends, particularly on Sunday, which is ‘my day’. I don’t focus on games for hours at a time — usually — so typically drift from game to game over [...]
One of the joys of the internet is that it connects and levels things. Enough amateurs can be as right as an expert, and uniquely strange loners can find all the other strange loners just like them. I know I did, anyway.
That connection, and that collective action can be put to good use, and one [...]
March 24, 2010 – 11:08 am
Today is Ada Lovelace Day, and I pledged over a month and a half ago to write a post about a woman in technology and science who inspired me. I’m a programmer by trade, and inclination; writing is important to me as well, but even that is centered around programming and technology issues. Ultimately, there [...]
To continue the experiential analysis, I wanted to recap the three modes of interacting as laid out by Norman in Emotional Design. Most people are familiar with his work in The Design of Everyday Things (or Psychology of, depending on where it was published). In Everyday Things, Norman complained about things that were overdesigned, or [...]
I’m reading Schell’s Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, which took me a while to pick up after his DICE talk which destroyed some of his credibility to me. The book, though, is a good one, and while I’m not far into it, the idea that Game Designers’ job is to create an [...]
I’m not a big fan of appointment gaming, nor of competitive play of video games. I play card and board games, but those are over pretty quickly, and tend to feel like they’re at a certain skill level that we all have. So I don’t play online FPS because there’s a lot of player knowledge [...]
I suspect that if White Knight Chronicles hadn’t been a huge JRPG, it would have been a half hour, or one-evening game at most. But it isn’t, and that more or less gave it a buffer for me. It’s a comfortable genre, and it seemed that it was going to do some interesting things.
Of course, [...]
Well, I did spend two hours of my weekend working on the Klik-n-Play Pirate Kart, but when I finally sat down to do it, I discovered that I’d saved none of my refactored map code. On one hand, that code was confusing and not very good, on the other hand, it was nearly done. Well, [...]