Gaming

Gaming as connection: Thank you, stranger

/ 11 Comments / Gaming, Thinkythoughts / By

Haven’t talked about gaming in a while. I still play, all the time, but with deadline after deadline looming I don’t dare buy anything new that might actually be good. (Side-eyes Fallout 4, warily.) I’ve been settling for comfort-gaming instead. You know, some soothing State of Decay and Mass Effect 3 Multiplayer, and my favorite real estate investment simulator, Skyrim (with Hearthfire DLC). But I did buy a new, old game that I’ve been wanting to play for ages, which I could finally get now that I have a PS4: Journey. If you’ve never played the game, it’s haunting and […]

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A world in which race matters

/ 39 Comments / On Writing / By

I’ve been thinking about this article for the last day or so. I posted a link to it on my Twitter feed yesterday, and saw a few reactions to it that seemed… confused. Part of the problem is that the article gets a little muddled at points, I think because it’s talking about a complicated concept: race as identity, versus race as socioeconomic marker within in the modern (racist) political structure. But part of the problem, IMO, is the misconceptions that readers were bringing to the article themselves. A couple even asked (paraphrase, since I didn’t ask them about posting

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Your groundbreaking is not my groundbreaking

/ 18 Comments / On Writing, Review / By

Note: I will be mentioning a few spoilers in this post. Look away now if you’re not ready for that yet! So, a few nights ago I started Dragon Age: Inquisition, the third game in a franchise I’ve liked a lot over the years. Just for shits and giggles I livetweeted my game for a few hours. Most of the feed is pretty dull — like, me eating dinner while waiting half an hour for the game to finish installing on my XBox’s hard drive. But once I finally got the game going and dug into the character creator, I

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A survey of my recent gaming

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And by “recent” I mean “I played it recently”, not that these are recent games. ‘Cause I’m busy, and sometimes it takes me awhile to get around to things. Spoiler warning on all of these, so I’ll put them behind a cut, but these are all old games anyway, so my guess is that nobody really cares about spoilers anymore.

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Gamefail bluescreen

/ 54 Comments / Rantage, WTF World? / By

Apologies, ya’ll. I know you haven’t heard much from me lately. Partly it’s that I’ve been busy; this is the time of year when my day job ratchets up, and since I’m still plowing full speed ahead on the UMSP, I don’t have a ton of spare brain. What little I’ve got has mostly been channeled into stress relief — hanging out with local folks, long meditative walks on snowy evenings, and among other things, gaming. But lately the gaming has been… shall we say, less than fun?

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Identity should always be part of the gameplay

/ 84 Comments / On Writing, Thinkythoughts / By

This is sort of a tangential response to John Scalzi’s “Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting. Good article; you should read it… and the comments. Yeah, I know, I usually say don’t read the comments. But I think they’re illuminating, if frustrating, in this case. If you’re not a straight white male, it’s a good idea to understand how even the most liberal of them think. If you are a straight white male, Scalzi’s talking to you; listen. I’ve been playing the hell out of Dragon Age and Dragon Age 2 on the Xbox 360 lately. This is partly

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The Inheritance Trilogy: The Roleplaying Game?

/ 17 Comments / silliness, Thinkythoughts / By

Now, don’t get all excited. Nobody’s offered or expressed any interest whatsoever in creating a game out of the Inheritance Trilogy. It’s just that a fan mentioned the idea on Twitter, and it intrigued me, so I’m bringing the question here: How would an RPG based on the Inheritance Trilogy work? For now, let’s go with tabletop RPGs rather than a video game. Not that the idea of a Squeenix or Atlus take on 100K wouldn’t thrill me — ohholycrapyesitwould — but there’s so many ways for games like that to be formulated. Tabletops, though, are a little more strict.

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Taking inspiration from games

/ 1 Comment / On Writing / By

The folks at Orbit asked me to do an interview that will hopefully be published in the back of The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms. After doing it, I realized I forgot to mention something in answer to the “what are your influences” question: video games. I say this while sitting down to play Persona 4, which I bought before Christmas but wouldn’t let myself play until I finished Book 2. It’s exactly the kind of game I like: deeply immersive, long enough to feel worth the monetary investment (P3 took me about 200 hours), visually pleasing, with really engaging characters, and

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