March 2021 Wrapup!

Curse this Smarch weather!

But March is over and we’re moving on to April! March lacks a theme, which means that anything I wrote in February and went: Hey hang on, this doesn’t relate, got bumped. And thus, I present to you something you can read that directs you to other stuff you can read, that’s all fun and good.

What did we get in the Game Pile? Two videos, and two text articles. The videos were on Second Sight, and how meritocracy is fake and Games Journalism is fundamentally broken, and on how Minecraft doesn’t have anything like Goblins and how that’s? interesting? I also tackled the digital Root board game and how it isn’t quite the same thing as the physical game, but how that can be a good thing, and finally, I took some time to take down Genewars, a 1996 RTS. Man, 90s RTSes are just a genre for me to poop on huh.

The Second Sight video was something I was pretty proud of, especially because there’s some techniques in that that I was afraid would look dumb and bad and it didn’t.  The process of turning a 1500 word article into a video produces a video of about that length, which I think is good, since it means that there’s no reason to just list a series of things that happen in the game and to instead try to focus on what the game is trying to do.

In my efforts to not just become an anime review blog, I wrote about some deliberately oddball stuff. I talked about Chess, a really good musical that fits almost too well into modern discourse about what gamers think matter. I briefly talked about Until This Shakes Apart, a new album by Five Iron Frenzy I’ve been listening to in parts to repeat for months now. I got a single anime article in with The Ascendance Of A Bookworm, which I love a lot and will still use to tease Nixie. I talked a little bit about the way medium influences content with the book series of the Muddle-Headed Wombat. And finally, just a few days ago, I talked about complicated feelings around the series Black Books, which was made by a dreadful dickhead.

What else do I recommend you check out this month? Well, there are two pieces that were put up as part of a sort of ‘Hi, I like you and I like knowing what you like’ Birthday celebration: my article on being Edelgard in 4e D&D, and my article on the Hindren in 4e D&D. These were both little hat-tips to friends near their birthdays, and it seems they were well received, but they also were just, you know good content for if you’re into 4e D&D. While we’re talking about building in other games’ spaces, I wrote about how I use ‘pushed’ when talking about custom magic cards and how Competeitive Commander is essentially building its own game in another game.

On other topics, there’s an article about The Games Of Orcs, which is worldbuilding for nonhuman cultures in fantasy settings. This was really fun to research and involves a lot of thought about the sheer mechanisms of what goes into folk games. I also wrote about how to handle gods based on my own thinking for the gods of Cobrin’Seil, and there’s a piece about how character creation needs to avoid Owlbear Traps because they don’t work.

Game-making practice, there’s one big one: I broke down the rules of my game Die Rich after finally, finally, finally getting a chance to playtest it with some real humans. Also, Fox and I talk about how we’d design Pokemon to fill some holes in the type lineup. It’s a long conversation, about an hour, but you might like it!

Finally, I did write about three equally important political topics; that a dedication to nonviolence doesn’t mean an abdication of a willingness to use force, that Rush Limbaugh is fucking dead, and that Garfield is probably white and Heathcliff is probably black.

Next up, here’s this month’s T-Shirt. Thanks to 2020 I never got to show students my original Naruto-style did you check the subject outline, but I wore it to class this year and they loved it, so it inspired another, updated version of the same idea. I expect I’ll make more on this theme.

March has featured some illness, which in our current situation kind of slowed things down more than I expected. I have two classes going this semester, and they’re both exciting and interesting and I’m talking to students who seem to be split into ‘let me pass and let me out’ and ‘I am genuinely interested in this,’ which is a good split to have. An important piece of PhD documentation got completed and handed in and now I’ve been working on the research part of that, which is exciting. I’m basically finding I have a little more time than I thought I did – that the kind of administrative work of the research project is less arduous than the work I’m enjoying doing, which kind of stands to reason. I even participated in a twitter event with other educators, about games, and got to get them to read ‘Gamification is Bullshit,’ which is

Fun.

Weirdly, I know I said this last month, but another friend had to bow out of a game I was running. In this case, it wasn’t mental health, it’s that they’re a parent to a two year old, and time in the evenings has become precious. Oh well!