No, I’m not dead, although posting’s been light lately. What have I been up to lately? Here’s a brief summary of my gaming life over the last few weeks; some of these items might merit full posts when I get some spare time. I finally purchased a mount for my main Warcraft character. It’s a [...]
Real Life Excitement(tm) has been forcing games to take the backseat over the last few weeks, but rest assured that my twenty-sided die is never far from my thoughts. The main thing currently distracting me from the wonderful world of games is the fact that my wife, it turns out, is newly pregnant with our [...]
Good and thorough thoughts on video games and real-life violence over at the Empires of Steel developer’s diary. (A week or two ago, I was privileged to discuss this very topic with Mr. EoS Developer over a cup of coffee.) He’s tracked down some statistics about murder and other violent crime rates since Doom and [...]
Things were looking grim for my undead warlock in World of Warcraft. I was out of spell components and thus could not summon the familiar upon whom I depended for protection. I was far, far away from the nearest friendly Horde outpost, and had inadvertently stumbled upon an enemy Alliance encampment. In the course of [...]
Over the holidays I played a number of different boardgames with friends and relatives, and in the course of doing so I had a personal revelation of sorts: I really don’t like it when a game makes you “lose a turn” as a gameplay penalty or obstacle. This realization came to me after I played [...]
I was in Chicago last week for a conference–and while the conference was reasonably fun, my annual trip to Games Plus was even more so. Each year, as a reward for surviving several days’ worth of networking and schmoozing at the conference, I travel to Games Plus to browse the aisles of that gaming Mecca. [...]
Over the last few years, I’ve slowly forced myself to accept the fact that the Good Old Days of Roleplaying are more or less over for me. I don’t anticipate that I’ll ever again game with quite the frequency and intensity that marked my roleplaying game sessions in high school. And that’s OK, really; being [...]
One of the first events I attended at Origins this summer was a small roundtable discussing the topic of ethics in gaming. How should one approach dark, evil, or morally ambiguous themes in a roleplaying game? Of the three forum participants, I recognized two as having written game material that would have, back in the [...]
Brace yourself for MerpCon! That’s right, a convention devoted to roleplaying in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth (largely, but not exclusively, through Iron Crown’s vintage Middle Earth Role Playing game). This will be the second such convention, and this year it looks like Michael Martinez (a familiar name if you follow any Tolkien newsgroups or discussion forums) will [...]
Gamasutra has an interview with game-design legend Chris Crawford. Lots of interesting ideas in there, but the gist of it can be boiled down to a theme I’ve heard more than once over the last few years: innovation in games is dead, and the industry is living on borrowed time. I don’t know much about [...]
