May 2012
1 post
March 2012
2 posts
1 tag
Chance Encounters in the Wastes
I met my best friend, Kevin Mahoney, on the Internet in 1998, back when it was weird to meet people on the Internet. This is because many such acquaintances, like ours, began on IRC—internet chat before internet chat and instant messaging were common, inescapable aspects of a digital lifestyle. We bullshat infrequently for about six months before we discovered, to our mutual shock and surprise,...
February 2012
1 post
January 2012
1 post
1 tag
Re: Wild Cursing from Seat 7A
I lucked out on my flight yesterday, snagging a free first-class upgrade for the first leg of my trip to London, from Seattle to Atlanta. I decided to celebrate by spending some time with Terry Cavanagh’s VVVVVV on my 3DS. I can’t imagine that my thunderous guttural roar of ffffffffuuuuuuuuuuuuuuccccck was the first such utterance of that most hallowed Word of Power in business class, but it was...
December 2011
5 posts
No Words
fuckyeahidiotsonic:
3 tags
Who Run Jedi Town
Some stray observations from The Old Republic, my first deep-dive MMO experience since EVE Online:
I hate it much less than most MMOs. Most of this is thanks to the conversation system, which makes the game feel like a single-player BioWare experience that happens to feature other folks running around. When I’m engaged in a quest, when the camera zooms in and I get a one-on-one dialogue...
1 tag
Hello Internet, How I Missed You
It’s been way, way too long since I put anything up here. I’ve been crazy busy, what with that game I was working on and the GDC talk and traveling and fighting dinosaurs and various other heroic tasks. I was recently reminded that I have ignored this space, and the guilt is weighing heavily on my heart. So here I am. “HEY AARON WHAT ARE YOU PLAYING INSTEAD OF WRITING”, you...
September 2011
1 post
August 2011
1 post
July 2011
2 posts
June 2011
10 posts
Come Watch Me Flap My Jaw Re: Narrative Design at...
Corrections are in place. Behold! My session at GDC Online 2011, “The New World: Case Studies in Transmedia Narrative Design”.
DESCRIPTION: In “The New World”, we’ll examine the possibilities and pitfalls of expanding storytelling beyond the core game and across a variety of established and emerging media—manuals, collector’s editions, marketing...
“The Sniper has decades of experience surviving in the barren Australian outback....”
– I fucking adore Valve.
Behold: The Cancer Vaccine That Will Cure Your...
Researchers at the Mayo Clinic have successfully cured prostate cancer in rats using an ingenious immunotherapy treatment which produces no side effects. In essence, a cancer vaccine. This breakthrough research, led by Mayo immunologist Dr. Richard Vile, yes, his name is Dr. Richard Vile, as in Dr. Vile, and yes, I’m thinking about that too.
What was I saying? Right. This breakthrough...
May 2011
10 posts
be not afraid
Douglas Adams was our greatest technoprophet. There’s a lot in that piece (published in 1999) worth reading, but I will always most fondly remember this:
1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3)...
April 2011
13 posts
“Is there a line [to cross]? If our medium is art, how could there be a line? How...”
– Gearbox Software CEO Randy Pitchford, speaking to Gamasutra’s Leigh Alexander.
A Unified Theory of Folks in General
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to appreciate their mistakes. The unskilled therefore suffer from illusory superiority, rating their ability as above average, much higher than it actually is, while the highly skilled underrate their own...
The Loneliest Kind of Crazy
If you love disquieting tableaus of madness in motion—Henry Darger, Louis Wain, that kind of thing—you should fire up Left 4 Dead 2 and play this week’s Mutation, “Last Man on Earth”, now on its third rotation. You may have missed it the first few times, as I had, in which case you owe it to yourself to do it right now. What awaits you is an intimate glimpse at a...
March 2011
8 posts
pointincase asked: Also which Earthbound character is the most gay. I must know now. The man-woman fairy people don't count.