Via Dave Higgins. I sometimes call a similar approach to this “mountain peaks above the clouds”; Brandon Sanderson talks about “moments of awesome”. Basically, you’re taking some really strong scenes, set-pieces, or moments and incorporating them into a story outline.
Originally shared by Misha Burnett
On Sunday I attended the matinee of this year’s Circus Flora performance. I have mentioned before in this blog how much I love having a traditional small circus based in my home town. I strongly urge anyone who can arrange the trip to come to St. Louis to…
Someone creates a cool game, and it is met with deafening silence. It is hurled into the void and, despite its inherent genius, it is never played by anyone or heard from again. As a game designer this is as essential an experience as the act of creation. It happens to everyone.
But!
If somebody makes an intensely interesting game that speaks to an experience outside the mainstream, or somehow not aligned with a conventional narrative of violence and power, or just plain weird, the chances that nobody will touch it increase dramatically.
However!
The odds of that cool thing getting the slightest shred of attention increase when certain boxes are checked. The biggest boxes are “male” and “white”, and they correlate with things like resources and confidence, which of course correlate with privilege. Many times I have seen similar games enter the world at more or less the same time, with more or less the same built-in genius, and watched one succeed while the other fails. Guess who wrote the one that usually succeeds?
Even more troubling, I’ve seen games by marginalized creators that got zero traction essentially re-written to great acclaim. Sometimes it’s a “hack”. Sometimes it’s a business arrangement. Sometimes it is something else.
Here’s another thing that happens all the time:
People gather at a convention to socialize, and that socialization takes place in a very specific environment – at a bar, where “industry veterans”, genial raconteurs all, hold court among the various strata of friends and admirers. Social connections are forged, and sometimes these turn into business connections. At other times this exact milieu is where actual business is conducted. If you find this environment challenging for any one of a million reasons, hey, that’s on you. Somebody else is going to get the work, down the road. And the people who most easily integrate into this social space check the boxes I mentioned above.
Some friends of mine want to route around these problems a little bit, by putting the work of people for whom the systems in place don’t work super well in front of people who will be interested in them. The ultimate goal here is to connect creators – in this case marginalized creators – with people who buy games. And that’s the important part – sometimes games get praise for their brilliance and become critical darlings, but nobody buys them. And the very best way to thank a creator and encourage more brilliant work is to buy their stuff.
So now there’s More Seats At The Table, which has a newsletter and a Patreon. Subscribe to the newsletter and you are going to be exposed to weird, wonderful games by equally weird and wonderful people, many of whom are friends of mine and all of whom I resoundingly endorse. Support them on Patreon if you’d like to see clever end runs around a dysfunctional status quo succeed.
Via The Fussy Librarian’s newsletter, an interview with some facepalm-worthy revelations from a romance author who doesn’t fit the industry’s prejudices.
I’ve speculated before about a difference between stories where the characters mainly act upon the world and stories where the world mainly acts on the characters being, in part, about how much agency the authors and readers perceive themselves as having.
“If the glorious technological future that Silicon Valley enthusiasts dream about is only going to serve to make the growing gaps wider and strengthen existing unfair power structures, is it something worth striving for?”
Originally shared by Singularity Hub
A new report from the Institute for Public Policy Research has deep concerns about the future of work.
Obviously (as the article notes), stopping plastic pollution in the first place is an important part of the solution, not just cleaning it up after it gets into the ocean. But another key point is that by taking out large amounts of plastic waste before it breaks down into microplastics, this project is preventing a much worse problem than the one we’re already facing.
Interesting. Dickens envisaged something similar to Westworld (or Grand Theft Auto): a place where wealthy young men could behave badly without inconveniencing society at large. The satirical twist is that along with automatons, the poor would be recruited as victims that nobody cared about, and there would be a mock trial at the end in which the privileged young men would get off scot-free.
Now, apply this to people living in some other unusual circumstance, like a planet with different gravity or air pressure.
Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh
Fascinating adaptation. “Bajau divers been observed plunging more than 200 feet underwater, their only protection a pair of wooden goggles — a physiological marvel.
In 2015, Melissa Ilardo, then a graduate student in genetics at the University of Copenhagen, heard about the Bajau. She wondered if centuries of diving could have led to the evolution of traits that made the task easier for them.
“It seemed like the perfect opportunity for natural selection to act on a population,” said Dr. Ilardo.
[…]
When people plunge into water, they respond with the so-called diving reflex: the heart rate slows and blood vessels constrict as a way to shunt blood to vital organs. The spleen also contracts, squirting a supply of oxygen-rich red blood cells into the circulation.
[…]
When Dr. Ilardo compared scans from the two villages, she found a stark difference. The Bajau had spleens about 50 percent bigger on average than those of the Saluan.
Yet even such a remarkable difference might not be the result of evolution. Diving itself might somehow enlarge the spleen. There are plenty of examples of experience changing the body, from calloused feet to bulging biceps.
Only some Bajau are full-time divers. Others, such as teachers and shopkeepers, have never dived. But they, too, had large spleens, Dr. Ilardo found. It was likely the Bajau are born that way, thanks to their genes.”
