SPAG #60; Lyttle Lytton 2011; nY #9

-
Three pieces of unrelated news concerning me and (in one case very tangentially) interactive fiction:
  1. The new SPAG is out, now with a beautiful cover, many interviews, an interesting design document for Hoist Sail for the Heliopause and Home, an overview of the PAX 2011 Demo Fair, and my analysis of Gigantomania. It is not too early to start writing a piece of criticism, an essay on design, or some other interesting article for the next issue! What about recapping and reflecting on an interesting discussion that has been held on the blogs or the forum? There are many possibilities. SPAG needs you!
  2. I sent in a sentence to Adam Cadre's 2011 Lyttle Lytton competition, where you have to write the worst possible short opening sentence for a novel. I'm pleased to say that Adam awarded me a shared second place for:
    This is the story of how one woman overcame breast cancer by never ever losing faith in herself.
    Coincidentally, just after I had sent in this sentence, big posters appeared in the Netherlands showing a baby and the text "Vrouwen creëren meer dan borstkanker ooit kan vernietigen", which translates to "Women create more than breast cancer can ever destroy". Which is terrible in so many ways that I don't even know where to begin.
  3. I published an article on interactive fiction as experimental literature in the Flemish (and Dutch-language) literary magazine nY, issue 9. I focus on two aspects: the many roles in a piece of IF, and how these can be used to explore, for instance, the theme of authority (think Fail-Safe and LASH); and choice, and how this can be used to explore moral issues, to represent reality in its potentiality as well as its actuality, and to represent consciousness without assuming that thinking occurs one thought at a time. I believe the piece will appear on the website at a certain point, but I'm not 100% sure; if it does, I will of course post an update.

Comments

  1. Lea29 April 2011 at 22:35

    Those posters sound ripe for sending to the Sociological Images blog.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown5 May 2011 at 15:17

    Hello there,

    I'm Richard Ashley. I run the site Dragonsbay.co. We have a segment called: Plundering the Vault.

    Once a week we focus on articles from other Role Playing sites. Each week is a different site. We re-post the article with plenty of click backs to the site were the archive came from. This way the various authors out that get a reminder out there that their sites are other sources of information. .

    At the end of each article we have something like this. It would be personalized to your site.

    Special thanks to (insert name here) for allowing us to reprint this article. He/she/they offers game master tips at his/her their website, the site.com. Drop by right now to get the latest(insert specifics about your site).

    Would you be interested in having your site be plundered? :) Check out what vaults have been plundered recently here.

    Richard Ashley
    www.dragonsbay.co
    rca310 -at- gmail

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Keeping the narrative pressure on

-
I played another session of Trollbabe yesterday, and I would like to take the opportunity to write a little bit about GMing this game (and similar narrativist games). This is not a worked out manifesto so much as an attempt to think through an approach that I've been taking more or less instinctively. First, some context. This game was online, with two people I had never played with before: Judith and Katy. Actually, it's not quite true that I never played with Judith. I've known her for some 38 years, and possibly the first roleplaying I was ever engaged in was on a vacation with her family and my family. She acted as a kind of story guide, and I and her brother Adriaan played characters in an unfolding short story. I was thrilled by the possibilities inherent in such an activity, but it would take more time before I really discovered the world of tabletop RPGs. Both Judith and Katy played a bunch of roleplaying games before, though as far as I can judge they were all fai...
Read more

Walter Benjamin, "Der Erzähler" (The Storyteller)

-
In the comments to my last post, Ian mentioned an essay by Walter Benjamin , Der Erzähler ( The Storyteller ). Benjamin was an important German philosopher of the first half of the twentieth century; he wrote on a wide range of topics, but his best-known work is probably his essay Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit (it is widely cited as The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction , but The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility would have been a better translation). Der Erzähler is a very rich and complex essay. It claims to be a reflection on the work of Nikolai Lesskow (in English known as Leskov, I believe); but it also touches on the difference beween a story (in the sense that a storyteller tells stories; Erzählung , not Geschichte ) and a novel, on the communicability of experience, on the role of death in modern life, on the nature of wisdom, on the relation between man and nature, and on several other topics. All...
Read more

Thoughts on a Trollbabe session

-
Yesterday, I played a second session of Trollbabe with Erik and Michiel, even more delightful than the first. ( Trollbabe . I dislike the title of the game, to be frank, but it's the only thing about it to dislike. Let me stress that the whole point of the game is that you're playing strong, independent women. With horns.) To give you an impression of the context, let me say that both Erik and Michiel are very good friends of mine, and that we've done a fair amount of roleplaying before, though mostly D&D. In fact, the two of them have played various editions of D&D almost exclusively, and neither had any previous GMing experience. That was about to change. In the first session, I GMed their characters Rolda (Michiel) and Vekir (Erik), who were together in a single adventure -- something that is not a given in Trollbabe . This time, we were going to do the same thing, but in addition I would also get to play a character, one adventuring at a different location. Mi...
Read more