Links For June 8, 2015
All the women I know in video games are tired
We’ve been in the New York Times and been invited to conferences and told that we are Important Voices, doing Important Work, we’ve been on the news at night and in magazines. We are awash in social capital. But none of it translates to real capital. I’m not sure what we expected to get. Like the hollow feeling in my chest after that secret project lately that laid me low, what other result did I want than to complete it and have it be mine? I’m not sure, but that ambiguity depletes me of something, as it depletes all of us.
Learn to Play: A Lack of Taste
Games have the opposite problem: an elitism defined by the absence of taste, or simply by bad taste: an overweening concern with effective production of profit-generating emotional payoff that’s grown homogenous through the optimization of business practices and Metacritic scores. If this wasn’t so, it wouldn’t even be partially intelligible to speak of “what gamers like” as if it’s unitary, authoritative, or elite.
Tightening the World-Plot Interface: or, Why I Am Obsessed With Conversation Models
The trad-IF world model is terrific at doors and containers, but few interesting stories are actually about the doors and containers themselves. This is just the easiest proxy we have for the idea of gradual discovery, just as evading the police is the easiest proxy Framed could come up with for the turning point of an action thriller.
Intro to Ludic Ecologonomy (Pt. 1)
The Form of Games is dualistic– Economic and Ecological, the one dealing with rules which can be broken and changed abstractly, the other dealing with forces which cannot be broken and which can only be changed by concretely reconfiguring the materials conditions which cause them. This is the ground, not goals or optima or anything else– those are economic categories.