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qqueenofhades · 4 years ago

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Thanks for writing DVLA, it was wonderful. I haven’t gotten that absorbed in something in a while, and I read it twice while on a camping trip this weekend. And then spent a lot of time just staring out the window being sad about the Crusades and just these two beautiful queer disasters in general. (A HUNDRED YEARS OF PINING. I LOVED IT). (1/6)

It was everything I wanted, so satisfying, and the thread of Crusades and faith conflicts and the stupid complicated ways humans find to hurt each other was really masterfully woven through. I learned so much; I had a basic idea of the Crusades but you filled everything in and made it come alive. And you got across so well that people across history are just people. (2/6)

Maryam was my favourite, I would read anything with more of her in it as well. The Constantinople section and the way it ended just ripped my heart out. (PHIL.) I was so glad Hippolyta and Rebecca got out safe. But the end to such a lovely sunlit chapter of life was heartwrenching. (3/6)

It means a lot to me, as someone trying to confront her own faith’s and her ancestors’awful actions in the past, to have someone present religious conflict the way you do. Part motivations like conquest and glory and riches, part motivated by faith, and very much something that I or anyone else could fall into just as easily as people in the past did. (4/6)

I graduated three years ago with a minor in history and have done absolutely nothing with it - I was burned out for ages on even reading anything, and I haven’t read anything academically rigorous in so long. This felt like a perfect reintroduction to history, and it made me want to do research and read history again, for the first time in years. (5/6)

I’m noting the resources you’ve recommended to some other folks about medieval queerness and the Crusades, but I was wondering if you also had any recommendations for reading about Julian of Norwich specifically, or queerness in female medieval religious spaces in general? Thank you so much, I’ve followed your blog for a long time and always love reading your posts. (6/6)

Ahh, thanks so much. Once again, I must bow to someone’s superlative tumblr ninjitsu skills both in knowing the number of asks it will take ahead of time and preventing the blue hellsite from eating any of them.

I’ve had so many people say these absolutely lovely things to me about DVLA -- about the history, the religion, the journey, the story, the reactions they had to these themes, how they felt inspired by it -- and I really am truly humbled by it. I think it speaks to the way all of us felt some kind of ownership or reflection or empowerment in Joe and Nicky’s story and the way it unfolds both on screen in the TOG film and our own conceptions and reactions and engagement with it. It’s just one of the best ships I can think of in terms of that, and I’m worried that anything I say will end up sounding trite, but I really do mean that.

As a historian, I am obviously delighted to hear that it made you want to return to or re-engage with the subject in some way, as well as to use it to help think through the religious themes for yourself. Because as I said in my answer to how to deal with the history in a hypothetical Joe/Nicky prequel movie, we can’t just have the easy luxury of being like “oh all the crusaders were clearly religious zealots and we would never be like that and never do anything like that.” Because a) we already do that, and b) it prevents us from assessing ourselves and our own behaviour and our own troubling patterns and habits if we just arrogantly assume that all the people in the past were stupider and/or less enlightened than we were and clearly We Won’t Make Those Mistakes. So we have to see ourselves in them in some way, and to understand they still did those things, they still destroyed a lot of beautiful things in their world for ultimately no good reason at all. We’re doing the same thing, we justify it to ourselves in different ways, and the goals and the stakes are a lot larger in a globalized world, and anything that sets up medieval people (or really any people in the past, but the medieval era is the stick that gets used the most often) as so unlike us and so inferior to us is just genuinely dangerous. So yes. I’m sure you know my feelings on that topic.

Maryam, Rebecca, and Hippolyta have all gotten a lot of love, which I think is great, and it seems to be the consensus that chapter 4 ruined everyone’s lives. This is understandable, since I’ve mentioned the fact that despite the pain, I think it’s possibly my favourite, and I am glad that everyone had the totally normal emotions over the sack of Constantinople that I also had while writing it. Because yes! It is a tragedy the likes of which was still a Thing in the year 2004, the 800th anniversary, when the pope felt moved to apologize for it! The scale of what it destroyed and took away and the way it influenced history afterward (as Joe is thinking at the start of chapter 6) is just MASSIVE, and... yes.

As for reading recs (and again, it delights me that you want to dip your toe back into reading academic history), I don’t have anything about Julian of Norwich specifically (though there’s a LOT about her out there, especially right now, so I’m sure you can nose about and see what turns up). But as for queerness in female medieval religious spaces (with some bonus medieval queer ladies in general):

Sahar Amer, Crossing Borders: Love between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)

Judith Bennett, ‘ “Lesbian-Like” and the Social History of Lesbianisms,’ Journal of the History of Sexuality, 9 (2000), 9–22.

Marie-Jo Bonnet, ‘Sappho: Or the Importance of Culture in the Language of Love: Tribade, Lesbienne, Homosexuelle’, in Queerly Phrased: Language, Gender, and Sexuality, ed. by Anna Livia and Kira Hall (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 147–66.

Bernadette Brooten, Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996)

Mary Anne Campbell, ‘Redefining Holy Maidenhood: Virginity and Lesbianism in Late Medieval England’, Medieval Feminist Forum, 13 (1992) 14-15.

Carol Lansing, ‘Donna con donna? A 1295 Inquest into Female Sodomy’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, 3 (2005) 109-122.

Kathy Lavezzo, ‘Sobs and Sighs Between Women: The Homoerotics of Compassion in The Book of Margery Kempe.’, in Premodern Sexualities, ed. by Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 175-198.

E. Ann Matter, ‘My Sister, My Spouse: Woman-Identified Women in Medieval Christianity’, in Weaving the Visions, ed. by Judith Plaskow and Carol P. Christ (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989), pp. 51–62.

Jacqueline Murray, ‘Twice Marginal and Twice Invisible: Lesbians in the Middle Ages’, in Handbook of Medieval Sexuality, ed. by Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage (New York: Garland, 1996), pp. 191–222.

Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Among Women: From the Homosocial to the Homoerotic in the Ancient World. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002

Susan Schibanoff, ‘Hildegard of Bingen and Richardis of Stade: The Discourse of Desire’, in Same Sex: Love and Desire Among Women in the Middle Ages, ed. by Francesca Canadé Sautman and Pamela Sheingorn (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 49-83.

Have fun!!

#history #medieval history #queer history #greenestcoat #ask #dvla asks

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mcalhenwrites · 7 years ago

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Confession: My history with fanfic isn’t a flattering one. My first fandom involved playing Shadow Hearts in late 2004 and then actively looking for fanart, fanfics, and discussion in spring of 2005. Still, it took me months to sign up for LJ after lurking, reading every single post in the SH community. I did write fanfics, but I never got more than a few sentences into them. But I knew about the existence of fic long before that. And I remember thinking badly about it despite the fact that I was privately consuming it. A shitty attitude to have, especially being a hypocrite. :P I was sixteen when I got my own computer. My parents had given my brother and I our own computer about three years before, but my brother wouldn’t share. I probably got 5 hours of playing on that stupid machine over the course of three years, whereas my brother played that much on a daily basis. So when I had my own finally, I looked up things that weren’t...appropriate?

And I found spanking fanfiction. I read for fandoms I didn’t even like or know just to have access to my kink. (I mean, I’d already devastated library bookshelves looking for content like this for years before this point. I was writing original spanking stories in my closet with either a flashlight or the light from the crack in the door at the age of 12, I was so ashamed. On paper. It was 1997.) I remember one writer in particular whose work stood out to me because it was domestic discipline between two men (I just know the fandom was scifi), and my boyfriend at the time said, “Wow, even his screenname sounds gay!” Honestly, what I know of fandom now, I’m willing to bet that person was a woman. I remember reading this on a geocities webpage. Goodness, I feel old. Sometimes I ran into things that gave me the creeps, but I kept reading some of them just to have some kind of content semi-relateable. 12 y o me wrote some heinous shit, so I shouldn’t have been so judgemental, but I was. I never had a fandom in mind. It’s funny, I had steath-watched Queer as Folk by then, but I never did look for fic from it? Haha. Shadow Hearts was the first time I wanted continued stories, continued time with the characters. Spiral: Bonds of Reasoning soon followed. I can’t remember exactly what year I first watched Spiral, but 2004-2006 was a mesh of me slowly getting to meet online friends and be a part of fandom. It made a huge difference in my life. I can’t pinpoint when the transition was, where I stopped looking down on fanfics. Somewhere between 16 and 19. (Too old, but better late than never.) Onto the reason I felt like sharing that entire fucking history: I still hold back with fanfic as a writer, and my original fiction is a better example of me as a writer. I started dabbling with Kingdom Hearts and Spiral when I started expanding my writing to include fic. I remember reading through scathing fanfic criticisms on LJ and using it as a guide on what to avoid in my writing, even though a friend of mine warned me that that community was toxic and cruel. I knew that, but still...I wanted to glean tips from it. I wanted to be worthy enough to not end up being criticized there, even in a vague way like, “this fandom habitually mistreats so-and-so character!” Fact: people just shouldn’t be fucking tearing people’s work apart like that. I know so many friends who were torn apart in places like that. Blanket statements like, “I wish my fandom would stop writing bash fics for all the girls because they’re seen as cockblocks” is one thing; literally posting excerpts and links and ripping them apart makes you an ASSHOLE. Yet I still fucking looked because I wanted to be better as a writer and thought it would help. Which honestly just led to me having less confidence in my writing, is that any surprise? Guess that’s what I get for lurking a community like that? Note that while I may not be interested in what someone writes, I support people writing. I support you working on your writing, because no one starts off great. People with self-inserts and OCs and ideas that don’t fit in canon are having fucking fun and that is amazing. ‘Cos if writing stops being fun, what’s the point? I wasn’t actually a witness to the strikethrough despite being on LJ - I wasn’t active in enough fandoms or on the site. I ended up reading about it later down the road. (Though I think it explains why so many things did disappear on me, come to think of it.) It was 2009 when I started to be open about my original stories. I had sort of kept them under wraps, only mentioning them sparingly. Seemed like people I knew wanted more fic than original anyway. (And that’s still feels true to me, haha.) Buuuut my original stories had one big thing that my fic did not: spanking. Yes, there were spanking fics, but they were rarely anything I could stand to read. I didn’t write them, either. It didn’t feel “right” to use someone else’s characters for my fetishes. And sometimes it just didn’t fit the characters. :’) My original stories definitely included it, but it made it harder to share. Meanwhile, my self-worth about writing continued to take beatings, and I wasn’t aware of how or why. My confidence sunk lower, but I kept going. I had it instilled in me from a very toxic source that I wasn’t trying hard enough, and so I kept trying even more. Only to realize, eventually, that she was just a fuckfaced bully I was stupid enough to listen to. (Yet she says what my family does, and that’s a big thing that goes through my head: that I don’t try hard enough, that I don’t work hard enough, that I must not care because I don’t dedicate more time to it. Even though I DO.) And I feel like I can speak candidly about that because I’m beginning to realize how much I do work hard at it. Even if I’m slow at improving, even if I’m not good, I’m still working at it. I actually started to become more open about writing my stories and fic after dissolving that “friendship”, but then started to hide in my hole again when tumblr got on its high horse about kink shaming. I started to fear being a target on my back because I do like a lot of kinky things. That’s also about the time I stopped working on “Of Little Things” from Tales of Xillia. I probably will never finish the story because the next chapter has Alvin and Jude doing some kinky spanking for fun, and I feared alienating everyone who read it at the time. So I stopped. I do think Alvin finds it to be stress relief, and it works for Jude as foreplay to build him up to sex. Nothing graphic...but I couldn’t bring myself to post the next chapter. I loooove Tales of Xillia, of course, and I loved Milla/Jude/Alvin as my OT3 - I STILL DO. I wrote fanfiction between original for a while. I never thought it was as good, but I had fun with it. Then something weird happened back in December of last year. I fell in love with FFXV more than I could possibly imagine. I started a few fics I never shared or finished, and I resigned myself to being “just a reader/consumer” because I didn’t think I’d really get into writing fic much. I’d always done it here and there, and I guess I could say “dabbled” but that makes it sound like I didn’t put any care into what I wrote. That’s not true. I did. But my commitments have always been to original first. Only I was stuck in so many of my stories, and I just didn’t have any willpower to live anymore. I’ve already wrote about how FFXV saved my goddamn life by just being there for me when I was scared and sad about the election results and the crap going down in my country. But it also got me to care about writing when my own stories made me feel nothing but hopelessness. I have never written for a fandom the way I have FFXV. Ever. I have tons of Spiral fics, but it took me years to write that many. FFXV hasn’t even been out a fucking year, and I’ve written 50+ fics. (40 are posted on AO3.) I wrote ‘no one to dry your eyes at midnight’, a story that has spanking! I posted it while going through multiple panic attacks, and then I watched as people actually left kudos...that scared and comforted me at the same time. I’m one of those people who wants validation, but if you give me it, I get an upset stomach, start crying, and throw up. I make no sense. Anyway... I use fic to push outside my comfort zone somewhat. With Spiral and Nabari No Ou, I started to write fics that were present tense. I tried to accept that it’s okay for me to write these characters, just like other fans do. I sincerely worry that I’m ruining characters for people. But I think a ton of followers have seen me call myself a “taint” by now, and the reasons behind it, so I won’t go into that. I wish I could stop holding back. With both original and fic - especially fic, because I feel it suffers from me not thinking I belong in fandom. Which is...deeper than writing or what I write. I think I shouldn’t be physically present at cons, that I don’t have a right to include myself in discussions (even though I badly want to and desperately crave chances to do so), that any contribution I make is actually an annoyance that others must wish would go away. Sometimes it crosses my mind that I shouldn’t even be trying. Which makes me sad, because FFXV makes me happy. But it also hurts to write fic at all, no matter the fandom. Because other people are doing it better. Other people write the characters in a way I never will be able to. They can write wonderful stories, and I admire them, and I’m proud of them. But I’m not one of them. And when it comes to original fic, I feel even more alone. A person who wants to share stories that won’t be ruining the characters for anyone, since they’re mine, and...if it’s bad, it’s bad. If it’s enjoyed, it’s enjoyed. (And it’ll never be good enough that anyone writes fic for it, right? So I’m safe from anyone showing me up! LOL.) And umm. I don’t know. I still hate my writing in so many ways, no matter if it’s original or fic. I think I have some good ideas, but I suck at implementing them. (I call myself the r-slur a lot out loud, because I know what’s wrong and read how to fix it but can’t seem to improve? Why am I so...well... y’know, r-slur?!) So knowing a handful of people enjoy my writing...I’m grateful. And I’m sorry that I’m skeptical that it’s good when you tell me it is. And I’m sorry to myself for ruining my own chances to be anything.

#mcalhen personal #this is a fucking essay I'm sorry #long post

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thebuniperspective-blog · 7 years ago

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The First Blog, Wherein I Come Out As Queer & Dunno How Long Titles On Tumblr Should Be: I Had a Weird Week

Hi, I’m Michael Bennett producer of The (Bunny) Buni Perspective! and I had a bad week. Kinda of an amazing week. And here I am, talking about things I’m now no longer embarrassed to disclose.

I’m going to talk about the week in sections as they come to me, so this might jump around a little, but it ends with Bunny Bennett and a promise to see you tomorrow.

Warning frank discussion of sex, pot and LSD use and cursing you fucking dumbshits. I promise not to be too gross.

I Joined, Figured Out, and Then Deleted Grindr, In One Single Day.

Pause for applause.

Grinder is not for highly specific queers. The title queer is feeling like the correctt word for me, as it also means weird. . So I’m polly, so far I’m deeply in love with two girls. I’ll be writing more about Heather and Meghan in the next few blogs. Promise girls.

I’m turned on by femininity. Not just sexually, feminine things were the bane of my childhood and now they draw me in. To make this simple my ideal girl, in pop culture for many, many reasons, is some variation of:

...35 and inserting gifs that make you blush...shame....

The thing is, I have for years been drawn to femboys and just shoved the feeling down. I can see the first guy I wanted to ask on a date vividly in my mind. I have a really hard time explaining it, but if Pearl were a boy, he’d be my dream guy.

I’m also polly, so on the Internet I’m a ‘faggot cuck’

I promise tomorrow I will discuss the polly aspect of my sexuality in ore detail, for now just know I’m just complicated.

Ok so, how do I convay any of that on Grindr? I can’t. I want to have a conversation. You cannot say that because it starts ‘hey’ then it’s just dick pics or boring, predictable bullshit.

I had a big realization. I’m a fucking jerk. I’ve been chatting online for decades and have treated the majority as badly as these guys treated me. Not that I sent dick pics, but if they didn’t do what I wanted I wasn’t nice or polite. Often I wouldn’t read their info well. I dunno. I felt pretty bad being ignored and hit on cause apparently I’m adorable?

...fat piece of shit.

The REALLY cute girls on grindr were a minimum 100 miles away. None want to do a long distant thing, which is really what I want right now. And frankly the guys I want to meet are girls. And I know I’m queer because the other day I said, ‘That cock is adorable’ and that is not what a straight man says.

I feel a lot better saying all that. Let’s talk about my favorite game I need to quit.

I Can Spot A Catfish A Mile Away After Two Full Days Of Talking Out Loud

I was playing League and I out of no where got a friend request. I take all of these, usually remembering them from a recent game. Not this time. First thing ‘she’ said was “I always get call a catfish” DOT DOT DOT

This ‘girl’ played well, we chatted in game, ‘she’ was REALLY flirty and I bought ‘her’ many skins in game, maybe 50$ worth? Can’t remember for my embarrassment's sake. I begged this person to talk to me face to face on skype and they made it into a fight every time. So I cut it off.

This happened to me recently. This person refused to talk to me while we played games (me out loud into my headset, and ‘she’ replying in chat). Every hour I begged this person to talk to me in anyway. At first they told me they only spoke Japanese and ‘she’ was embarrassed about the language, ‘she’ understood me too well for that, think I literally said, ‘What are you Chewbacca?’

I basically just talked. They replied and were REALLY needy. I mentioned skins at last and they changed how they talked a lot but then suddenly, this person couldn’t talked to me because of childhood tongue biting induced tongue paralysis. Also their name was Soka Hui? Apparently?

They told me their family was massacred. Like RECENTLY. So I looked it up:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/the-wolf-family-murders-north-dakotas-most-brutal_us_57fbe48ae4b0b665ad818798

That’s scary tho if that person recorded me.

I Fell in Love With a Guy

I did not want to. I could hear the mocking voices of my brothers from my childhood, the ghosts of my high school, the word ‘faggot’ as anything but gross, not something that turned me on. Not something I whispered to a guy, begging me to...he didn’t love me. He sounded really fucking pretty when he said I love you. He said my name so beautifully the echo of it makes me cry as I write this now.

I would have called him a fucking faggot in 1997 and been angry. Might have gotten violent.

Now I wish Dexter would just say anything, perched in my lap and...

Well it’s stupid to dwell on things. I learned a lesson. The lesson here is ‘you can’t win, but always try.’

Here’s why: I did everything right, this is how Meghan and I began. Dexter and I have talked on and off for months. For about 8...maybe a year. Dexter was my dirty little secret.

He called me and moaned and we...you know whatever, but always behind Heather’s back (she knows now). I hated to admit that guy was really...

Well he got a hold of me at the beginning of the week.

He told me that he wanted me to make love to him, say ‘I love you’ to me on his boyfriend’s bed. I took this too mean he wanted me to be in love so...we talked.

We talked for an hour and I was so in love. He was interesting and funny. He had comedy bits memorized. He loves Star Wars.I wanted to keep talking. I thought we’d at lest text later.

I wanted to Love Star Wars with him. I wanted to meet him and do whatever he wanted. He cut off the call...I should have known an hour was kind of short compared to girls I had talked to in the past.

I didn’t hear from him for 3 days.

I had all this confused love in me. I barfed it all up. He was masturbating. Trying to get me to talk about sex and I was stammering and nervous and near crying. I told he was my first guy...the guy I was in love with, for real and he cut me off. There was a really hard to describe, painful, awkward silence.

I flashed back to all the folder of evidence I had that he loved me, the saw the mountain of facts that said he was just getting off to me using him. Or...something. We haven’t spoken since.

I told him ‘I have a lot of cosplay ideas’ and he laughed.

He said he had to go and I said ok. He said ‘Talk to y-’ but I hung up and threw the phone. Cried. Last my game of League. Told Heather and Meghan. Cried in the shower.

I told Meghan and Heather about this guy throughout the three days he went silent. Meghan has a number of really hot ideas involving some third male person. Heather is asexual but really really like the idea of live yaoi.

Dexy...Dexter hurt me, really badly. I tried anything for a few days to distract myself, the catfish, grindr, other guys I know from chat rooms. I over bared myself to them when I could just do that here and link it.

That leads me to:

If We Got Married No One Would Have to Change Their Last Names, Cartoonist Who Draws Like Me, Puppeteer Who Made a Way Better Puppet Than Me and I Love It and Other Reason Why I Might Be In Love With Isabella Bunny Bennett

A long time ago. And right now I’m pausing to see if I can find the thing...

Ok as far as I know it’s gone? Maybe I can get it from Linkara’s title card artist.

He and I interviewed Isabella back when she in the long ago times and it was one of the all time best conversations I had ever had in my life. She is bright and funny and clever and i’m crying again, what the...Ok I came back in twenty minutes later to fix this mess. I did start crying a little. It’s hard to remember it all but Bunny was so natural, we finished each other’s thoughts. I really wanted to talk forever. She’s so...shit literally crying...

This was a very long time ago, John was still in the band.I lost track and my internet presence took a nose dive. That will get many blogs.

Her twitter posts recently (Sept’17) are really lining up with how I feel.The normal places I thought I could meet someone online, are failing me. It’s frustrating, but I can do one thing at least. Flirt with Isabella. I flirt with art:

I got no context for this guy at the bottom...he didn’t get my context clearly.

Anyway

...

.....

...in the song Burning in the Stratosphere she makes a kissy noise and says...’I love you’ but at the beginning in a near whisper...chills. I wasn’t expecting it, really hadn’t visited the album it’s on til tonight.

I hope to talk more about Isabella in the future. I’m a chaos magician, so it’s likely to happen.

#bisexual #bi #puppet #cartoon #cartoonist #crushes #love

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symbianosgames · 8 years ago

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The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include Julian Gollop on Phoenix Point, the making of Typeshift & the SteamProphet contest.

Lots of interesting links this week - am particularly taken by the article on the tumultous community of Elite: Dangerous, which I thought was far less tumultuous than Star Citizen. (Well, it probably still is.) But it reminded me that when you make a game that's in a state of constant change, you'll get all kinds of views on its artistic direction - especially on the polarized Internet. Which can be tiring, and rough, but isn't a lot of the Internet? 'Til next time...

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Giant Sparrow creative director talks about the freaky beautiful haunting of Edith Finch (David Nieves / ComicsBeat) "What Remains of Edith Finch is developer Giant Sparrow’s (published by Annapurna Interactive) follow up to their critically acclaimed debut The Unfinished Swan. While the first game was a unique tale of an orphan boy who navigates a literal blank world by throwing paint everywhere. What Remains of Edith Finch is an eerie beautiful collection of stories about a cursed family house in the Pacific Northwest."

The Occupation and the perils of politics in games (Chris Priestman / Eurogamer) "At 11.36am on March 22nd 2017, White Paper Games announced The Occupation with a trailer and a press release. Set in 1980s north-west England, it's a first-person narrative adventure that follows a journalist caught up in the aftermath of a terrorist attack that left 23 people dead."

Milwaukee's War on 'Pokémon GO' Could Change Tech Forever (Jordan Zakarin / Inverse) "Even now, almost a year later, Sheldon Wasserman sounds surprised when he describes what went down in Milwaukee’s Lake Park last summer. “People are beginning to run across the streets, parking is absolutely overloaded, the police are now ticketing, food trucks are showing up,” the Milwaukee County Supervisor remembers."

Picture in a Frame (Amr Al-Aaser / Medium) "I think a lot about how we frame things... It’s something that feels repeatedly relevant in games, a space where the practice of describing games as “x meets y” or “game x with twist y” is a common format for arriving at an explanation of a title."

Still Logged In: What AR and VR Can Learn from MMOs (Raph Koster / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2017 GDC session, MMO designer Raph Koster talks about the social and ethical implications of turning the real world into a virtual world, and how the lessons of massively multiplayer virtual worlds are more relevant than ever."

Meet the superfans still playing Populous: The Beginning (Oliver Milne / RockPaperShotgun) "So how come there’s still an active group of Populous players keeping the flame alive nearly twenty years later? I got in touch with some of the community’s longest-standing members to find out. [SIMON'S NOTE: this one's a bit old, but had no idea third parties got unofficial matchmaking running for the game.]"

RPG Codex Interview: Julian Gollop on Phoenix Point (Infinitron / RPG Codex) "Phoenix Point uses willpower as a key stat. A character's willpower rating determines initial and maximum will points for a battle. Will points are spent on most special actions and abilities. Will points can be lost through injury, morale effects (such as comrades dying or facing a horrifying monster) and special enemy attacks."

The future is in interactive storytelling (Noah Wardrip-Fruin & Michael Mateas / The Conversation) "Marvel’s new blockbuster, “Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2,” carries audiences through a narrative carefully curated by the film’s creators. That’s also what Telltale’s Guardians-themed game did when it was released in April."

How Zach Gage fine-tuned the difficulty curve of TypeShift (Rollin Bishop / Gamasutra) "TypeShift, the latest game from acclaimed mobile developer Zach Gage, is part crossword, part anagram, and all puzzle. Rather than simply ask a player to solve a single jumbled word, or even several, TypeShift — which is available on iOS and Android — instead asks players to create any number of words out of several tiers of letters until they’ve used every single one."

How Final Fantasy 7 Revolutionized Videogame Marketing and Helped Sony Tackle Nintendo (David L Craddock / Paste) "In late July 1997, Sony Computer Entertainment America buzzed with excitement. SCEA was in possession of Final Fantasy 7’s gold master discs, media containing finalized code. Over the next few weeks, they would undergo mass production—pressed to millions of CD-ROMs, packaged inside jewel cases, and shipped to stores in time for the game’s summer launch across Europe and North America."

The state of Elite Dangerous (Wesley Yin-Poole / Eurogamer) "On 25th April 2017, Cambridge-based developer Frontier released patch notes for its two-and-a-half year-old space game Elite Dangerous. Buried within those patch notes, under the section "General Fixes & Tweaks", was a line that set the game's vociferous community alight: Farmed salt from the community for usage later."

Spaceplan - Based on a Misunderstanding Of Stephen Hawking (Scott Manley / YouTube) "It's a 'make numbers go up' game with a bit of a space theme and potatoes, lots of potatoes, solar masses of tubers."

Classic Game Postmortem: Seaman (Yoot Saito / GDC / YouTube) "In this GDC 2017 Classic Game Postmortem, Yutaka "Yoot" Saito speaks at length about his work creating 'Seaman', a game that left an indelible mark on the fabric of both the game industry and pop culture at large."

What I learned playing "SteamProphet" (Lars Doucet / Gamasutra) "At least 249 indie games have launched on Steam in the past 13 weeks not including VR or F2P games. That's more than 30 games every week, on average. In their first month... 75% made at least $0, 10% made at least $1K-9K, 7.5% made at least $10K-49K, 2% made at least $50K-99K, 5% made at least $100K-999K, Exactly one made > $1M."

Knack 2 is an atonement (Colin Campbell / Polygon) "Knack 2 director Mark Cerny is one of the most accomplished game developers of the last three decades, most especially in platform adventures featuring likable characters. From Marble Madness to Sonic the Hedgehog 2, from Crash Bandicoot to Ratchet & Clank, he's made his mark on a multitude of verdant, primary-hued worlds, where colorful critters boing and bounce."

Game Dev Insight: A Chat with BioWare Cinematics Lead Tal Peleg (Shinobi602 / Shinobi Speaks) "I’m super happy to be able to share a nice chat I had with Tal Peleg, a Cinematics Lead at BioWare. His previous animation work includes a bevy of notable titles such as Mass Effect: Andromeda, Uncharted 4, The Last of Us and Dead Space 2 among others. "

Why is motherhood so poorly portrayed in video games? (Kate Smith / The Guardian) "And games, you may be startled to discover, are not too great at portraying motherhood – though they seem to have fatherhood all figured out. Did you know that once you have a daughter you suddenly become aware that women are people, too? Who could have seen that coming?"

Ten Years Ago, Dead Or Alive Launched The Careers Of The Highest-Paid Women Pro Gamers (Maddy Myers / Kotaku Compete) "Vanessa Arteaga had been playing fighting games since she was a child, long before she became one of the highest-paid women in competitive gaming history—but her tens of thousands in winnings still pale in comparison to the millions that her male peers have made in competitive gaming in the years since."

'Civilization' Creator Sid Meier: "I Didn't Really Expect to be a Game Designer"(Chris Suellentrop / Glixel) "At GDC, Meier talked to Glixel for almost an hour with boyish enthusiasm about what makes Civilization work, why Firaxis turns to a new lead designer with almost every sequel, and that whole thing with having his name on the box."

Jeff Kaplan reveals the Overwatch Balance Triangle (Here's A Thing / Eurogamer / YouTube) "On this week's episode of Here's A Thing, Chris Bratt talks to Overwatch game director, Jeff Kaplan about the 'balance triangle' his team uses when thinking about hero design."

How Inside’s levels were designed (Alex Wiltshire / RockPaperShotgun) "Playdead don’t design games in the same way that other studios do. They’re the result of a process where nothing is written down. There’s no script and no design document. No member of the team owns any aspect of what they make and what will go into the final game. Everything is up for change."

Why This Very Queer Strategy Game Downplayed Its Queerness While Crowdfunding (Patrick Klepek / Waypoint) ""Essentially the game comes out to the player—if they notice, and not everybody does," said All Walls Must Fall programmer Isaac Ashdown, who lives in Berlin with his husband. "The fact is that the game isn't really 'about' being queer, but it's set in Berlin nightclubs, and those can be pretty queer spaces.""

These are the developers creating new games for old consoles (Andrew Webster / The Verge) "If you want to play Dustin Long’s most recent game, you’ll need a console that was first released more than 30 years ago. As a young musician in New York, Long found himself drawn to the chiptune scene, where artists craft sounds using classic gaming hardware."

Burn The Bikini Armour: Actionable Tips For Better Character Design (Victoria Smith / Play By Play) " By taking a look at the worst and best of costume design in games - as well as primary sources and the basics of visual design - you can elevate your character designs and create something truly unique. Nobody wants to appear on the Worst Dressed list, so why should your game characters be any different?"

I Paid Women To Play Overwatch With Me, And It Was Fantastic (Cecilia D'Anastasio / Kotaku) "Earlier this week, on Fiverr.com, I selected Biu’s “Basic” package which, in exchange for $5, granted me her company for five Overwatch games. In her profile’s image, a helicopter selfie, Biu is wearing a t-shirt with Zelda’s Link and sticking out her tongue."

Designer Interview: Crafting Flinthook's hookshot wasn't easy (Alex Wiltshire / Gamasutra) "There are many ways to express the concept of throwing out a line from a player character that attaches to a surface, something that’s familiar to many first- and third person 3D games, from Ocarina of Time to Spider-Man 2. But the hookshot is curiously underused in 2D platformers. Tribute Games’ new action platformer, Flinthook, might give some pointers as to why. Not because Flinthook isn’t good. Quite the opposite, in fact."

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symbianosgames · 8 years ago

Link

- Simon, curator.]

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#IFTTT #Blogger

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symbianosgames · 8 years ago

Link

- Simon, curator.]

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#IFTTT #Blogger

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symbianosgames · 8 years ago

Link

- Simon, curator.]

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#IFTTT #Blogger

0 notes

symbianosgames · 8 years ago

Link

- Simon, curator.]

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#IFTTT #Blogger

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