#gamification definition

[sbanimation]

Learning by doing: why is retention the goal in e-learning and training courses?

One of the key ways to increase retention is interactivity. Rather than passively consuming content, learners retain information better when they interact with the material. This can include discussions, group activities, problem-solving exercises, and hands-on simulations. However, the best methods we have available today are through various animated interactive video content including augmented reality, virtual reality and gamification. Using animation, e-learning and training courses shows how the training content is relevant to real-life situations. The course material should provide examples and case studies that demonstrate how the knowledge or skills can be applied in practical scenarios. https://sbanimation.com/learning-by-doing-why-is-retention-the-goal-in-e-learning-and-training-courses/

[deadendtracks]

i've never enjoyed learning a language but i think it turns out the problem was the way i was being taught maybe? idk. i'm enjoying trying to learn extremely basic italian. i doubt i'll go to the extent of learning to be fluent because i know myself and i do not have that kind of attention span but if it's good enough to get myself around Rome by myself in October I'll be proud.

[psychhound]

5e homebrew for disability pride month

hey yall :D since it's disability pride month and i am a Local Disabled TM i wanted to spotlight the d&d 5e homebrew i've done featuring disability mechanics!! they're all FREE / PWYW and available on itch!!

autism & adhd mechanics

traits for mechanically emphasizing a character's autism and/or adhd!! there's 11 traits total, with 5 shared between them, and 3 each that are specific to autism and adhd. the traits are beneficial, detrimental, and a mix of both, intended for 1-3 to be chosen for a single character. includes traits like sensory processing disorder, time blindness, and rejection sensitive dysphoria

service monsters

service animals - monster edition! you choose a customizable base for your monster, a statblock, and origin, and then get to choose your service type: guiding, hearing, mobility, medical alert, trauma, schizophrenia, or autism! each service type has a unique monster with different abilities, strengths, and magic. service monsters can't be used in combat but they have resistance to all damage and go to a pocket dimension upon dropping to 0hp

trauma mechanics

10 traits for panic disorder, ptsd, and cptsd, with an included definitions section and suggestions for trait application. includes mechanics for triggers, as well as for traits like panic attacks, insomnia, hypervigilance, and trust issues. the traits include different outcomes for meeting the dc or failing by different margins, and the aftereffects of failing a save, as well as ways that allies can help

my inspiration for making these was that i'm an autistic, mentally ill, traumatized disabled person who's been an active and leading disability advocate for the last 9 years and a disability-specialist social worker for 2.5 of those. definitely still room for improvement with my homebrew but i think there always will be when trying to put the incredibly varied human experience of disability into a crunchy numbers&rules format :o)

if you liked them please consider throwing some dollars my way either on itch or on my kofi as i get ready to head to grad school to study gamification in the mental health & disability space!! you can also check out the rest of my 5e homebrew here!

happy disability pride month to all, go run over some toes

[bluebellowl]

GARDEN PEOPLE TALK TO ME!

I’m looking for people to interview for my game design graduation project.

I'm making a small game to educate and inspire people about Food Forests. The start-up game company eVRgreen Studio is my client for this, so it's gonna be all about nature and gamification for a sustainable society.

The game will be aimed at Millennials and Gen X with vegetable gardens big and small. If you’re in that age group and you’ve got a garden, let’s talk! If you know people who match that description, send them my way!

The project is still in its baby shoes, but that's the best time to talk to the people who are gonna play the game later on. Your input helps me decide on how we're gonna present the game, what the gameplay should look like, and what kind of art style I should go for.

I’m working on a form rn as well, but I definitely want to actually talk to some people. If you're interested, just drop into my dms.

[hoursofreading]

THE INTERNET is designed to stop us from ever switching it off. It moves at the speed of light, with constantly changing metrics, fuelled by “‘ludic loops’ or repeated cycles of uncertainty, anticipation and feedback”—in other words, it works exactly like a Jackpot 6000 slot machine. (On a basic level, social media apps like Instagram operate like phone games. They’ve replaced classics like Snake or Candy Crush, except the game is your sense of self.) The effect of gamification on artmaking has been dramatic. In Rebecca Jennings’s Vox long read on the necessity of authorly self-promotion, she interviews William Deresiewicz, whose book The Death of the Artist breaks down the harsh conditions for artists seeking an income in the digital economy. Deresiewicz used to think “selling out”—using the most sacred parts of your life and values to shill for a brand—was “evil.” Yet this economy has made it so there’s “no choice” if you want a living. The very concept of selling out, he says, “has disappeared.” A few years ago, much was made of the fact that the novelist Sally Rooney had no Twitter account—this must explain her prolific output. But the logic is back to front: it’s only top-selling authors who can afford to forgo social media. Call it Deactivation Privilege. It’s a privilege few of us can afford, if it’s the algorithm we need to impress rather than book reviewers of old. In a nightmarish dispatch in Esquire on how hard it is for authors to find readers, Kate Dwyer argues that all authors must function like influencers now, which means a fire sale on your “private” life. As internet theorist Kyle Chayka puts it to Dwyer: “Influencers get attention by exposing parts of their life that have nothing to do with the production of culture.” The self is the work, just ask Flaubert. But data collection’s ability to reduce the self to a figure—batted about by the fluctuations of its stock—is newly unbearable. There’s no way around it, and this self being sold alongside the work can be as painful for a writer of autofiction as it is for me, a writer of speculative fiction who invented an imaginary world. ITELL YOU all this not because I think we should all be very concerned about artists, but because what happens to artists is happening to all of us. As data collection technology hollows out our inner worlds, all of us experience the working artist’s plight: our lot is to numericize and monetize the most private and personal parts of our experience. Certainly, smartphones could be too much technology for children, as Jonathan Haidt argues, and definitely, as Tim Wu says, attention is a commodity, but these ascendant theories of tech talk around the fact that something else deep inside, innermost, is being harvested too: our self-worth, or, rather, worthing. We are not giving away our value, as a puritanical grandparent might scold; we are giving away our facility to value. We’ve been cored like apples, a dependency created, hooked on the public internet to tell us the worth. Every notification ping holds the possibility we have merit. When we scroll, what are we looking for?

[transmutationisms]

this is so stupid but like so do u know about total institutions as defined in Erving Goffman's Asylums? uh if yes. do you think that reality tv shows that basically separate the contestants into a house where they are constantly on film, being prodded by producers, in some cases don't even have access to phones, etc. like is that a total institution? are reality shows inherently manipulative? do you think people dying by suicide after appearing on shows like Love Island are related to this? is there any scholarship on reality tv?

sorry if u know none of this I thought to ask u bc my initial thought was "the bachelor house is a bit like a psych ward." which is an insane thing to think. but truly I think shows like Jersey Shore, Rock of Love, Married at First Sight, Ultimatum, etc. that ply contestants with alcohol while controlling every aspect of contestants life for weeks are like. like thats bad. and then people harshly judge them for their behavior! like a psychiatrist saying a patient is very ill bc they do badly in a high level of care.

i don't think it's stupid. i don't really read much on this but yes there is definitely scholarship on reality tv---these shows are media objects and cultural productions as much as any 'prestige' drama.

obviously a tv shoot differs from an institution proper in that it's a temporary arrangement. however, the level of control and surveillance participants are subject to is something you would rarely see outside the conditions of an institution, and there is certainly something heterotopic about many of these sets as a kind of 'local institution'.

i think some of the most interesting shows have made this part of their conscious onscreen presentation. plenty of people have written about 'big brother' as a conscious gamification of the experience of being subjected to neoliberal workplace surveillance, for example. then there's something like 'secret eaters', which iirc literally had a little security camera icon on its title card even? that one didn't restrict people's movement, but if anything it did imply that doing so would have been in their best interests---because it was the unrestricted, unsurveilled eating behaviours that were configured as the result of laziness / lack of knowledge / lack of willpower, and the cause of weight gain.

so, if 'big brother' demanded the affective performance of enjoyment from those in an institution-like setting, 'secret eaters' presented the panoptic surveillance state as a benevolent kind of medical overlord, and the wayward citizen as someone insufficiently disciplined and too free for their own good. you can see variations on this latter argument in, eg, 'supersize vs superskinny', or any of the programs about weight-loss 'camps', or, on the meaner and more american end, 'the biggest loser' and even many episodes of 'my 600lb life'.

this is obviously a little different from the question of whether the shoot itself is institutional, which is essentially a question about working conditions. i watched a lot of 'america's next top model' as a teen and i remember even then thinking it was a leetle fucked up how much control the producers seemed to have over the contestants. so like, again i would say pretty much all of these shows that isolate participants in some closed house or whatever are patterned off institutional models of control, restriction, and surveillance, even though obviously they're not permanent commitments and they also usually allow some contact with the outside (grocery shopping or photoshoots or what have you).

i do also think there's something to be said about reality as a genre that often finds success by capitalising as cheaply as possible on some common social anxiety or malaise. so, the neoliberal workplace of 'big brother' and the success of weight loss shows following declarations of an 'obesity epidemic' in the us and uk. but then there's also, say, a franchise like 'survivor', which flourished in the post-9/11 years and often operated in a particular ecological niche that married body demands (strength, thinness) to the obvious survivalist fears. there was kind of a double reassurance being sold there: if civilisation collapses, you, too can learn to sustain yourself just like these starving people on a tv shoot; but also, look at how these bodies are becoming more disciplined, such that they can successfully perform physical challenges that we market as having some resemblance to military training exercises...! i remember even 'antm' dabbled in that a bit: the phrase "model boot camp" got thrown around more than once, and in the first couple of seasons there was more of an emphasis on 'fitness' and even a couple of challenges that were basically just "wear camo and pretend to do an obstacle course" lmao.

i guess to return to your initial question... there are ways in which a reality shoot often mimics, temporarily, characteristics of an institution; and then there are also ways in which it presents institutionalisation, or aspects of it, onscreen. so, without flattening the distinction between being on a reality show and being institutionalised, there's a lot to unpack here about reality as a genre that frequently constructs itself around the functions of, and justifications for, the institution.

to oversimplify (and certainly there are exceptions and edge cases) i think you could say that where scripted tv tends to rely on the closed family home or the workplace as its sphere of narrative construction, reality is more likely to construct a kind of temporary fantasy setting where contestants can be subjected to the kind of surveillance and restrictions typically associated with an institution or at least a high-control group. and this is both because of producers' need to generate 'drama', and because the shows are often successful precisely by replicating and intensifying those elements of control and surveillance that are (perceived to be) on the rise even outside of the total institution.

[scarefox]

btw something many people on certain video platforms don't seem to be aware of, since so many people fall for it, is comment baiting....

Ya know when video creators ask you questions in the video, something they could easily google themselves, it's because they want you to feed the algorithm with your comments. Making their video more relevant, which gives them more click traffick which generates them more money. Reaction folks like to do that. Which sometimes is fair game (they also bait you with negative looking thumbnails even if the reaction is positive). Some of them actually have genuine questions they could look up but having the fans answer it is a good way to engage and bond with your audience while also feeding the algorithm. That is okay imo, not much different than entertainer who get paid for entertaining and chatting with people. The more elegant version would be to ask people to put their opinions on a topic in the comments and then chat with them.

But yesterday I saw a clip on tiktok... so freaking obvious bait, it was painful. A dude reacts to a MV of Jeff Satur, he got requested by his audience (who definitely mentioned the name in the link they sent him), he literally has the yt video open with the title there on his screen and then asks the whole time "OMG who is this guy??" also titled his video with "please tell me who this is" to trigger every eager fan out there to infodump in his comment section...

Stop being so easily manipulatable please... that one was so cheap it annoys me that it worked on hundreds of people.

Not that this example is harmful in any way but it hurts to watch it play out. Would be worse if you actually pay money instead of your time to answer his question.

I am begging everyone who is wandering on social media, to learn how these sites work, how creators on these sites earn money, how the algorithms work.... that way it's easier to see when you get tricked by it. Also if we are at learning how things work: also look up the term "gamification" since some social media sites like tiktok use that.

(don't get me started on how emotionally manipulative (& intentionally addictive) tiktoks UI, algorithm, ads and especially the (emotional) reward system are already by itself ... should be illegal actually. it's only missing that it plays happy jingles and gives you virtual coins for opening the app and rewards you for every video you watch with a public high score. they are worse than metas & xitters user engagement system while providing zero safety for mental health except the mediocre filter that doesn't work and a screentimer even I have to use to not doomscroll forever)

[earthtogwyneth]

Blog Post #5 (10/3/24)

How has the gamification of violence impacted children's view on violence?

Violence in video games has lessened the impact of how real the consequences are. In many games, the killing, raping, murdering of people, especially women, has become a normal part of the game. Committing these acts are needed to win the game in most circumstances. Fickle discusses, "Did it [Pokemon GO] not, by making requisite such discomfort as might otherwise be avoided or at least anticipated in daily life, actively reify the abstract fact of inequality with an unpleasantly vivid material reality?"(pg. 1, Introduction). When games begin to make violence normalized and present it in a palatable way for children, children begin to believe this is normal behavior. Children begin to reinforce this behavior through the way they interact with others and have a normalized sense of that this behavior is accepted in the world.

How has the internet increased the spreading of misinformation?

Misinformation has become so heavily widespread across various media platforms that it has affected the ways in which people consume information. The internet has impacted the way information is presented and then consumed. As opposed to only getting your news from trusted news sources, the internet has allowed for people and independently-ran sources to present news. Although discourse about news is encouraged on social media platforms, it creates an outlet for people to spread personal opinion and call it fact. Without a proper caution to believing everything you see online, people can begin to believe personal bias and opinion as fact, and this would create a loophole of misinformation constantly being spread.

Does the usage of race in video games reflect society's beliefs on race-related topics?

Video games including race and creating scenarios in which a character's race is their entire storyline does reflect society's consistent uncomfort with race-related topics. Discussed by Fickle, games are meant to be an alternate reality, and this alternative reality still harbors the same constraints and notions related to race and gender. Games were created to be an outlet from regular routine, for many an escape. This escape has only been subjected to the same prosecutions the world has been subjected to involving socially constructed viewpoints to become integrated into the game's development. Kolko said, "As mentioned earlier, users bring their assumptions and discursive patterns regarding race with them when they log on, and when the medium is interactive, they receive such assumptions and patterns as well"(pg 9, Race in Cyberspace). Although thoughts of race is developed within the game, in online spaces, discussions of race are also present and involve users presenting opinions on race, most often in negative ways.

How can society be critically aware of their consumption of bias related to race in media?

It's important that society critically analyzes the usage of race and discussion related to race online. Race being a socially constructed topic will always create for discourse surrounding it, but that discourse can be used to present justice to those impacted by negative notions. Society needs to have a clear understanding that race continues to be a prevalent topic of discussion because of media's infatuation with the topic, and the constant discussion of race. Kolko wrote, "Cyberspace and race are both constructed cultural phenomena, not products of "nature"; they are made up of ongoing processes of definition, performance, enactment, and identity creation"(pg. 10). The role that race plays in all of media is due to the constant discussion of the topic, which lies at the fault to that differences have not been accepted, and policy allows for these differences to fester.

Fickle, T. (2019). The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities. New York University Press.

Kolko, B. E., Nakamura, L., & Rodman, G. B. (2000). Race in cyberspace. Routledge.

[damnfandomproblems]

#4821: This is a valid ask, and I want to expand on something it mentions re: gamification with coins. At first glance, and with the information provided, someone will probably think, "wait, what's wrong with this? It just sounds like tumblr badges". And you'd be right, because that's definitely what it sounds like. But the context is very different. A lot of roleplayers found the introduction of coins as rewards for post count to be a bit gaudy, because the site in question is a roleplaying site, for writing and for writers. There are many styles of roleplaying from one-liner dialogue replies, to novellas and chapter-length epics. Due to this, using post count as a marker for rewarding users was seen as, erm, not particularly balanced, since people who write one-liners can churn out 50 posts a night, whereas people who write novella may post one reply every two weeks. Users who brought this up and asked for a different system that, at least, addressed this distinction, were dismissed outright.

From what I recall, there was a lot of dismissing happening about a multitude of topics, not just this one, but it quickly became clear that the only kind of feedback the developers wanted was affirmative feedback. If they didn't already have something in mind, it wouldn't be on the radar. It was really offensive because they always emphasized how the site would be "by roleplayers, for roleplayers", but their definition of PBP roleplaying (and the styles of roleplaying included under that umbrella) was so narrow, it wasn't really a project intended for the greater roleplay community. It was just a pet project tailored to the preferences of whoever was in charge.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with making a website and tailoring it like that. ;ut the lack of honesty about what they were trying to do was very gross. It felt like "smile and wave" publicity, and stringing along potential users to boost initial user numbers.

Posting as a response to a previous problem.

[essektheylyss]

World Wizard Entertainment: After Hours

I did want to write a little thing now that I am done making a vicious mockery of Vince McSam, because this was really a WILD week and I do love a debrief.

Honestly, when I sat down to make a bracket last week, I was not committed to posting it, I was not going to make any graphics, and I definitely was not planning to run a tournament.

....Obviously that changed, but you already know that.

Really I just wanted to figure out how hard it would be to properly seed a tournament in fandom. I've already talked about that elsewhere so I won't get into it, but when you're building a tournament, you want it seeded for intrigue in later rounds, even if round one match-ups are very lopsided.

But once I had it, I was thinking about how different polls have gone in the past. Specifically, I had written a post during some earlier polls with Laerryn and Essek competing that was commenting, you know, if we're talking duel, Essek loses, 100%. He'd have a prayer in hell of winning, and there are no gods here or whatever. And the poll in which Laerryn and Essek were matched up, which Aabria made a very funny joke about, wasn't even a wizard poll! It was just sexiest character or something. But the thing is, a lot of polls have been really vague about what criteria to vote on, and there's a reason for that! A lot of polls like that are going to have an obvious winner. And because of how these spread, you are going to have a lot of people voting purely on popularity or name recognition, including plenty of people who are not super engaged in fandom since there are lots of lurkers (and we love them! hi, lurkers!), and also random people outside the fandom who just vote on any poll, so you have to account for that.

But we have polls now, and fandom is fun and chaotic, so I wondered... could you game it for an unexpected result?

I cannot turn down a challenge once I've come up with it for myself, so at that point, I actually built a tournament.

For a lot of the week, in all but the most meaningless and random of situations, I thought the answer was no! We got Ludinus kicked in the first round, which I mostly did to stir up a little drama, because round one was pretty calm and quiet.

By the quarterfinals, it got tougher. At that point there were more folks engaging, but a lot of the tags were, "Didn't we already decide this?" and I was like, well, no one is watching March Madness year after year going, "Well, Gonzaga* is the best and that's decided I guess," (except maybe Gonzaga fans, but knowing some of them, they are really serious about their basketball). They're there because there's chance involved. A great team can lose to an underdog in an early upset. Also, there's always the bracket contest, which is another layer of gamification that adds some interest. (Sidebar, can you tell yet that I wrote a paper on gamification when applying to grad school? Lulz.) But like I've mentioned, fandom polls are highly stacked to be popularity contests. How do you introduce some chance and intrigue?

As it turns out, you call the Veth stans, which I sure wouldn't have guessed, so I'm glad they turned up anyway.

But in all seriousness, with a poll like this, it's really not about deciding who is The Wizard. (For the record, with my url fully visible, the answer is absolutely Laerryn Coramar-Seelie. She is seeded first for a reason!) It's about seeing if you can be weird and wacky enough, or maybe just heartfelt and sincere enough, to turn the tide of what's expected. But it's only fun if it's collaborative.

And here's where I say it all comes back to collaborative narrative and storytelling, because when does it not with me, but seriously—I seeded Veth pretty high because she was a PC, but wasn't sure if she was going to hold that far through the polls. By the time she was, I wasn't asking, "Why is Veth beating Yussa, the most no-brain cell wizard in the northern Exandrian hemisphere, with one wizard level?" It was clear that the Veth fans had decided to make this their mission.

So I do hope the takeaway, based on everyone making content and giving speeches and doing a fun kayfabe, is that you can make a really interesting and fun tournament by committing to the bit. You have to get ridiculous and you have to stick with it, but that's... really what fandom is. It's really not about "is my fave gonna win," and it's honestly not even about who wins (you may have noticed that the winner section of my results post is... small, which is intentional), it's about building a little story together.

And I'm really glad we all did that. I feel like I need to go around and do a virtual 'good game' high five to the Veth stans, and the Caleb stans, and Aabria herself, and everyone who wrote in defense of someone and put on a kayfabe and ran with a bit, because it really was a fun roller coaster of a tournament.

And if you didn't join in this week, but kind of wanted to, I hope the next time someone runs a tournament you just go for it! I was also a lot more timid about fandom participation as a teen, but honestly, if you are really excited about, I don't know, Realmseer Eskil (who is super cool by the way), don't take it too seriously and write an overwrought defense of them! Make a funny meme! Be sporting about it, come up with the most ridiculous reason you can name to vote for them, and run with it.

(Also, my other takeaway is that it is really easy to ape the overblown wrestling host voice. Please do it, it's literally so funny.)

[where-your-eyes-dont-go]

So I’m reading an article about social media gamification*, and it makes the claim that games “are the art form that works in the medium of agency.” I really like this definition, mostly because it made me realize my appreciation for games like Depression Quest is the same feeling as my appreciation for Lucio Fontana’s pieces with tears in the canvas:

*How Twitter Gamifies Communication, C. Thi Nguyen, Forthcoming

[vidreview]

VIDEO ESSAY ROUNDUP #6 [PART 1]

[originally posted august 1st 2024]

at last, it's time for another roundup! things were fairly dry for a minute there. i tend to go through peaks and valleys vis-a-vis video essay consumption, where i'll watch a bunch of them for a few months and then not be able to watch any for a few months after that. this has been especially true as i've been getting back into the habit of making my own scripted essays. did you know i did one about the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Specials a few months ago? i share this so you can judge for yourself if i know what i'm talking about enough to be worth taking recommendations from. i am a fallible beast, and our tastes are likely not the same! also i'm proud of that video and i'd like you to watch it.

but we're here to talk about other people's work, and let me tell you, the last month and a half has yielded a real bounty. let's jump in.

"Investigating a forgotten Edward Snowden Quote" by Allie Meowy.

edward snowden was a bit of a mystery to me beyond the headlines. all i knew was that he leaked highly classified documents detailing secret mass-surveillance, and that he liked hentai games.

this is one of the funniest, strangest essays i've encountered in years. what happens when the wikipedia page for games based on movies doesn't include Elf: The Movie: The Game for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance, and also you happen to discover that Edward Snowden is on the record as liking "some" hentai games? i'm not even sure what this essay ultimately adds up to, but i had such a blast watching it that i honestly don't even care. a wild ride that's well worth your time.

"a pocket full of stones" by Glouder Glens.

i've been thinking about an interview with People's Joker director Vera Drew where she talked about how many young queer artists have relegated themselves to the anti-recognition of youtube. if her film was proof that there's room in the film fest circuit for artfully essayish digital cinema, then we have no choice but to campaign for the incredible works of Sylvia Schweikert, AKA Glouder Glens, to reach a similar level of recognition. if you've yet to encounter its work, Sylvia's half-essay half-werewolf-erotica about it/its pronouns is a classic, but everything on her channel is a gem (not to mention its excellent short films). lately, Sylvia's been experimenting with the form in a big way. her last essay, "Self Discovery Stories," is artfully vertical, a true phone video that digs deep and hits hard. "a pocket full of stones" takes a huge step sideways, rendered in 4:3 at a scalding 360p and edited with a post-adobe-flash Lynch-esque animation style that rockets you back in time to the earliest days of internet video in the best way. what i wouldn't give to see this one on the big screen, i'm telling you. this kind of work simply doesn't have a place on youtube as far as youtube's concerned, so it's up to us as champions of the medium to share widely what the algorithm will not. definitely heed the content warnings though.

"The Miraculous Horror of Stop Motion" by Henry Kathman.

here's a cozy, enthusiastic dive into the often unforeseen externalities of stop-motion animation, that doesn't outstay its welcome or get too sanctimonious. i appreciate Kathman's use of alternate backdrops to give each section its own mood. through three unique and interesting examples of stop motion, he explores how the medium itself is an artform that can't be streamlined through technology the way so many other forms of animation have been-- even just to recreate the feel of stop motion digitally, you still pretty much have to hand animate it with an equivalent amount of brute labor. it's a satisfying analysis, which is unsurprising from the ever-consistent and thoughtful Kathman. and the soundtrack by Molly Noise is, as always, fantastic.

"The Religious Gamification of Indika" by Pim's Crypt.

i watched an essay a couple weeks ago about Indika which heavily criticized it for being boring and overly talkative, that really just convinced me that i wanted to see someone look at the game on its own terms. Pim here does a great job doing exactly that, wasting zero seconds of the universe's limited window of coherence on lip service to the harsh critical consensus in favor of simply examining what Indika says on its own terms. they explore how the complexities of faith are successfully gameified in Indika, making a compelling case for its quality. i've highlighted Pim in a previous roundup, and i'm happy to see them back with another solid work.

"So What's Up With Those PS2 Castlevanias?" by Trans Witch Reviews.

this one's pretty much what it says on the tin. when it comes to analyzing game franchises long-running enough to have titles across multiple console generations, i'm always drawn to essays that dig into the red-headed step-children no one ever really talks about. like the PS2 Castlevania games. i didn't even know they existed until now! granted that's probably because i never owned a Sony console before the ps4, but whatever. like a lot of games with 2D roots, Castlevania seemed to struggle finding its feet in the third dimension, and the historical consensus seems to have largely landed on "the 2D ones were best." i think this Trans Witch makes a very compelling case that at the very least Castlevania: Curse of Darkness is an underrated classic-- enough so, anyway, to make me want to give it a shot. i appreciate how she highlights the music of the series by focusing on the work of specific composers, though i think she lingers on those samples for a bit too long. regardless, this is a well put together essay made with readily apparent enthusiasm, and sometimes that's all you need.

"Why The Ring Didn't Use Color Grading" by WatchingtheAerial.

an astonishingly thorough deep-dive into the very specific in-camera techniques used to give Gore Verbinski's American remake of The Ring its signature blue look. like a lot of people i always assumed this was accomplished with digital color grading, though unlike many detractors i adore The Ring's visual identity and think it's at least as worthwhile a film as its Japanese counterpoint. this is the kind of video essay i adore-- a technician with extensive domain knowledge utilizing resources laypeople wouldn't know about to answer a seemingly simple question at exhaustive and surprising depth. the real kicker here though is that the creator also wants to recreate this technique for themself, all the way up to tracking down the kind of film stock The Ring was shot on and using it in a 35mm stills camera. i immediately went from this video to watch everything else on his (?) channel, and i wasn't disappointed. here's someone who cares a lot about the labor of shaping and lensing light, and the emotional properties these processes bring to a film. "Collateral & the Death of Neon" is SUCH a satisfying watch if you care even a little bit about the visual identity of city streets across history. great stuff all around

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

I was looking at a book recs list from 2020 where you mentioned GoodReads, and I was wondering if you've looked into The StoryGraph since then but had no idea what tags to check and didn't wanna scroll through three years of posts looking, sorry if you already have an existing manifesto somewhere.

I checked it out back when I stopped using Goodreads but wasn't really interested. as much of my decision to quit with Goodreads came from my desire to be as detached as possible from Amazon, I was also really over the performative gamification of reading that came from logging every book finished and page read for people to see, and as much as I respect Storygraph's existence as a Goodreads alternative I wasn't really interested in taking up the exact same behavior all over again.

Storygraph was also still definitely going through some growing pains at the time, and I frankly wasn't very interested in sticking around waiting for it to get good. this was very shortly before a large group of authors, most of them POC, reported that their books were getting flagged for content that was barely in the book or not present at all - ie, a queer middle readers book getting a CW for scat when nothing more explicit happened than a mention of a character going to the bathroom. I don't know if it was ever sorted out whether this was malicious targeting, well-meaning over caution, or a combo of the two, but between that and some other user features that I was side eyeing at the time + the above, that was a polite no from me.

after that I switched over to a Google docs list tracking the books I want to read and keeping track of what's been read on a yearly spreadsheet, with monthly recaps here. that's been much more satisfying for me 📚

[pochapal]

1. Congrats on the kinda blown up post!

2. This is a really weird, kinda stupid ask, but out of the Umineko characters u know, who seems like they’d be the most fun to play in a ttrpg? I ask because I know multiple people have done this one character and, for spoilery reasons, I have no clue how.

1: thank you i guess! feels weird to have a post gain traction among people beyond my usual follower circle lmao

2: now the first thing you need to know is that i don't do ttrpgs or understand anything about them in any meaningful way so this is very hard to consider. i do think the dice rolling factor of certain tabletops plays nicely with the whole "demon's roulette" angle of umineko except for the part where umineko only pretends like it's a series of random chance events and not a thoroughly premeditated script but maybe chance vs control could thematically translate into a good ttrpg character basis maybe? i guess the hard thing with umineko is that everything including its characters was not designed for a rng roll one outcome of millions scenario but instead deliberate consideration and understanding - idk much about ttrpgs but i feel like needing to take a 3000 word break to painstakingly sketch out a deeply biased account of a character's tragic backstory in order to explain the relevance of the morally questionable action they have just taken (the explaining of which being as plot-critical as the actions themselves) isn't the most friendly thing you could mix in with a ttrpg formula.

as character archetypes i think a great deal of umineko characters ire fun and engaging to explore on their own terms, but ttrpgs often have a growth/power fantasy element baked into them that isn't entirely congruent with the grounding theses of most of the cast. natsuhi is deeply fascinating as an individual but "powerless woman who is snared in the twin nets of pride and desperation and whose only agency is whether or not she can uphold a conspiracy to people who can leverage all kinds of abuse towards her" doesn't really work in any kind of rpg sense. if natsuhi were to get "stronger" and "advance" this would lay ruin to the underpinning tragic essence of what makes natsuhi *natsuhi*. same goes even for characters like battler who you'd think would click more with this formula - even a hypothetical mystery-solving based ttrpg could not accommodate battler as the inherent gamification of the narrative necessitates truths and evidence being revealed on a diegetic level in such a way that battler could actually figure out, and at that point what we're talking about is basically danganronpa instead of umineko.

i think in this way despite being a vn and thus a form of video game so much of umineko is heavily resistant to being "played" in the traditional game sense. there is a game going on in umineko between writer and reader, but this is a game of thinking and interpretation and understanding and not something that can be broken down into quantifiable Progression Units. the only "final boss" of umineko is your own lack of understanding and this fight is waged in your own head and not within the fabric of the story - even if in umineko proper battler "figures out" the mystery, it won't end up in a climactic final fantasy-esque showdown with beatrice on rokkenjima. gamification is kind of like "fantasy" within a narrative context (this is something i have/will talk about more in the writeup so forgive me if this isn't clearly defined yet) in that it's an embellished obfuscation of truth in the Romantic sense where you get lost in the process rather than the results - in theory, battler cornering beatrice during the denouement and saying definitively "this is the truth behind everything" is as a decisive an action as battler using the power of anime and friendship to energy blast beatrice into ash. the difference is the former keeps the mystery and tragedy front and center, while the latter out of necessity makes it specifically about battler as the center of the narrative universe.

this goes into the territory of mystery fiction and whether or not the designated Detective (capitalized in the stock archetype way and not the literary analysis dichotomy way) character must also occupy the traditional role of protagonist in the Hero sense. battler is the central character in umineko and the most crucial information is filtered through his lens, but battler is not the Hero of umineko - he is a passive witness to the tragedy who can only grow more desperate and powerless as the atrocities continue to pile up. the troubling thing about a lot of mystery is how you make a Detective that isn't basically just a cop - there is a certain power tension in mystery where through uncovering the truth the Detective takes the obfuscating "power" held by the Culprit and redirects into a clarifying force of their own. a denouement is when the Detective has, after a sort of hero's journey, acquired enough truth/power to unmask/dominate the Culprit, and as a "reward" is able to use the power structures of society (police, carceral punishment, "Just" murder) to get their way (return to a status quo) where the Culprit was previously able to use the power structures of mystery narratives (tricks, unreliable perspective, misdirection, "Unjust" murder) in order to get theirs (subversion of the status quo in accordance with their motive). all of this very easily feeds into copaganda-esque regurgitations of power dynamics and grows more prominent the more physical agency a Detective-Hero has in their given narrative situation.

bring those elements to a gamified stage and what you're left with is more a simulation of dominion through your character's power biases than a nuanced understanding of the social conditions that led to the formation of these events in the first place. you could of course perform a complete dissection of the Events and Circumstances of a ttrpg's setting, but is producing a diatribe on social structures and reinforcement of power akin to "playing"? i think maybe an umineko character might work in an undertale/deltarune-esque manner where there is an explicit conflict and tension inherent to the non-neutral action of "controlling" a character, but i don't see how that easily fits into the dna specifically of ttrpgs. there is an element of roleplay in ttrpgs where there is a meeting of the player's self and the character's self in order to produce the performance of the game-narrative in accordance with the structural rules. laying out like that i guess there's overlap between the premise of a roleplay-focused ttrpgs and the Witch Narrative, but both have different causes and different end goals. in a ttrpg no matter what in some form your goal is to "win", to attain something and move on to the next thing - everything in a ttrpg/game serves more as a vessel to enable the player to both achieve and experience a victory-state. there are ttrpg types that could interrogate these elements in a satisfying way, but nothing in umineko is directly about these things and thus a translation in this form would be to lose something in the process.

you don't come to umineko to "win" umineko. or if you do you'll quickly figure out that that is something not possible within the story's verbage. mystery and horror and tragedy do not produce victory in the conventional sense and any story in those genres that uncritically ends on a "victory" is dubious at best and incompetent at worst. in these worlds and fictions, how is it that something you could call victory can be attained? what sort of person would you need to be in order to strive for this victory? if any of the umineko characters were capable of this trajectory then they would never have ended up in the situation that they are in. to not only be concerned with powergaming but also to have the ability to do so fundamentally changes an individual's position within a narrative - for the premise to exist it implies a way out of any potential hardship, that if you're good enough at [power verb] then you can attain autonomy/power/dominion. nobody on rokkenjima ever had any of these things, which is why this is all happening in the first place. i don't think you can ever satisfactorily separate umineko characters from their disempowering material conditions like that.

the silly answer to this question, of course, has to be beatrice who has already been roleplayed by half of the cast of umineko at this point anyway. beatrice "exists" and beatrice is a vessel for power so in this way beatrice is already kind of a ttrpg character in that sense if the ttrpg's goal is desperate slaughter through at least two layers of metaphor and obfuscation. the important thing to take into account is that a playable ttrpg character "exists" and so maybe if more people on rokkenjima were into roleplaying none of these horrors would be happening lol.

[tkrr]

So this is for the people accusing Taylor Swift of being performatively progressive. It is not *necessarily* a defense of her actions or lack thereof of late, but I think that as a neuroatypical myself, this comes from my own experiences.

Someone pointed out recently that there’s a significant aspect of gamification to her fandom, and yeah, I see it. Everything from Eye Theory to the clock covers for the Midnights vinyl to her well-known fondness for Easter eggs speaks to this, and I think this is deliberate, but not quite for the purely capitalist reasons people think. I think it’s as much of a game for Taylor as it is for her fans.

And while she’s unquestionably one of the smartest people in the music business (same league as, who, Rihanna? Dylan? Donald Fagen? Weird Al?), she also seems very selective about what she applies those smarts to. She’s rumored to be quite shy away from the public. She’s also known to be a people pleaser, and that’s something that sometimes leads people to make less than great decisions about when to speak up about something. This is the personal aspect for me, because I can be the same way — as a confirmed spoonie of the emotionally underendowed type, I’ve definitely had too many moments where I should have spoken up but didn’t.

People run hot and cold about her, especially regarding the recent anti-trans backlash and the Matty Healy situation. (Which can be explained by him being a longtime friend and therefore her being unwilling to confront his shittiness, which is overstated but real.) From where I sit, her sitting out in political matters at the moment can be explained, as someone pointed out, by the real possibility that if she’s too overtly pro-LGBT+ the way she was in the Lover era, that her concerts could become targets for right wing terrorists; I hope this means that she’ll start stepping up after the tour is over and as the 2024 election draws closer, so I’ll give her a pass *for now.*

I’ve operated under the assumption for quite some time that Taylor is likely on the spectrum, capable of masking for public performances but with very limited emotional capital leftover when she turns it off. I think that’s what she was getting at in “Sweet Nothing” when she says

Industry disruptors and soul deconstructors

And smooth-talking hucksters out glad-handing each other

And the voices that implore, "You should be doing more"

To you, I can admit that I'm just too soft for all of it

If she is in fact neurodivergent, something that seems pretty obvious to me as a neurodivergent myself, she’s in the position of being a once-in-a-generation legend who can just about bear the stress but can’t do much more than she already is because she doesn’t have the spoons. We all know where she stands, and given her past track record I suspect she’s probably involved in some amount of low-key activism that we aren’t hearing about. I think we should back off the scrutiny until after the tour is over.

[mmtys]

Stuart Questions

This idea of gamification or gamifying the classroom has definitely gotten more traction lately but I’m wondering if it will be like every other education trend and die out eventually? Especially in favor of standardized test scores because not every student will see the learning over the game. (This is really more of an opinion, I suppose)

“It is important to articulate failure in ways that don’t instantly assume the total failure that is typically articulated in games, sports, and assignments, but instead as an opportunity for reflection and improvement” (48). How? Genuinely how? I have it in all of my syllabi and give a reminder regarding the ability to redo/retake/resubmit assignments with failing grades after studying/using feedback, and rarely do students take advantage of this opportunity. They see their overall grade isn’t tanked by that specific grade and move on.

I'd love to hear from all the teachers in the class, too :) @npfannen