I'm made of meat

Delicious LiveJournal Links for 8-19-2010

• Let the cake hunt resume! (Portal 2 Gets Release Date - February 9th)
  (tags: portal games EpicWin)
• Last US combat brigade exits Iraq.
  (tags: iraq military war)
• Israeli groups run courses on Zionist Wikiepdia Editing
  (tags: wikipedia propaganda israel politics)
• This article contains some interesting stats about the recession, differing gender effects, education and employment.
  (tags: recession gender education employment uk)
• My favourite reaction to the naked /covered in blood photo of the True Blood stars.
  (tags: trueblood funny comic)
• The Tragic Death of Practically Everything
  (tags: funny technology geek)
• Study Shows Birth Dates, School Enrollment Dates Affect ADHD Diagnosis Rates
  (tags: children medicine psychology adhd)
• The True Blood stars naked and covered in blood. If, y'know, you like that kind of thing.
  (tags: trueblood photography nsfw naked)
• A public service announcement concerning Fozzie Bear.
  (tags: muppets spelling funny)
• People have NO BLOODY IDEA about saving energy
  (tags: environment energy green electricity)
• 54% of people who use streaming services such as Spotify have stopped downloading music illegally.
  (tags: spotify music internet)
• Seven Revenue and Customs staff have been sacked for deliberately under-paying benefits to ethnic minorities.
  (tags: government racism bureaucracy)
• Redundancies At Real Time Worlds - a developer talks about what happened
  (tags: development games)

Nice quote

The games I run and play in aren't stories. When we play, we make this gigantic tangled mass of narrative. There's too much stuff in them to be a story. We make stories out of them, by taking a particular point of view, and highlighting some bits of the mass as important, and sidelining other things.

When you take a point of view to get a slice of the game, you get a story -- protagonists, antagonists, and supporting characters emerge. However, you can slice a game in multiple ways, and get multiple stories. And in each slice, who the protagonists are is different. All from the same play session.

My sense is that this is one of the most amazing aesthetic features of rpg play. A movie like Rashomon is cutting-edge stuff because Kurosawa had to invest a huge amount of brilliance to make a movie that could present multiple perspectives on the "same" event -- but when we game we do this automatically, with not the slightest hint of effort.

IMO, that's where the real artistic potential of rpgs lies: in those places where we can do better than other narrative arts.

-Neel

stolen from blackmanxy.

And that's one of the things I love about gaming - the fact that we're not creating a story, but one happens through us anyway.