Traverse Fantasy

I left my Switch at home so I've been borrowing my partner's to play her copy of  Shadows Over Loathing , a silly quirky goofy point-and-click RPG in the lineage of the browser-based  Kingdom of Loathing . There's six-ish regions in the game, each having a dozen-some points of interest which you navigate with your character (as a "physical" location with one or more rooms, rather than an abstract point). You can travel from any point of interest to another in the same region, and it may just trigger an event such as an encounter or a detour into another site hitherto undiscovered (the more sites you discover, the less random events are possible, the "faster" you can travel between sites). That's all there is to it! I had an epiphany while playing that such a structure could solve a "problem" I've had running my pirate campaign, that I feel obligated to locate adventure sites in the geography of their particular island, having the player...

I've been struggling with how I kinda really hate game design. No matter if I play things or run things or design things, the number one thing I hate is cruft masquerading as complexity. I like messing with dynamics and seeing what happens when multiple intersect, but I don't like having lots of levers and dials that you need to optimize in order to play well, especially when it all turns out to be a "solved game" of knowing what to do every time. This makes me more of a cutter than a creator, sometimes, like how my personal  D&D  rules boil down (my idea of) the game into extremely discrete, structural dynamics. This has proven a blessing and a curse for  Resourciv , my civ-like computer game, in that I'm terrified of adding anything for fear of making it needlessly complex—but then I don't add anything at all. I've been constantly saying over the last few months that I am running up against game design, and now I'm standing in front of a wall. Le...

There's a cliché quote often falsely attributed to Oscar Wilde: "Everything is about sex, except sex, which is about power." Thankfully, this isn't a boomer's Facebook page, so we can have the same point restated by Deleuze and Guattari and seem all the more intellectual for it: "The truth is that sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on. And there is no need to resort to metaphors, any more than for the libido to go by way of metamorphoses. Hitler got the fascists sexually aroused. Flags, nations, armies, banks get a lot of people aroused. A revolutionary machine is nothing if it does not acquire at least as much force as these coercive machines have for producing breaks and mobilizing flows." I've been ruminating on a handful of things lately, which I realize are interconnected. The angels ...

Talia Bhatt wrote a really good essay called “ The Third Sex ”, about how the third-sexing of individuals who display male-to-female cross-sex behavior/characteristics marks them for ostracization and violence in their particular societies. In other words, taking traditionalist Hindi society as an example, the classification of MTF individuals as hijira is not motivated by an enlightened sense of gender diversity (especially as opposed to ‘modern’ notions of transness), but rather by a patriarchal imperative to punish those who dare to forsake the male pedestal and instead associate with the female sex, since doing so problematizes the base assumptions of patriarchy that sex is immutable and that the male sex in particular is superior to the female sex. “The ‘gender binary’ is a misnomer,” Bhatt argues; “gender has always been a hierarchy.” It’s a really good essay, one that speaks to how ‘pre-modern’ patriarchies rationalize the existence of trans people as well as contextualizes ho...