Blog Archives

In the 1950s, Mad Magazine did a fairly gentle parody of Archie Comics (as “Starchie”) which transformed the safe and friendly confines of Riverdale High into a rough urban school as portrayed in the then popular Glenn Ford movie The Blackboard Jungle. It was fairly successful humor because the object of parody had a value […]

Making a movie, a good movie, is an achievement just shy of a miracle. Unlike writing a novel–which (if you have the talent) requires nothing but determination, a pen, and a passable vocabulary–financing and producing a feature film often requires the cooperation of hundreds of people, many of whom could care less about the artistic […]

“Dunk barely knew these new players at all. If it weren’t for the fact that their names were stenciled across the backs of their green and gold armour, he didn’t think he’d have been able to pick them out from each other in the game. Still, they were on his team, and he expected them […]

In the previous post, we looked at a few different book-to-film adaptations and answered the age-old question: which was better, the film or the book? One of the common criteria for evaluating the success or failure of a film adaptation is its fidelity to the source material. The truth is that fidelity, whether in the […]

Kickstarters need videos, and in the particular case of my Kickstarter, I’m in an unusual position: I’ve got a functioning piece of software that I can show features from. Rather than be a talking head staring into a webcamera and feeling like a dork, I’ve used a program called Screencast-O-Matic to record a video of […]

Lord Dunsany wrote a story about the devil and the game of cricket, so science fiction and sports go way back. In fact, general (non-science fiction) sports fiction – at least as it is known in America – has its roots in the exotic. In the 1890s, modern organized sport was exclusive to preparatory schools […]

Conventional wisdom (i.e., Jim Dunnigan) says that computer games ate the monster wargames in the mid 1980s – the kind of record keeping that turned Campaign for North Africa into a horrifying joke (where you have a form to keep track of your forms, for keeping track of the maintenance conditions of your trucks carrying spare […]

I do stress that being into science fiction and fantasy in a really knowledgeable way…was not in any way associated with nerd-dom or geek-dom. Being into that was more associated with finding yourself, with some degree of alienation, with the counter-culture, with various degrees of nature-ism or questioning modernism (in its plastic/boring sense), with political […]

In my post last week, I posted up this Venn diagram, which is part of my philosophy about game design.  While there are proponents of several models of how RPGs work, including the three-fold model, the actor-response model and the “story model,” I look at roleplaying games as the intersection of three different reward mechanisms. […]