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An alternate reality game begins when people notice “rabbit holes” — little details they happen across in the course of everyday life that don’t make sense, that seem like clues. Consider the game Why So Serious?, which was actually a marketing campaign for the 2008 Batman movie The Dark Knight. The game started when…
When people say they just want 'good stories' and no politics or 'SJW' issues in their entertainment-what they are saying is that when they were kids, they completely missed the subtext of every story, movie, comic book, etc they took in. These stories have always been political. Star Trek, Star Wars, Harry Potter…
When I was a boy, a popular literary genre for children was the heroic biography of a medical pioneer such as Edward Jenner, Louis Pasteur, Joseph Lister, Frederick Banting, Charles Best, William Osler, or Alexander Fleming. On April 12, 1955, a team of scientists announced that Jonas Salk’s vaccine against polio—the…
"Cosplay is a form of empowerment for all children and adults," says Stanford Carpenter, president and cofounder of the Institute for Comics Studies, who says that he used to be dismissive of cosplay. But after attending dozens of ComicCons, he witnessed the dress-up affair changing masked heroes indefinitely. "It's…
More than just a hipster fashion statement where big glasses, tight suits, and high-water pants are the norm, the black geek phenomenon normalizes all things formally couched as geeky. Science lovers, space dreamers, comic book fans, techies, or anyone who relishes super-high-level analysis just for the fun of it…
I COULD go on now and tell of battles, copiously. In the memory of the one skirmish I have given I do but taste blood. I would like to go on, to a large, thick book. It would be an agreeable task. Since I am the chief inventor and practiser (so far) of Little Wars, there has fallen to me a disproportionate share of…
Software is a new enough kind of thing in the world that humans are still figuring out how to deal with it. Though it can be bought and sold, you can't see, hear, touch, taste, smell, eat, or burn it. On an unlovely flat artifact called a disk may be hidden the concentrated intelligence of thousands of hours of…
In the traditional theory, which still is the prevailing one, there were alleged to exist inherent defects in perception and observation as means of knowledge, in reference to the subjectmatter they furnish. This material, in the older notion, is inherently so particular, so contingent and variable, that by no…
Read to your child. Try to read to your child every day. Read from a wide variety of materials and books. Encourage writing. Encourage your child to scribble and pretend write if they are young. Encourage older children to write stories and letters and share them with the family. Have writing materials readily…
Now it is not that the cell biologists can’t point to experiments which seem to fit their views, as is common in natural science. (After all, the Earth’s Moon does indeed have a geocentric orbit.) Good colleagues of mine like Robert Reis are able to produce nematode worms that live ten times longer than their…
An RPG is a process of cooperative storytelling: the Gamemaster lays out a situation or scenario for the players, such as, “You hear an alarm coming from the First National Bank!” The players then choose how their characters react (“We rush to the bank to see what’s going on!”). Things proceed in a back-and-forth…
In a roleplaying game, the players take on the roles of people in a fictional world. Each player creates a character to portray, and together, the players create a story. In their imagination, the players experience the same challenges and rewards that their characters experience. To facilitate this, the rules of the…
An RPG is a process of cooperative storytelling: the Gamemaster lays out a situation or scenario for the players, such as “you hear an alarm coming from the First National Bank!” The players then choose how their characters react (“We rush to the bank to see what’s going on!”). Things proceed in a back-and-forth…
Most games have a winner and a loser, but the Dungeons & Dragons Roleplaying Game is fundamentally a cooperative game. The Dungeon Master (DM) plays the roles of the antagonists in the adventure, but the DM isn’t playing against the player characters (PCs). Although the DM represents all the PCs’ opponents and…
There are three principal obstacles to be overcome in adapting a terrestrial species to life in space. It must learn to live and be happy in zero-g, zero-T, and zero-P, that is to say, zero-gravity, zero-temperature, and zero-pressure. Of these, zero-g is probably the easiest to cope with, although we are still…
There was a certain kind of beauty, a prettiness that everyone could see. Big eyes and full lips like a kid’s; smooth, clear skin; symmetrical features; and a thousand other little clues. Somewhere in the backs of their minds, people were always looking for these markers. No one could help seeing them, no matter how…
In the early game, there are no clearly defined classes until you begin school and recieve the class of "Student". From there, you have a wide selection of sub-classes you can choose from, such as Nerd, Loner, Jock, or Cool Kid, though you usually just fall into one that fits your character. It can be difficult to…
You frequently state, and in your letter you imply, that I have developed a completely one-sided outlook and look at everything in terms of science. Obviously my method of thought and reasoning is influenced by a scientific training – if that were not so my scientific training will have been a waste and a failure. But…
And then, of course, you can't be a writer unless you actually write, and it doesn't take as much time as people think. You know, the number of people who say, well, I'm going to write a book when I have time, they're never going to have the time. And I started writing seriously when I had four tiny children. Well, I…
Laughing Man: Who knew that copies could still be produced despite the absence of the original? If you had to give a name to this phenomenon, what would you label it? Motoko: It would be "Stand Alone Complex" Laughing Man: Yes, it's the stand alone complex. From the start the very nature of our current social system…