Universality of Games

Just as the ancient and primitive religions of the world show profound similarities in their fertility rites and their sun and moon worship, many games appear to be common property to human beings everywhere. Indeed, the comparison is not at all farfetched: many games now thought to be mere children's pastimes are, in fact, relics of religious rituals, often dating back to the dawn of mankind. Tug of war, for example, is a dramatized struggle between natural forces; knucklebones were once par...

 How Literacy Impacts Reading and Gaming

For Ellie, that charade contributed to her waning interest in computer games and simulations fi-om its highpoint in middle childhood. Reasonably versed in computer technologies and a fan of emerging online forums such as Tumblr, she agreed to talk about her play in virtual worlds not as an enthusiast, but as something of a philistine. She enjoyed Second Life—but only up to a point. "The imaginative part stopped for me when I stopped designing my avatar," she told me. Further opportunities f...

 Cosplay as Empowerment

"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 about empowerment. It's about the possibility of what you can be or what you can do. And when you see people in underrepresented groups, it takes on the empowerment fantasy of not...

 The Receiving Set

In radio and television, for instance, the Other Men were technically far ahead of us, but the use to which they put their astounding inventions was disastrous. In civilized countries everyone but the pariahs carried a pocket receiving set. As the Other Men had no music, this may seem odd; but since they lacked newspapers, radio was the only means by which the man in the street could learn the lottery and sporting results which were his staple mental diet. The place of music, moreover, was ta...

 Floor Toys

How utterly we despise the silly little bricks of the toyshops! They are too small to make a decent home for even the poorest lead soldiers, even if there were hundreds of them, and there are never enough, never nearly enough; even if you take one at a time and lay it down and say, "This is a house," even then there are not enough. We see rich people, rich people out of motor cars, rich people beyond the dreams of avarice, going into toyshops and buying these skimpy, sickly, ridiculous pseudo...

 History of the Concept of Art

Nowadays when someone speaks of "art" you probably think first of "fine arts" such as painting and sculpture, but before the twentieth century the word was generally used in quite a different sense. Since this older meaning of "art" still survives in many idioms, especially when we are contrasting art with science, I would like to spend the next few minutes talking about art in its classical sense. In medieval times, the first universities were established to teach the seven so-called "liber...

 There is Too Much Art to Consume It All

So I have a counterclaim that exists today - Deviantart. Why can't everyone be an artist? Because you can only consume so much art. I have a page group that is currently ~45 pages of artists on that website whose galleries I need to review and potentially watch. They total up to around 15k works of art, and that pool just grows, I can never get it under wraps, because it would take me probably a full workweek just to get through half of that. On that, I'm already following nearly one thousa...

 RPGs are Without Limitations

The greatest beauty of roleplaying is its complete lack of limitations. If you can imagine it—or if any of your friends can—you can do it, and magic, strange worlds, supernatural monsters, and legendary heroics are its stock in trade. In the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, all of these elements combine to weave a tapestry of fantasy gaming that is at once classic and new. Yet this lack of limitations also means that no single book can serve every possible variation. At 576 pages, the Pathfinder...

 Judge (DM) as Multiple Roles

So, what is a Judge? A Judge is the stage-setter, the tale-teller, the mediator, and the narrator. The Judge fills in the background, describes what the player characters see, and operates the non-player characters, ranging from ultimate menaces to the universe to small-time crooks to innocent bystanders to other heroes and forces of the law. The Judge decides if a character's action is successful or if a villain escapes. The Judge provides the challenges for the heroes and the information th...

 The Zoku Jewel

‘Volition is a funny thing,’ Zinda says. ‘The jewels don’t just respond to what we want, but what we would want if we were wiser or smarter or knew more. The zoku as a whole tries to extrapolate what you really need, rather than just what you are asking for, and in line with everybody’s volition. I’ll give you an example. Tell me something you really like. A food, or something.’ Mieli hesitates. ‘This is pointless.’ ‘Come on. Don’t take it so seriously!’ Mieli sighs. ‘Liquorice. I like liq...