Saturday, February 6, 2010
 

Paizo’s response to criticism of their portrayal of women

Last year I sent a slightly snarky email to Paizo in response to their virtual Christmas card mailing, which was a picture of the Pathfinder RPG iconic character Seoni1 done up as a sexy Santa. As an afterthought I turned the email into a post because hey, why not get double duty out of that text I spent time writing?

Unsurprisingly in retrospect, but completely taking me by surprise at the time, that turned into a huge mess when the post was linked to on the Paizo forums.

I hesitated to write a follow-up post for a long time. When the next Christmas came around I considered writing something but ultimately skipped it just because it still left a foul taste just thinking about it. Even now I’m not really interested in analysing it, but a recent experience trying to explain male privilege to a friend and the resulting sensation of banging my head against a wall reminded me of that post and my undischarged duty to a commentor on it. That I’ve been reading the excellent Border House Blog that bankuei recently blogged about probably has a lot to do with it too.

Response

When I wrote that post, one of the first comments was from Ravyn of Exchange of Realities, asking that I post a follow-up should Paizo respond to the email. They never did so I never did, but I did (eventually, when my anger with the invaders had cooled) go and read through the entire long Paizo forum thread that discussed my post.

The male privilege and cluelessness about same was predictably rampant, but there was a surprising number of eloquent people arguing my point to the rest of the forumers,2 which was great to see. Most of them were more gentle and better-written than I was, but that sadly didn’t seem to change any more minds than my angry arguing in the comments of my post did.

There were some very disappointing posts in that thread, and the most disappointing were the ones from the Paizo staff. So Ravyn, here’s your answer:

LOL.

—Erik Mona, Publisher #

All I have to say since I ordered the Holiday Pin-Up Seoni is I LIKE IT and “pin-up” was in the art order description!

—Sarah Robinson, Art Director #

I don’t think that Christmas Seoni is “bad” or sexist or anything of the sort. I think Paizo’s done a great job at being open-minded and getting all sorts of genders, races, sexual orientations, beliefs, and all that good stuff out there in a non-discriminatory way. In other words, the only thing I discriminate against is bad writing, I guess.

—James Jacob, Pathfinder Editor-In-Chief #

The only thing to say about Erik Mona’s response is that if the head publisher of a company is going to respond at all I would expect more of them. He could have said nothing at all, but he chose to respond and chose that to respond with? It seemed to be much more a response for the sake of the bulk of the forumers—”don’t worry, I’m not taking this seriously either”—than for me or any of the forumers who brought up criticism of Paizo’s representation of women.

The art director’s answer is just tiring. That she asked for it doesn’t mean it wasn’t sexist. If she’d said, “I asked for a black slave naked except for Rudolph antlers and nose, with a white man’s Santa-style boot on her back,” that would have been plainly wrong.3 It is the content of the art direction that matters, not whether or not it was asked for or even whether or not the art director happens to be female. Women can absorb and transmit oppressive cultural values just as easily as men can, because having the right bits in the pants doesn’t provide magical brain-immunity to the culture that we’re soaked in.

James Jacob’s response I cared less about and I included it for the completeness of Paizo’s response, paltry as it was. (Unlike the others though, he participated in the thread conversation beyond this response.) Still, it’s annoyingly self-congratulatory. If the detractors are ignored and you make a point of stating your point of view over theirs, then you’re selecting for self-congratulatory feedback. It’s entirely possible to have done a great job on diversity and still have a lot of room to improve, and it’s so much easier to overlook an area where there’s a huge lack of improvement when you simply assert that there’s no problem.

And of course, there were Sean K Reynold’s self-serving responses in the comments of the original post, but the less said about those, the better.

So that’s it.4 The people at Paizo don’t take concerns about sexism in their art seriously because they think their art is already not sexist.

Edit to add: Now that there have been a few comments in the moderation queue, I can see that this post is going to attract some of the same Champions of Men that the last did. I have only a little bit of interest in arguing with people who don’t know—and more to the point, don’t care—about the fundamental concepts that a conversation about inequality starts from. If your comment ladles a big helping of male-privilege condescension on top of the cluelessness I’m not going to approve it.

Yes, I’m going to police the comments.5 You might really want to add your opinion to the comments, but opinions saying that there’s no problem are pennies a gallon and they get old fast. I’d rather keep the thread welcoming to all, no just the ones who ironically and loudly insist that there’s nothing to talk about.6 That said, you’re welcome to add vitriolic comment to the original thread, where it would be in fellow company with all the other white men saying that they don’t see what the problem is.

Otherwise, I’m happy to converse with people who are genuinely curious and make an effort to be respectful (not to me, but to women and PoC who are in the audience). I’m not setting the bar high—the least indication of having thought about it and being willing to keep thinking about it is all that’s necessary.

  1. Not that I recognised her as Seoni at the time, not being familiar enough with PFRPG then. Granted, I still wouldn’t know if not for that post, and I don’t know any other PF iconic’s name.
  2. roguerouge in this post and cappadocius in this post are particularly fine examples.
  3. This is not to compare sexism and racism, which are different yet related in complicated ways. It’s an over-the-top example that I would hope the majority agree clearly demonstrates the irrelevance of an art director defending a piece with, “but it’s what I asked for!” when the resulting art is inappropriate. Despite that intent, if using that example is offensive in a way that I—in my white privilege—have failed to see, I hope you feel welcome enough to say so and allow me to make amends.
  4. Dammit. I just can’t write a short post. I could have been working on my conversion of Shaintar to Burning Wheel.
  5. Criers of “censorship!” are welcome to educate themselves about freedom of speech on their own time. The short version is: No, I don’t have an obligation to give anyone a soapbox here; Yes, you are free to write in your own blog instead.
  6. There’s a quote of Lady Macbeth that applies here.
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Pick a lever, any lever

One of the best reasons for not updating a roleplay-gaming blog is being too busy with the actual hobby—busy roleplaying—to have time to update.1 One of the not-so-best reasons is that I used to blog when my son napped and he’s stopped doing that. Tonight is one of those rare nights where I’m not gaming or prepping for a game, I’ve slept well the night before, and I have a post in mind that shouldn’t take more energy to write than I have left but is still worth posting.

So, on with it.

Greywulf wrote a post on why the D&D 4e Powers system is good. I didn’t find myself agreeing, but he wrote a follow-up comment that illuminated a dynamic between the Powers system and player creativity that I hadn’t thought about before. One commentor was unhappy with the way players seem to prefer invoking powers over creative tactics. In part j_king wrote (emphasis mine):

It seems that whenever my players get into a combat, their most difficult choices are: where to move and which power to use. And perhaps whether to use an action point once in a while. I find that it’s rather rare that they think of clever ways to gain the advantage over a monster; especially if the encounter is balanced so that the party is likely to win. More often than not, once an encounter gets past the 15 minute mark it devolves into “Great cleave, 18 — hits, 12 damage. Marked.”

Could just be uninspired players. However, I think the system could do more to encourage more imaginative thinking rather than purely tactical.

To which Greywulf replied:

4e does rather hand it to you on a plate, doesn’t it? I think the key is for the GM to present situations that can’t be solved using their Powers alone – a 100′ chasm or trap’n’monster setup, for example which just begs for the players to stretch their imagination a notch. Once they get the hang of using their brains rather than just what’s written on their character sheet, it will soon become second nature.

The parts I emphasised are about the role the character sheet has as a tool for creative play. A character sheet has a lot of stuff on it, and what that stuff is varies tremendously from system to system. Often enough most of it is just pre-crunched math that is collected on the sheet for easy reference. Increasingly in the games I read and play I’m seeing another category of stuff present on the characters sheet, things I’m going to call levers.

Moving the world

Levers are things that a player can look at on their character sheet and yank on for effect in the game, often (but not necessarily) as a response to a problem that needs a solution. One of the most common types of lever is the skill. How often, as a GM or player, have you seen a player confronted with a crisis immediately look down to their character sheet to scan their list of skills for the magic bullet that will solve the problem? The player is looking for a lever—something they can yank to make the game do what they would rather it do.

Skills aren’t the only kind of lever that show up in systems. An example of a lever that has mixed mechanical and story effects are Aspects in FATE. These are short phrases like “Twitchy as a ferret” that can be called on to influence a roll in the player’s favour, or to bribe the player into making a choice that’s probably not in their character’s best interest for the sake of a more interesting story.

Power are a major type of lever in D&D 4e. Powers are the primary mechanic through which characters can have significant effects on the world and through which players can have significant mechanical impact on the game system. There are a lot of options, and the character advancement system is set up so that Powers are a large part of defining and refining a character. For any given situation in combat it’s likely that the character has (or could have taken) a Power that would optimally exploit or solve the situation. Need to whack a badguy but you’re a bit low on hit points? If you’ve got a Power that strikes and lets you use a healing surge, that’s a lever you can pull to solve that dilemma.

Creative impulses

It might be obvious by now what I think this has to do with creativity. When you’ve got a problem on the one hand and a lever that fits the problem on the other, the obvious choice is to pull it. In a game with few or no levers there are few or no ready-made answers to the game situations, while in a game with many and varied levers there is always going to be one or more that are good enough to apply to the situation.

Whether pulling that lever results in a creative addition to the game or not depends greatly on the game system that lever is part of, and I think this is part of why the Powers system in 4e leaves me cold. Not only does it give a player many levers to pull in combat, but the system doesn’t ask anything more of the player after the lever is pulled. You can get creative with the use and description of a Power, but you don’t have to in order to make the game’s engine run.2 4e provides lots of levers, which makes it easy to just pull a lever. Of course this could be waved away as an example of lazy play—but who’s going to stop that lazy player, and haven’t we all been that player at some point?

So levers can be creativity inhibitors.3 Given a choice between McGuyvering up a solution to the challenge and using a Power that is obviously going to do the trick, pulling that Power’s lever is going to win out for most players in most circumstances.

That’s not to say that levers are inherently bad. They’re not. A system can also provide levers as a kind of story bribe: “Here, you can pull this thing for powerful effect, but before it does its magic you have to add a bit to the story yourself…” Levers of that sort work as a bribe for the player to add to the ongoing story because their in-game effect is partly undefined and needs that bit of player storytelling in order to have a defined effect.4 Levers like that have a coin slot—you can pull the lever, but you have to pay into the story before the lever will let you effect the game.

Which leaves the other way that levers can encourage players to be creative: by not existing. A lever that isn’t there is a lever that doesn’t offer a short-cut to solving the problem. Are you an untrained schmuck with a rusty sword and nary a stealthy skill to your name peering down on the four bugbears guarding the cave entrance you need to get into? Without a skill or a fighting chance there are no levers to provide obvious solutions, so you have to get creative.5 Shoving boulders onto them from above, luring them away with a clever strawman silhouetted against the moon, or some other unorthodox solution is going to be fun to play and memorable after the game.

Full circle

Which brings me back to the insight that j_king and Greywulf’s exchange gave me. The abundance of easy levers on a D&D 4e character sheet don’t prevent creative play, but by being there they make it easy to just pull a lever rather than get creative, and the system doesn’t make up for that damping effect on creativity by making those levers require creativity after pulling them. Since I’m personally not interested in the tactical combat side of D&D 4e, the abundance of purely mechanic levers in 4e explains why as a system it doesn’t excite me.

Greywulf’s suggestion to j_king that the way to solve that is to set up situations where Powers aren’t the answer to the challenge is a good one for people who already like 4e but want more opportunities for creative problem-solving. From my perspective, the Powers system is what makes 4e different from the stacks of other games I own—having to write scenarios to work around that core of the game seems to me like a reason to use a different system. As I wrote in my comment on Greywulf’s post, the core system of a game shouldn’t be an obstacle to creativity that needs to be GMed around to make the gameplay good, and the contents of the character sheet should be inspirational rather than creativity-damping.

There are a lot of other half-formed thoughts bumping around in my head about how the lever metaphor can be used to understand what makes different games tick, but those will have to wait.6

  1. I suppose I should make a post about what I’ve been up to, at some point. The short of it: Google Wave; reading a pile of new games; playing Diaspora; playing Savage Worlds/Shaintar; adapting Shaintar to Burning Wheel.
  2. To be sure, this is a benefit in other ways. For instance, the tactical aspects of combat run very smoothly because you only have to make a choice of Power and then the mechanics follow smoothly from that choice.
  3. One of the most uncontroversial examples of a lever that greatly inhibits creativity is Diplomacy in D&D 3.x. Part of why that skill is so reviled is because, as written, it short-circuits any roleplay that is about conflicting PC and NPC interests. With a high enough Diplomacy, any time the player wants they can pull that lever and make the game instantly less interesting to everyone else.
  4. How levers can require story in order to work is a matter of their mechanics. In Burning Wheel for example, in order to earn Artha (an important fate-point currency) the player has to make decisions that further their character’s goals and beliefs. In order to pull a lever like the belief “I am the greatest swordsman alive” so that it pays out in Artha, you have to do things like challenge the king’s champion to a duel. You don’t get the mechanical effect of the lever until you create some story, because the act of creating that bit of story is what pulls the lever. I’m sure there are more and better examples, but forgive me my blogging rustiness.
  5. I’m not saying sneaking past the bugbears or slaughtering them is a badwrongfun thing here—I love me some steathly characters and enjoy the more fighty parts of this hobby fine—just that not having the two most obvious answers of “fight” or “sneak by” available means that an unorthodox solution is the only option left.
  6. Now I remember why I haven’t been posting. This took the better part of three hours to write, link, and shoddily proofread. Three hours used to not seem like a lot, but now that it’s my entire post-toddler evening it seems like a lot more.
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A comment on POD and shipping

I wrote this as a comment on Brad Murray’s blog post about his decision to print and sell Diaspora through the Print On Demand (POD) service Lulu. Being a smart1 blogger, I’m going to recycle and slightly expand that word count here for your delectation.

I recently bought two copies of Diaspora—one for myself and one as a very early2 birthday present for Fimmtiu. He enthused about it and its Traveller heritage enough that I paid some attention, and then let my attention be thoroughly gripped3 by a roleplaying game for a genre in which I thought I had only passing interest. I love me some science fiction—especially hard sci-fi—for my leisure reading, but I’ve never been able to get into it for roleplaying for some reason.

Anyway, this is a post about Lulu, nascent technology, and shipping rates, not how awesomesauce Diaspora is or how much you should go buy a copy or read about how it does sci-fi differently4 or how it’s very well supported by the creators in the game’s Geekdo forums and Brad’s blog.5

So, enough introduction.6

I was pretty staggered by the shipping rates at Lulu, and it was definitely a matter of the cover price to shipping cost ratio. A lower cover price on the same physical object (and hence, the same shipping cost), definitely leads to greater sticker shock at the fixed shipping cost.

The saving grace though is that combined shipping turned out to be very reasonable. A single book order was a full third shipping ($187 on top of a $35 book), but ordering two books only added a couple of dollars to the shipping cost and made for a more palatable ratio. Eighteen dollars of shipping is not so appealing, but $18 and $2 for every book after the first is actually not too bad.8

That’s not a criticism of choosing Lulu at all. What it is, is that it’s interesting to consider how new technologies (and various implementations thereof) impact buyer psychology. From my experience ordering Diaspora, one of the things that I think Lulu could do to improve is provide a shipping cost calculator at the first stage of the checkout—where you can still easily twiddle the quantity ordered to see what you’re buying and for how much—rather than leaving it as a potentially purchase-souring surprise at the very end after payment info has been painstakingly entered. Their current implementation of the checkout process cuts across the grain of how buyers evaluate and commit to a purchase price. We like to know the price of something when it’s being sold to us.

The upshot for Diaspora might be that some people will decide to forgo buying it, while others like myself will resolve to buy it only in pairs or greater. Without knowing how many people virtually walk away when they see the final price for one book, it’s not possible to know whether that’s a net positive or a net negative in sales dollars. It does make me wonder if Lulu keeps stats on how many people get to stage 4 of the checkout and then don’t complete the order, and what they think about that.

All that said, I’m glad Lulu exists despite its warts. Print on demand is—as Brad’s post broke down so clearly—making it possible for amateur RPG publishers to publish at all, much like blogging software allows amateur commentators and reporters to write at all. Knowing history and tech, too, I can be confident that this kind of implementation issue will get smoothed out, either by Lulu or whoever usurps their niche.9

  1. By “smart”, read “lazy”, and by “lazy”, read “good”. Or, at least, that’s the theory that my programming background gives me license to lazily rest my laurels upon.
  2. Six months or so.
  3. To be pronounced “grip-ed“, as Lister so eloquently did.
  4. Actually, how Diaspora does sci-fi differently is probably entirely why it grip-ed my imagination in a way that previous sci-fi roleplaying games failed to do despite my best efforts. I’m looking at you, you tattered and now long-gone copies of Other Suns and Time Master that someone found in a garage sale and gave me when I was a kid.
  5. This run of links and nested grammatical structures makes my inner linguist cringe and whimper. Really, there is something terribly wrong about how hyperlinks do not and often cannot be cleaved along the same boundaries as grammatical phrases do. I refuse to adapt my idiosyncratic style to satisfy an even more obscure and even more idiosyncratic desire for HTML syntax and English syntax to harmonise structurally, but it bothers me nonetheless and I’m only being slightly silly in saying so.
  6. It was late when I rewrote this for posting. Yep, feeling a bit punchy. Also, I have an unnatural love for footnotes and for this plugin that makes it so easy to insert them.
  7. That’s shipping for me. Your mileage may, quite literally, differ.
  8. Yay footnotes. Some of you did the math, but because seeing them is more visceral than imagining them: That works out to one book for $18 shipping, two for $10 each, three for $7 and change, four for $6, and then it approaches the asymptote and the jumps are less impressive. Take home lesson: buy a play set! (Again, these are dollar values for shipping to me.)
  9. Fin. Also (since I stayed up long enough for the date to roll over), today is my son’s second birthday, but also the anniversary of his rather traumatic and entirely too early entry into the world. It’s a mixed day for us. He’s a wonder though, so we’re celebrating in good spirits despite the mixed meaning of the day. (Before you ask: He’s fine now. Bad memories only, miraculously.)
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Too much of a good thing

I have a serious glut of systems. I love that, no mistake, but it mismatches the irregular gaming non-schedule my group has.

In the last while1 we’ve played some HackMaster Basic and some Diaspora. Neither have we played much, but I’m optimistic about getting at least a decent campaign out of the latter. Science fiction is a nice change of pace for all of us, and it’s even more of a change for me since I get to be a player instead of the GM.2

I like to try new systems. That’s not the best feature to have as the group’s default GM, but I have yet to find a system that suits me well enough to stand head-and-shoulders above the field of contenders. I have been looking for a new system that felt like “home” ever since parting ways with the venerable lineage of Dungeons & Dragons—and, having looked up from the vast continent of D&D Land, there is an entire world of games to explore. It’s wonderful and frustrating in equal parts.

I love the potential in Burning Wheel for deep, character-driven stories and long-term development. I really like how easy Savage Worlds is to customise for any setting and how it makes things easy to stat on the fly. I’m intrigued by the mechanics and setting of Reign, and I especially like how flexible its magic system is for both the GM to customise and for the players to use in-game. HackMaster Basic’s crunch level is not too high yet remains satisfying, and it supports D&D-style setting assumptions well. The Shadow of Yesterday is just deliciously player-empowering and has some impressive game-design pedigree behind it.3 The Riddle of Steel sounds like a lovely combination of deadly combat and player-driven stories.4 Those are just the systems for fantasy that I really like, and it looks like there will be a FATE-based fantasy system out this Christmas to expand the attractive options even more.

I don’t think there would be any problem sampling so many systems if we played even half as regularly as some groups. It does seem, though, that my interest in a system is tied not so much to how many sessions we play it for, but simply how much time has passed since it caught my attention. I think if we played more frequently I’d feel less like a magpie, catching every shiny thing that comes near, simply because we’d get a half-decent campaign out of every new discovery. As it stands we get one or two sessions out of a game, and those are the ones I’ve been lucky enough to get any play out of at all.

I’m not sure what purpose this post serves except to air out my brain. There doesn’t seem to be a good solution, apart from magically increasing the frequency that we get together to game. There’s no way for me to commit to a system for the next ten sessions or so, since that represents the investment of six months to a year of gaming and that’s a lot when I don’t even know if I like running the system. That’s leaving alone how much of a commitment that would be asking from the rest of the group when I’m the one excited about an obscure game’s reviews.

Does your group play, or try to play, many different games? What has your experience been? How do you balance group commitment to a campaign against the desire to try the latest and greatest game?

  1. “While” being defined as “the last few months”.
  2. HMB might turn out to be a campaign of some note too, but for once I’m letting the players drive whether we continue with it or not.
  3. And pedigree “ahead” of it, too: So many games I’ve read cite The Shadow of Yesterday as an inspiration.
  4. If only the copy I ordered two years ago had ever arrived, or my multiple email inquiries ever been answered, The Riddle of Steel might have become my default system. I’m hesitant to even mention it now, given my tainted feelings about the game. I could have pirated it ages ago without compunction since I’ve paid for it, but I really prefer a physical book. But, I digress from the digression.
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Breaking radio silence with a basket of links

In the recent past I had some great but exhausting roleplaying sessions, acquired a pile of new books upon which I am spending my scant hobby time, had a good vacation, got angry at my web hosting provider, switched providers, discovered the Wordpress worm going around had attempted to hack into the Seven-Sided Die, dealt with a Wordpress upgrade1, and then switched my web hosting back after some coding excitement involving a close brush with the dark arts of PHP optimisation and low-memory server environments.

I haven’t been blogging much lately, to say the least. All that is done with now though—except for the reading, but at least that will give me fodder for posts in a way the other things don’t.

This isn’t a real post; it’s just an excuse to update and keep the front page somewhat alive. So, here follows some real content that you might find edifying or at the very least diverting.

Random Average talks about Min-Maxing Fun, specifically about how some systems have a “cruise control” setting that guarantees a minimum of fun while also usually limiting the maximum fun potential, while other games are wide open to the heights of gaming nirvana and the pits of That Sucked Goats.

Over at the funereally-named Buried Without Ceremony there is an article, Plugging in Scenes and System, that talks about Mo’s socket theory and how it relates to satisfying play and personal (in)compatibility with different game systems.  Socket theory, very briefly, is about how people “plug into” different parts of the system and the overall roleplaying experience in order to get out of the experience what they want. I think my primary socket is aesthetic, which came to me as something of a revelation and something of a “well, duh!” moment. It also partially explains my incompatibility with D&D 4e. I’m not sure what my other sockets are (oddly, I think system might not be one of them), but I am going to be thinking about this more.

On the subject of roleplaying for the aesthetics of it2, I came across a delightfully dreamy game called Archipelago3 that is designed to support and complement the aesthetic socket directly. It takes its inspiration from the visually-immersive mixture of the mundane and the fantastic that is characteristic of Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, which is enough to get my attention alone.

Roleplaying Pro’s Colin Dowling answers the question, Why verisimilitude? with a great post. What I took away from it was that I might be better off explaining that when I say I want verisimilitude in my roleplaying experiences, what I’m specifically looking for is not “realistic elves—just like in the real world!!”, but rather the experience of a piece of fiction (created by us) that has authenticity. I don’t enjoy a movie that continuity problems or has major inconsistencies nearly as much as a movie that puts a high priority on internal consistency and then showcases a believable and authentic story. I’m the same way with roleplaying experiences.

One of the recent acquisitions is Greg Stolze’s Reign. It’s a gorgeous book I got from IPR along with some other things (one of which was a packed in bonus book as a gift! awesome!) in softcover. I’m liking it well enough that I’m considering using it for the Myth Drannor sandbox I’m contemplating instead of Savage Worlds. It has a simplicity to its system while maintaining just that much more depth of ludus than Savage Worlds offers. It has a points-based character creation system that lets you build the character you envision, including characters who wouldn’t know and couldn’t care less about how to handle themselves in a fight. The resolution system (the One-Roll Engine) is universal across the system while maintaining a satisfying “fitting-ness” for all its applications. That’s a really big deal for me, since I find most universal resolution mechanics dry and unappetising for most of the things that get shoe-horned into them. There’s more to say about this game, but it won’t fit into a links post.

Geek•dō is a strangely compelling place to spend some hobby time. For the uninitiated, it’s BoardGameGeek but for roleplaying games. (For the really uninitiated, it’s like the love-child of IMDB and Wikipedia for roleplaying games.) I’ve made a bunch of entries already, which is simultaneously dry, demanding work and excitingly satisfying. It satisfies some deep (and very buried) urge to tidyness to add an entry to the database so that I can fill a hole in my online collection.

Enjoy, and feel free to share your recent favourite discoveries in the comments.

  1. Still dealing with the upgrade, actually.
  2. The above Buried Without Ceremony article defined the aesthetic socket as “not necessarily caring if a narrative is created or if character development makes sense, as long as play creates something beautiful / interesting”. This resonated with me so much that it was like opening my eyes for the first time. I also realise now why what I look for in a game tends to be skipped over or not understood by most people I’ve played with, because that socket is weird.
  3. It’s worth noting that Archipelago is a free download, and only 22 pages.
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