Recent content by far_wanderer

You appear to be looking pretty hard for a fight where there isn't one. I've read and heard old man diatribes about cosplay and that wasn't one of them. The only things even remotely denigrating to cosplay are in the subtitle and picture caption. The rest of the article is, if anything...

It's worth noting that a similar thing happened in Stargate. SG1 and Atlantis were light-hearted and optimistic sci-fi, and then Universe went all grimdark. I really didn't like Universe, not because it was bad, but because it felt like it had taken away that optimism and replaced it with the...

While I agree in general with this article, I feel that there is an important counterpoint - binge watching does fragment a viewing community, but that also means that the community learns how to deal with fragmentation. Contrast that to shows with a regular release schedule where I, as a late...

I can actually provide some insight into this one. The reason western fantasy tends to be similar is because there is significant cultural cross-over between the people who design settings for video games and books and the people who design settings for pen-and-paper RPGs. And in a...

Out of curiosity, where did the references to Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter come from? Because I don't find them anywhere in the citation chain, which leads me to believe they were added, here, for the purpose of being inflammatory. A person far enough outside of geek-culture to be a...

Unfortunately neither of those options is what you wrote. The beginning of this article much more closely resembles "that which does not kill you makes you stronger, and cannot ever cause chronic illness, and people who say it can cause chronic illness are idiots." Inflammatory phrases are...

I think you could have been clearer in your point about storytelling to avoid a lot of unnecessary debate. Based on my own experience, and the few hints you've dropped about what is coming, I think that what you mean is that storytelling is less important for the GM, because it's the only one...

And suddenly my opinion on Gears of War changes from "not even slightly interested" to "strongly considering a purchase".

I think what he was trying to say was "motion control is not the future of gaming, motion control is merely a PART of the future of gaming". Or to put it another way, the Wiimote is to the GameCube controller what the mouse is to the keyboard - a new interface device capable of doing new and...

Thank you for that, it makes a bit more sense now. It's interesting, the News Hour on PBS also covered this story in a quick blurb, and according to their report the case wasn't about the offensive content of the video, but was instead about the violation of the privacy of the kid who was...

So, suing a company for something that goes up on a service they host is bad and all, but does anyone else notice the actual, far more serious, issue here? They didn't press charges against the company - they pressed charges against the employees. Employees who, if the Google blog is to be...

On the one hand, you raise a lot of important issues. But on the other hand, "Oh No, if we want to role-play our characters together we'll have to come up with personalities that agree with each other" is something table-top gamers have been dealing with for longer than I've been alive. Is it...

Since I have exactly as much authority to speak on behalf of the "gaming community" as whatever idiot nutjobs threatened the guy's family, I would like to publicly apologize for their behavior. We're sorry. Now then. Images will not portray any more realistic a depiction of games than text...

One very important thing contributing to this that you left out is that JRPGs (especially the ones with turn-based combat) tend to have VERY significant differences between walking-around-mode and fighting-something-mode. MMOs (and I'll broaden that to western RPGs since I don't play any MMOs)...

Important tips: -The quartermaster (the first merchant you encounter after your origin story) sells a backpack (the things that increase your inventory space) for about a tenth the cost of anyone else I've encountered so far. More importantly, if you buy that backpack right away when you meet...