Reading Time: 6 minutes I saw an unusual book offered for free on Amazon last week. Its author described The Whispering Crystals as LitRPG, or literary roleplaying games. The plot involves a young woman transported to an alien world, then sent through trials to learn to survive. As she slowly progresses in essential skills, she updates her character sheet […]
Gaming
Exploring the world of gaming from a secular perspective.
Posted inGaming
The night I got completely hooked on roleplaying
Reading Time: 10 minutes My handiwork in the alley had not gone unnoticed. The people in the inn were talking about me.
Posted inGaming
Holiday gifts for the gamers on your list
Reading Time: 8 minutes From the video game player to the one who prefers offbeat indie card games and more, we’ve got you covered!
Posted inGaming
From gamer to ‘gamer girl’ to gamer again
Reading Time: 14 minutes Many years ago, more than half a lifetime by now, I took my first steps into gamer girl territory. Except I didn’t really see it as being a gamer girl. To me, I was simply a gamer, full stop. Now that we’re nearly at the 40-year anniversary of the classic Dungeons & Dragons cartoon series, […]
Posted inGaming
The rise of the casual MMORPG player
Reading Time: 11 minutes Nowadays, these games studiously court players who might only have a few minutes a day or a couple of days a week that they can spend ingame.
Posted inGaming
Using games to defuse frustration in the Dark Ages of Twitter
Reading Time: 9 minutes Sure, it’s gallows humor. But maybe sometimes we need a good laugh when things are on fire all around us.
Posted inGaming
The one unforgivable sin in tabletop roleplaying games
Reading Time: 11 minutes Cheating may be reviled throughout most of the gaming world, but all too many players seem perfectly comfortable with doing it. Entire websites exist whose entire function revolves around providing cheat codes and methods to interested gamers. In turn, multiplayer online games fight constantly against cheating. The smaller the venue, the more intimate the players’ […]
Posted inGaming
Gaming through the fear of failure
Reading Time: 12 minutes It’s not your imagination: games really have gotten easier over the years. The reason has everything to do with my generation’s fear of failure, and our need to get payoffs we can’t get in real life.
Posted inGaming
We like to scare ourselves: The rise of horror games
Reading Time: 7 minutes Fear is part of the human condition. Horror games speak to that part of us and allow us to take a little control over it.
Posted inCritical thinking
Paul Pelosi’s attacker and Gamergate: Old conspiracy theories never die
Reading Time: 8 minutes On Friday morning, 42-year-old David DePape attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul at their home in San Francisco. Internet sleuths quickly found that his extensive internet footprint began with one of the dumbest conspiracy theories to sprout in decades: Gamergate. No matter how many years separate us from Gamergate, it never seems to go away. There’s […]