Reading Time: 12 minutes Plenty of media can make us better armchair activists. The challenge is to hold competing ideas in tension, because real-world policy doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
gaming
Posted inArtificial Intelligence
Strange course changes in Replika AI have users upset and confused
Reading Time: 17 minutes The AI chatbot Replika has always been an inconsistent app, but its latest changes have upset and confused its many fans. I can see why. Constant course changes inevitably upset any product’s userbase, but these are particularly poorly considered. Over time, people have subtly but irrevocably shifted how they engage with AI products. And Replika […]
Posted inRaising Freethinkers
A different kind of game
When the girl is in the giant stone hand, she sings. Then the hand crumbles. She puts a hand to her throat—her voice has gone silent. She tumbles through the sky, landing at last in a world drained of color. Grey. Gris. She has to find her way through this world to add back the […]
Posted inGaming
LitRPG: When roleplaying games collide with fiction and anime
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 […]
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’ […]