Ludo-Analysis (Part 1)

Play – as Huizinga defines it above – is ultimately generative. It creates an order that would not otherwise come into being: in the middle of the twentieth century we see a narrowing of horizons. They are not so much being allowed to play as they are being encouraged to engage in what might be called a kind of “socratic” play. The doll or the model car has a specific way that the user is encouraged to engage with it in, and to do otherwise is a kind of perversion.

Imagination-as-a-Service: The “Under-monetization” of D&D

If the wi-fi is out, if the power’s out and there’s nowhere to go but you have candles, dice, notebooks and a copy of the core book, you can tell stories until it comes back on. As an aside, the Broken Hands Team actually already did that one evening while waiting for the power to come back on: no need to sit in the dark, but also no need for Netflix or video games or anything of the sort. That’s why the hobby is great – it’s analog, and it’s flexible. If games are art – and I would say that they are – then the medium for them is the social contract.

Commentary, Gaming, Written by: CameronCameron SummersDecember 21, 2022tabletop gaming, Hasbro, Dungeons and Dragons, Horizon of ExtractionComment

The Spectrum of Consent

It is here that I find the genesis of a potential theory of consent. I believe that there are two varieties – at least – of consent that we refer to by the same name, despite being distinct from one another. I have decided to call these “opt-out” and “opt-in” consent until better terminology presents itself.

The Bound-Like

Occasionally, we discuss genre, and largely this is limited to film and literature, but there’s a particular problem with looking at the use of genre in a ludic context. In short: video games handle genre in a decidedly weird fashion, and it’s worth commenting upon.

The Political Economy of Game Design (Odd Columns, #10)

More than anything else – as several reviews I’ve written over the years indicate – I’m interested in tabletop role playing games. These games are fascinating for several reasons, but the one I want to focus on is an intuition that I’ve been working with for a while: Tabletop role-playing games – which don’t, in any but the most loose sense work anything like other games – are toy models of political economy, and I suspect that they could be used as models for alternative political-economic systems.