Category Archives: Chapel Hill
Known Associates
In the last few days, I’ve sure seen a lot of misspellings of Michele Catalano. Michele was my editor at the awesome (and sadly, now-defunct) Faster Than The World, and my freelance writing friend since then. She writes here about the … Continue reading
Specialized Skills
When I was in college, I was often asked what I planned to do with my degree in classics. No career counselor had suggested that studying classics is preparation to move to China, and that living China is preparation for … Continue reading
App Design Class
I always enjoy reading student work in the Game Concepts class. I’m so proud when students turn their rambling and epic game ideas into succinct summaries with player objectives, win conditions and fail conditions.
Failstate Fourth Wall
What happens when I’m encouraged to write failstate messages… Working on Tokyo Hosto was a great time, and I’m pleased to see it coming together.
A Study in Silks by Emma Jane Holloway
A Study in Silks by Emma Jane Holloway is described as the adventures of Evelina Cooper, the mystery-solving niece of Sherlock Holmes. I was interested in a society lady detective and foggy Victorian London is a great setting for a mystery … Continue reading
Flavortext Superpower
As part of the class in game design, we ask the students to come up with unique, descriptive titles for their completed games, and to write other game text like a one-sentence summary or a brief instructional screen. Usually I … Continue reading
Royal Mistress
New book review of Anne Easter Smith’s Royal Mistress, in which I display more of my vast knowledge of the British monarchy, and prove that 90% of it’s from historical novels. (The remaining 10% is from researching interesting parts of historical novels, … Continue reading
Recent posts
I feel like I’ve not written very much here recently, so here’s a roundup what I’ve been doing: I went to ECGC and heard game writer Tracy Seamster tell me that reading PostSecret and eavesdropping on the train is totally part … Continue reading
Still Life With Fail Fire
Teaching children is hard. I’ve written before about the industry codeswitching between developers and journalists, and trying to keep dev jargon out of my pieces for enthusiast publications. With the kids, I try to say things like Will your player … Continue reading
