The March issue of the Entropia Times magazine is out, and the ET staff has done a beautiful job, once again. There’s a pretty awesome piece about some of the crazy things I do for a living.
After it went to press, I added killing monkeys to protect the virtual dating coach to my job description. (Not kidding.) My job is pretty awesome.
You can read the magazine online, or get the PDF.
“…and I’ve also been going to the gym here a lot,” Stick said, midway through the backlog of saw-this-and-thought-of-you that makes up our recent phone conversations.
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “I saw it on your SCVNGR feed.”
“Oh yeah? Are you internet stalking me?”
“Stick, we share a phone plan! If I wanted to keep tabs on you, I wouldn’t have to use SCVNGR!”
“Oh, yeah.”
(There was accompanying text, but just as I was hitting Publish, I got a call from UMass telling me that I would retroactively fail every single literature and poetry class I’ve ever taken, unless I immediately deleted all that cliched garbage about spring and renewal and hopefulness.)
I was at dinner with Harold when I got a message from our boss on my phone.
“You get this one?” I asked. “‘See source code’? Why’s he telling us to see the source code? Oh, man, it’s the game assets, isn’t it? No, he’s gotta mean the main site, there’s something wrong with the CMS, I should probably log in and — ”
“Source Code is a movie, Meg.”
“Oh. Right.”
I challenged my players to a scavenger hunt a few days ago, and asked them to find a screenshot of two avatars flirting. This is what one them came up with:
I watched it until my boss told me to go shut the door so he could make phone calls without listening to my hysterical giggles.
Look, I wasn’t going to jump into the PAX East/ Dickwolves fray, but the ever-awesome Genevieve Valentine called me out on it.
It all began with a mediocre joke from a nerd comic that I find pretty hit-or-miss in general. But dickwolves isn’t a one-off mediocre joke. It’s the next example in a long line of game-related content that starts with the assumption that gamers are angry young men, and goes on to make sure that games appeal only to angry young men. (The original joke also says something about rinse-and-repeat MMO quests. Or I might be thinking about work.) This was followed by a backwards sort of apology, which acknowledged that the joke was mediocre, without acknowledging the reasons it was upsetting.
There was the inevitable blog fray, but I couldn’t really connect to either side. I was infuriated by the willfully-inconsiderate mentality that rape’s just a word, that somehow the user of words isn’t responsible for how the reader feels about those words. (Seriously, is there a reason to share words that doesn’t take the reader into account?) That somehow calling it a joke makes the offensive attitudes and assumptions behind it acceptable.
But I also didn’t connect to the stridently PC backlash, which seemed to be saying that all creativity needs to be bunnies and kitties and topics that will never ever make anyone upset. Or that one needs, somehow, to be a rape survivor in order to take offense.
And I’m shocked and saddened by the huge embrace of the word Dickwolves on gaming blogs and on T-shirts. It’s not, as some have claimed, a pro-rape sentiment, but it’s still offensively anti-woman. The guys embracing it are, I think, trying to say that it’s stupid to get worked up over the whole thing. The attitude is “Don’t be so uptight! It’s just a joke! In a webcomic! Get over it!”
I’m annoyed that somehow saying that I don’t find horrible things to be all that funny means I’m uptight, and I’m really annoyed that this kind of joke can still find an audience in the games industry, in a field I love. I expect better than this in a field that should be focused on fun and creativity.
So, I’m adding dickwolf to my vocabulary. Not to mean comic strip rape, but to mean the type of bro who wants to keep gaming the he-man women-haters clubhouse.
via Persona
The CNN photo project at SxSW invited people to take a picture and show what they’re carrying, creating a snapshot of a SxSW day. My essentials are headphones, friends’ business cards, Allison’s house keys (on a Five College Credit Union bottle opener, no less), a Beijing transit card (because you never know when you might be in Beijing and want to take the subway), my phone, spearmint gum, eyeliner and lipstick, MetroCard, embarrassingly strong sunglasses.
If you’re not fascinated by the contents of my purse, check out what other (famous) people were carrying at SxSW.
This is worse than that time Pandora had the nerve to contaminate my Britney Spears/Lady Gaga station with Backstreet Boys.
Allison and I were lying on the living room couches talking. Or maybe we were sitting at the kitchen table talking. Or sprawled on the upstairs couch talking. Whatever. We spent most of this week talking, and that’s what we were doing when her husband, J, shouted in from the other room. “Honey, why’s our Wii blinking blue?”
“If it’s our alien overlords making first contact,” Allison shouted back, “then I for one will greet them with open arms.”
look like rockstar, by Simpson’s Paradox
A rock star with a fondness for tea and computer games, but still!
