Stranger Than

Posted on September 20, 2012 by Meg

A headline this morning made me realize that I’m literally unable to tell truth from fiction anymore.

This started when some friends blogged about a bacon sundae at Burger King and I didn’t know if they were kidding or serious.  Was it just my expat circle kidding around about home food they were missing? Making a point about fast food culture? Or actually taking pictures of a real thing in a real restaurant?

Then, Harold and I we were traveling when the whole Clint Eastwood talking to a chair thing  happened (that is a very odd phrase to type), so I first heard about it through social media. For a while, I legitimately thought it was a metaphor my liberal friends were using to describe the RNC.

Here in New York, there was a shooting by my old office in which NYPD cops accidentally shot nine bystanders, and then the mayor passed a law banning extra large sodas. Sometimes these headlines run side-by-side.

Pretty much when I read news now, I wonder what’s a clever parody of American life and what’s true.

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For Exposure

Posted on September 13, 2012 by Meg

Hey, guys, which came first?

Prefix’s post this morning on how Amanda Palmer doesn’t pay her backup musicians , including the brilliant snark at her cheapness:

Palmer sought to crowdsource each city she stopped in to get the instruments she wanted for her live set. One can see how this would cut costs; not only is the tour bus less crowded, but lodging is easier the fewer people you’re traveling with. Oh, and not paying the musicians for their sets helps, too.

OR

Gawker’s post this morning on how Prefix doesn’t pay their writers decently, including the brilliant snark at their cheapness:

Anyone lucky enough to get hired will be expected to write at least three 200-plus-word posts a day, for which they will be compensated $2 per post. Think of it, recent J-school grads: All you’d need to do is write 10,000 words a week and you’re looking at a cool $100.

Really not sure which one was posted first, if one is a reaction to the other.Could be that the Gawker writer is a Dresden Dolls fan annoyed by the Prefix piece and who wants readers to know that Prefix are supercheap to their talent too, or if the Prefix writer is responded to the Gawker attack by pointing out other people are supercheap to their talent, too. Could be just a pretty awkward coincidence for Prefix, but either way it’s a pretty depressing morning for folks hoping to make a living with their creative work.

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Kansas City

Posted on September 8, 2012 by Meg

I was excited when Harold suggested a last-minute trip to Kansas City. Partly because I love when scheduled, steady Harold wants to do something spontaneous. (I don’t know how  manic pixie dream girls do it. I’m quirkily restless all the freaking time, and Harold has yet to throw over all his responsibility and move to Bali with me.) And partly because Kansas City is such a major role, almost a character, in the stories Harold’s told me about his years there.

And so the actual Kansas City is superimposed with the stories Harold has told me, making it more than a mortal Midwestern City. After bringing Harold to my Massachusetts family, the situation is entirely reversed. It is his decades-long friendships to which I’m being introduced.

While we were there, I took a lot of desperately unimaginative photos, because I am the very first person ever to notice that there is a lot of sky in Kansas Missouri. It’s also very flat! So you can see for miles! Yeah, I’m full of unique observations like that.

This is NOT the world's largest ball of string. Anymore.


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Recent Projects

Posted on September 7, 2012 by Meg

I’ve got a piece on Tapscape talking about a recent texting ban in India. I should probably be discouraged from speculating on tech trends, but I was fascinated by the clever workaround individuals are using to circumvent the ban. It reminded me of some of the clever ways my expats friends and I would get around the Great Firewall and keep up with friends at home.

New game review on the island sim Robinson, because it’s been almost a month since my last island game review. Robinson fell totally flat though.

Robinson by Pixonic, is an adorable island sim for Android, promising escapist casual play and delivering forced friends and forced paid upgrades.

I’ve been writing some player guides for The Jockey Club‘s new Facebook game Thoroughbred World.

I’ve started a new contract job writing dialogue for another MMO — more on that one later. I’m afraid to say too much about it until everything is signed and settled.

And of course I’m still over at the Indie Game Magazine, talking about news in the indie game world, and letting my colleagues introduce me to awesome new indie titles.

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The Lasting Value of Educational Games

Posted on September 4, 2012 by Meg

Harold and I arrive in Kansas City, where recent heavy rains have closed one of the main roads. Harold mumbles something about the highway being  practically the Missouri River, after several days of rain.

“Should we try to ford the river?” I ask Harold, “Or should we caulk the wagon and float it across?”

 

 

 

(Oregon Trail screenshot from Shared Experiences provided for anyone unfamiliar with fording the river, dysentery and carrying 200 lbs of squirrel meat back to the wagon.)

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Weesh on Tapscape

Posted on September 2, 2012 by Meg

I’ve just started writing for Tapscape’s new startups section, with my first post on relationship app Weesh:

Weesh, an iOs relationship app for long-term couples, is one of the startups completing Dreamit’s summer incubator. Weesh allows users to find and share new date ideas, and creates a photobook of the couple’s good times.

Users can spot an interesting new restaurant or see a trailer for a movie, and then they make a “weesh” sharing that desire with their significant other. Weesh supports adding a location, sharing a link, a photo, or just entering text of something you’d like to do with your sweetheart.This is social sharing at its best — no spamming 500 Facebook friends with mushy messages, just telling your sweetheart you saw something  fun and thought of them.

This creates a list of the couple’s potential Weeshes, closing the gap between seeing an awesome new sushi place on Tuesday afternoon, and then ending up going to the same places on the weekend that you always go. Weesh also offer suggestions for dates, based on place and interest, a bit like another dating start-up app Datini.

Via Try Weesh, A New iOs Relationship App

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Foam Swords, Game Players, and Barbecue

Posted on September 1, 2012 by Meg

Eric holds an end-of-summer barbecue called MeatFest, although that’s more and more inaccurately named every year.  It’s still festive, I mean, but now that the group is not so much a mob of starving 20-year-old guys, there’s less meat and more summery salads,  stuffed mushrooms, and other kinds of delicious. Our college friends still gather, as many as can make it, now with husbands and wives, and this year included the first baby. (Her parents call her the Trap Baby because she’s so cute and so good.)

I brought Harold, after warning him that uncoordinated volleyball featured prominently in the afternoon’s plans and that the Hoffmanns are my second family. He’s met most of my Massachusetts friends on other visits, and I was excited to introduce him to the rest.

Eric pointed me to the sangria, but told me to leave some for his girlfriend, who was on her way. (I was a little pleased about the sangria and a lot pleased about Eric having a girlfriend.)

Does that say "star"? I think it does...

We ended up drinking, eating, and talking games, as we usually do. I was reminded, again, how very much there is for me to learn.  Greg teaches game development, so when the conversation turned to player archetypes, he pulled out the text book he just happened to be carrying…  Grant mentioned he was starting a gamification class, and my immediate reaction was to ask him if he got an achievement for completing it. Grant’s actually the first person I knew who made his own RPG, years before the app store, Limbo, and Minecraft made “indie games” a widely-recognized genre.

We had the annual volleyball game, with more excitement and enthusiasm than skill or competition. We usually shift to a more cooperative game in which both sides participate in making long strings of volleys, instead of trying to score points.  Some of the guys — including Harold! I didn’t see that coming! — also had the annual battle with foam swords.

As it got dark, we bug-sprayed ourselves and sat surrounding the firepit, catching up, telling stories and remembering other times.

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Tripl Travelogues

Posted on August 29, 2012 by Meg

Travel startup Tripl, originally a social connector for travelers, has undergone a reinvention as a virtual travel scrapbook. I checked out the newest version at Dreamit demo day.

The original version, if I remember right, allowed users to find friends, and friends-of-friends in the cities they’d be visiting. Seemed like a neat concept, and one I would absolutely have loved when I lived in Yantai, and I really, really wanted English-speaking friends. As an expat, I often met with distant connections of my distant connections to help them adjust to Chinese life or just meet another Westerner (and I was lucky enough be helped by Old China Hands when I needed it!). Now I live in New York, and if I met up with every single friend of a friend who happens to pass through town… well… um…. no.

The new version of Tripl is a social scrapbook, creating and displaying trip memories.
The design is just lovely, and Tripl pulls in additional content about the destination, like travel articles and related images. This part reminded me of OffBeat Guides, a print-on-demand customized travel guide, although of course the goal with Tripl is more a social memory book than travel planning.

By pulling in public info from Facebook and FourSquare, Tripl doesn’t require a user to have friends also using Tripl in order to see their travelogue.. This cleverly avoids the empty-room feeling that social startups often have. It can be really difficult to see if a product would be useful and fun when the only other users are the devs.  Of course, it also makes me hyperaware of just how much of my life is geotagged already… Tripl considers 100 miles to be a trip, so you won’t see any gorgeous travelogues of my SCVNGR checkins at my local coffeeshop. (Still waiting for my auto-cool location app.)

Future plans include tying in Instagram, an obvious next step for a travel-photo app, but the staff is wary of taking on too much and working on too many features, preferring instead to focus just on social travel scrapbooking.

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Facebook Timeline

Posted on August 28, 2012 by Meg

Harold: What does it mean when someone pokes you on Facebook?

Meg: That it’s 2005?

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From A Player on Next Island

Posted on August 23, 2012 by Meg

Even though I’m no longer at Next Island, I’m still quite proud of the work I did in questwriting and dialogue, and I was really pleased to read this from a player:

I started on one planet, made my way to the others, and after finding this one last, made the stark realization that Next Island was the closest to a single-player game I’d seen so far. The plots are multi-threaded, with follow-through & character development. They lead you through without the sense of being lead-by-the-nose. I’m really interested in what happens next (as opposed to being told to hunt more monsters for little reward).

Thanks, Miac. It’s really great to hear that you enjoyed the characters and connections on Nesoi Makaron.

Via So, now what? | Next Island Forum

 

Related:

A player posts to on the forum about having “a blast” with missions.

A player reading my dialogue and talking back to my character

 

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