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Jan. 29th, 2013 10:02 am
New Work - "Reading the Game"
As of this date, my article "Reading the Game" is free to view at Strange Horizons.
The first paragraph will give you the idea: "It can be disconcerting for a player of role-playing games to open a novel or put on a DVD and see her hobby depicted in a way that she barely recognizes. Such as when Inspector John Coffin encounters miscreants playing Vices & Virgins in Gwendoline Butler's Coffin Underground. Or when the Greatest American Hero attempts a game of Wizards & Warlocks only to end up wrestling Arabs on a mini-golf course. Equally, it is delightful to encounter such a loving depiction of a convention as in John Ringo's Princess of Wands, or of gaming group dynamics as depicted in Robbie Fraser's GamerZ."
The things I watched and read for this one! That's near forty years worth of pop culture and not all of it made it in, I might add. Honourable mentions go to Shakma! and the Supernatural episode "LARP and the Real Girl" which only aired last week. This article is both a kind of sequel to 2002's "Playing the Classics" which appeared in the fourth issue of Black Gate magazine and, like so many other things, my answer to a question I tripped over at university. "Hmmm, role-playing games as literary plot device. That looks interesting. I shall investigate as soon as I have completed writing my freeform for the next Necronomicon."
Ah, those carefree days.
The first paragraph will give you the idea: "It can be disconcerting for a player of role-playing games to open a novel or put on a DVD and see her hobby depicted in a way that she barely recognizes. Such as when Inspector John Coffin encounters miscreants playing Vices & Virgins in Gwendoline Butler's Coffin Underground. Or when the Greatest American Hero attempts a game of Wizards & Warlocks only to end up wrestling Arabs on a mini-golf course. Equally, it is delightful to encounter such a loving depiction of a convention as in John Ringo's Princess of Wands, or of gaming group dynamics as depicted in Robbie Fraser's GamerZ."
The things I watched and read for this one! That's near forty years worth of pop culture and not all of it made it in, I might add. Honourable mentions go to Shakma! and the Supernatural episode "LARP and the Real Girl" which only aired last week. This article is both a kind of sequel to 2002's "Playing the Classics" which appeared in the fourth issue of Black Gate magazine and, like so many other things, my answer to a question I tripped over at university. "Hmmm, role-playing games as literary plot device. That looks interesting. I shall investigate as soon as I have completed writing my freeform for the next Necronomicon."
Ah, those carefree days.