Neither Gods Nor Genies

In Game Masters Aren't Gods... They're Genies, Neal Litherland argues that the job of a GM (and it's telling that he calls it a job) is "to create challenges ... decide what treasure the players find, what allies they make, and ... do all these things in service to the players." He sees the game as being akin to a book that the players will want to keep reading. In a related discussion on Discord he made it even plainer, casting the GM in the role of a performer and other players as the audience.

There are a couple of big assumptions at play here and I disagree with both of them.

Game reviews by a guy who's only ever played Skyrim

Civilization

Civilization is an interesting departure from the mould of traditional games like Skyrim in a few ways. Probably the first thing new players will notice is that the first-person perspective has been abandoned in favour of a sort of top-down "bird's eye view", but this is just the beginning. Rather than controlling a single individual, given tasks by the various quest-givers around the world, you function as a sort of quest-giver yourself for your chosen nation, instructing its people on what projects to pursue and what battles to take on.

Fairy Tale: Rapunzel

In being rewritten and retold over the years, fairy tales are adapted and altered “to be more compatible with the ideological views of the audience” (Smith 2015, p. 424) or, because fairy tales are stories for children, the ideological views that the teller wishes to encourage in the audience. Embedding these values in stories makes them memorable and links them to seemingly concrete examples of reward and punishment. It also allows them to slip beneath the notice of otherwise vigilant parents on the basis that these stories are hallowed artefacts of our shared culture.

Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle

Gotham is a 2014 television series developed by Bruno Heller for Primrose Hill Productions, DC Entertainment and Warner Bros. Television. The series takes place in the fictional Gotham city, setting of the Batman comics, movies, etc. (but before the first appearance of Batman himself) and focuses mainly on a young Detective Jim Gordon and on Oswald Cobblepot (better known as the Penguin).

Other characters include the young Bruce Wayne (not yet Batman) and Selina Kyle (not yet Catwoman), and it is these two that this essay will focus on. Bruce has lived a life of comfort and privilege up until the death of his parents, whereas Selina, an orphan, has grown up on the streets, turning to petty crime to survive. Each of them, in their own way, challenges the normal power dynamic between adults and children. Bruce, as the employer of his legal guardian, and Selina because she has no guardian and is in frequent conflict with police and other authorities.

Intellectual property vs. physical property

The theory of copyright is sound enough to seem obvious and unassailable in the modern world: if one creates something, then one should be able to control and profit by its distribution. It applies as well to something we create with our minds as something we create with our hands. If I build something I can sell it, give it away, or keep it for myself. If I write something I should have the same options. If it were that simple, there would be little room for criticism.

But there's a strange difference in how the law treats physical and intellectual property. If I build a desk and sell it to you, you can use it as a desk, you can use it as a basis for constructing something else, you can chop it up and use it as firewood. It's your desk now. But if I write an article and you buy a copy from me, I get to tell you what you can do with it. You can't sell your copy to anyone else, for example. You can't chop it up and make something new out of the pieces. In fact, if I want, I can take it back and not let you have it any more. Even though you paid for it, it's still mine.

Gender and Character Customisation

Following the success of the Grand Theft Auto series (2004, 2008), the open-world sandbox crime genre of video games seemed an obvious path to financial success, and so many imitations were created. One such imitation was Saints Row (2006), a game that was not without its fans but, aside from a surprisingly high-profile voice cast (Saints Row 2006), didn't really stand out from the crowd. It was not until the release of the sequel that the series really found its footing and achieved cult status.

Ken Zucker, Transgenderism, Gender Identity

Gender identity is a tricky subject. Many people (I'm led to believe) have an innate sense of gender which may be in harmony or at odds with their physical sex. Not having such a sense myself I'm unable to imagine what that is like and must simply take it on trust that it is indeed a thing, in much the same way that a person blind from birth must simply accept that colours exist and the sky is blue – you say it and I accept that it is so, but it doesn't really mean anything to me.

Why do men's rights activists oppose women's rights?

In her essay Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words, Sharon Marcus argues for a post-modernist view of “understanding rape to be a language” (Marcus 1992, p. 387), that it is the narrative of female victimhood and male aggression that makes women vulnerable to rape and is itself reinforced by rape and the way we think about it. The prevailing view of rape, she says, is that it cannot be prevented, “only postrape events offer possible occasions for intervention” (Marcus 1992, p. 388).

Authors Behaving Badly

This is an account, written for my Writing Creative Non-Fiction class back in May, of my encounter with Gilbert Ohanian (previously covered on this blog) and a discussion of similar reactions from other authors to bad reviews.

Letters to Yourself

Robert Dessaix's 'Letters to an Unknown Friend' was the keynote address at Essaying: The Calibre Prizes, a symposium held at the National Library of Australia. This is my review of a transcript of it, written for my Writing Creative Non-Fiction class back in May.

Uncreative Fiction

This is a thing about creative non-fiction (and why I hate it) that I wrote for my Writing Creative Non-Fiction class back in April.

Shifts in Genre Conventions

An essay on genre and how it changes over time. I think genre is generally a pretty useless and uninteresting concept, so I can't really claim to have anything interesting to say about it, but since I had to write this I may as well post it.

Youth, Respect and Power

Today's modern industrialised societies are often said to have a “cult of youth”, a worship of the idea of being young. This could be linked to our consumerist culture and the constant search for new products and experiences. The “seductive power [of objects of consumption] lies mostly in their not having been experienced before [and] the young, by definition, fit the bill … as objects of consumption” (Bauman 2007: 59). This positions youth as desirable but not respected, a thing to be possessed but not admired.

Masculinity and Femininity

“Masculinity” and “femininity” are terms which encompass broad categories of behaviour deemed appropriate for and typical of those categorised as male and female respectively. These definitions are somewhat recursive as masculinity is defined as behaviour typical of males (or more specifically, men) and men are then expected to behave in masculine ways. The terms are also defined in opposition to each other, in that masculinity is whatever femininity is not, and therefore men are expected to behave in “not-feminine” ways. But neither exists as an objective standard outside of society and “vary across cultures and change over time” (Cameron 2007: 23); “Manhood does not bubble up to consciousness from our biological makeup; it is created in culture” (Kimmel 2001: 267).

Copyright in the 21st century

In 1557 the guild of stationers was granted a royal charter and became the Stationers' Company, leading to the creation of the stationers' copyright, which was a private agreement “granted by a group of businessmen who agreed to allow one of them the exclusive right to publish a specific work in perpetuity” (Patterson & Lindberg, 1991, p22) rather than an actual law. This copyright was created for two purposes; to protect the publishers of works and to aid the government in its attempts at censorship. (Patterson & Lindberg, 1991, p25) Modern copyright differs in its goals and execution, but is in some ways based on that first version.