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Two children facing each other in a chess tournament

A White mom (the mom of the girl child in the previous photo) sitting next to a White dad (the dad of the boy child in the previous photo), in the audience of the chess tournament

The mom holding a bottle of Smarty Pants vitamins and leaning over the chess board

There's an ad for Smarty Pants vitamins--a parent says to another "raising smart kids isn't a competition" then to the camera "except it totally is."

It's so over-the-top it could be parody. But it's real. So we need to talk about what's driving this competition, and why it's apt to get worse. 1/🧵

solid damage, liquid damage, gas damage, plasma damage (DLC content)

in the same way that if you ask "what do you do in chess" the answer is "you try to checkmate the other guy"

oh I think mario and chess both have goals, but I understood caleb to be saying mario is the chess board, not chess.

you can do all kinds of things while playing mario, but if you ask people "what do you do in mario" they will say "you try to get to the end and rescue the princess"...

mmm, I'm not sure what that implies for me to agree with it! mario has a goal that the player is supposed to go achieve through play. a board doesn't, right? it's just a tool for playing a game (you supply the game)

People wouldn’t say “it is a law of physics that you can’t go back” they would say “you aren’t allowed” indicating that they understand it as a rule

Also I would propose “you can’t go backwards in the level” as a rule — it is enforced as a physical limitation but it does not correspond to any physics we might impute to the setting; it is a non-diagetic limitation

Yeah my mental comparison here is between “chess” and “speed chess.” Both are chess, both have rules, one has more rules; we understand that there’s like a genealogical link.

is “speedrunning Mario” the same game as “Mario”?

I think this is an interesting question and that part of the answer is related to what he does in the thread, ie, go on a lengthy tirade asking the AI why it made such a boneheaded mistake and attempting to verbally discipline it for screwing up (which it is happy to play along with).

How Do We See Gender and Trans People? a short essay and video

🧵 upon first glance, you likely “determined” the gender of most of the people in this photo immediately, even though many of them are partially blocked or out of focus. why did your brain do this? did you notice any trans ppl here?...
[no paywall on Medium: juliaserano.medium.com/how-do-we-se... ]

One of the funny things about 4e is if it didn’t say D&D on it it would be obviously a game from a specific era of forge theory

the rumor was he took a while to concede because he hadn’t written a concession speech

kingdom hearts was boring

to adopt the lusory attitude is also to enter the liminal space, where we have a shared commitment to creating a "true" narrative using our agreed-upon rituals

this is something I have been thinking about recently in the context of mcluhanistic cool media and/or peter brooks's writing on "holy theatre" as ritual enactment of symbolic truth

the “hateful content” they are prohibiting here is “nazis are bad”

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Wrong link on previous post!

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making a shooting the moon hack with orcs and elves and calling it “fantasy heartbreaker”

but even then, AW does not cry out for adventures, which was our starting point. so I am skeptical of the value of the rule, even as I agree that there is a clear divide between two different "models" of RPG.

or maybe you would say AW is a trad/OSR game in disguise. (this would be a provocative claim! I always understood AW as trying to do some of the things trad games did using a story games framework.)

the obvious example to point to is apocalypse world. AW is a character-stance game with a strong GM role, but I think we'd all call it a story game. what are we relying on to make that call?

that is probably a topic for another thread though.

I certainly agree that we intuitively understand the distinction between "story games" and "trad/OSR". trivially, that distinction is why OSR exists, right? but I'm still unconvinced that character stance is a good facsimile for that.

thanks for writing this thread; sorry it took me a while to respond.

we definitely agree more than we disagree, and some disagreements are semantic - for example, I would say the game is the consensus, and that GMs are players (all people participating in the consensus are players).

Court’s Ruling in Skrmetti Threatens All Care That’s Politically Contested — Assigned An anti-trans, anti-science decision relies on a history of discrimination against women, and opens the door to challenges on care like vaccines.

The decision in Skrmetti lets politicians create their own evidence to justify banning necessary healthcare.

It's bad, writes @evanurquhart.bsky.social. Not just for trans people, but for anyone whose healthcare is or could potentially be politically contested.

Read more here:

making the table to create adventures in toon is writing all the adventures that can be randomly created with them, which means that, by volume of adventures written, greg costikyan is the only living game designer

I think genuinely that no game lies on either side of the character rule as you've defined it -- all games exist in consensus so all players are always authoring, which means they are editing; at the same time no game allows editing the world unconstrained by consensus (which often means by rule)

really I feel like a lot of the conversation in this thread has been revolving around “well story games don’t have adventures, but they are still game design”

I think that your point here is about the distinction between two types of games, one of which I think of as “story games” and the other of which I think of as “trad” or “OSR” or “getting to freeform”, but I feel like the character rule is not a good filter to find that distinction!

I've been thinking for the last hour about the wildness of this idea. I hope this guy took the launch of 5.5e well.