Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

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An Australian statistician and role-player living in Japan, interested in the theory and practice of role-playing…

Category: Nerd Culture

  • Minor Thoughts on Science Fiction

    Today Crooked Timber has an interesting thread on types of science fiction movie, with lots of commenters bandying about various interpretations of different stories. My favourite is the comparison between Lord of the Rings and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (anxiety about the change in class structure after world war 1). Also, I’m not sure if I’ve…

  • Current Viewing: Salt

    Last night I watched Salt, the Angelina Jolie spy movie. This is basically an action flick, with maybe 12 seconds of character development at the beginning that is only required as background explanation for a cold look near the middle of the movie, and a brief explanation at the end. After that Angelina Jolie kills…

  • Tyranny and Structure in Role-playing

    Noisms at Monsters and Manuals has written a comparison of gaming systems with political theories, dichotomized into “top-down” games (D&D 3rd Edition) and thinkers (Marx) and “bottom-up” games (OD&D) and thinkers (Hayek). Noisms makes it clear what side he falls on (he’s a “bottom-upper,” oo-er), which he characterizes as “the right” (vs. “the wrong”), but…

  • New Year Plans

    I crawled out into the freezing cold with a hangover today to visit the Asami Shrine in Beppu, to burn my 2010 demon-breaking arrow and purchase a new arrow for 2011. Burning the arrow that symbolizes the year before gives one time to pause and think about what one did in that 365 days, and…

  • Japanese Science Fiction

    Is a topic I don’t know much about, but James at Grognardia has been pondering how Japanese interpret Traveller and similar science fiction. To reproduce my comment to him there, the concept of the “Frontier,” which is important to Traveller, is not so relevant to Japanese literary history. Aside from a very brief and unfortunate period…

  • Speculation on the class and culture of role-players from four nations

    I have now had the chance to role-play with gamers from 3 nations – Japan, Australia and the UK – and I’ve seen a lot about American role-players online. From my experiences I’ve begun to get a bit of a sense of the politics, class and background culture of gamers in these 4 nations, so…

  • A Haul of Japanese Old School Gaming Products

    During my otaku bonenkai party, Mr. Shuto opened one of his many storage cabinets and revealed a huge haul of old school gaming products, almost all Japanese translations of originals, that he had collected from Yahoo Auction over the years. Most were in near-mint condition, some he had never played, and some of them I…

  • Otaku Bonenkai

    Last weekend my Warhammer role-playing group held a traditional bonenkai party. Bonenkai translates as “forgetting the year party” and is basically an end of year party, with a few formal details (a little tiny speech at the start, then a toast). There is often also a follow-up shinnenkai (“new year party”) to greet the new…

  • Survivalism and the Zombie Apocalypse

    Continuing this week’s zombie theme, Grey has raised in comments to my last post the possibility that our modern specialization and lack of basic survival skills – farming, hunting, that sort of thing – would be a major problem in surviving the zombie apocalypse. The obvious implication of this is that your average media studies…

  • Bilbo The Pimp

    The Daily Mash has responded to claims that The Hobbit is racist in its typical style. Their commentary on alcohol tax increases is also hilarious.