Compromise and Conceit

Infernal adventuring…

recent posts

about

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

Category: Nerd Culture

  • Playing Warhammer in Japanese

    A week ago, at the monthly konkon Convention in Oita, Japan, organised by the Evil Spirit club, I joined a Warhammer 2nd Edition game. This post is a brief report of the game and some additional comments about the convention, gaming in Japanese, etc. I have reported on the convention procedure before, and this time…

  • GMing Pathfinder in Japanese: Some additional notes

    Friday night last week was the culmination of my brief Pathfinder game, in which the PCs venture further down the valley, beat up some gnomes, and discover that yes, even in the idyllic Steam Mountains treachery abounds. This week’s session was played not at the ringtail store, as it was last time, but at the…

  • Japanese Role-playing game “Double Cross 3”: Introduction

    I’m playing at my local gaming convention this Sunday, and there’s a risk that I’ll be invited into a Japanese-made role-playing game, so against this risk I thought I’d read one of the more popular (and cheaper) Japanese-made games, both to get an introduction to the feeling of Japanese games and to learn some language;…

  • DMing Pathfinder in Japan: Initial observations

    As I mentioned in my previous post, I (slightly foolishly) offered to DM a group of 5 players, in Japanese. The game was last night, so here are a few notes. We played at my friendly local gaming store (FLGS), upon which at some point I need to blog. The owner only has experience of…

  • Playing Pathfinder in Japanese

    Yesterday I played my first ever role-playing game in Japanese, at the Oita Evil Spirit club Konkon convention. This convention is held every month in a public hall in Oita, which is near my town, and runs from 10am to 6:30pm. As far as I know not many English-speaking Westerners get to experience Japanese role-playing,…

  • Why don’t more women game?

    It’s a pretty well-established fact that role-playing games aren’t exactly popular with women, and neither are the related nerdy activities of computer gaming or board gaming. Recent studies suggest that about 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 MMO players is female. That’s a better ratio than at my kickboxing club, where it’s about 1…

  • Fantasy role-playing, the ultimate expression of post-modernism

    I’m fairly confident that Noisms, Sir Grognard, and in fact any the people on my blogroll except (maybe) Wax Banks would be quick to describe themselves as “not really much of a post-modernist,” and probably even be quite quick to tell me exactly what they think of the idea. But if we go and check,…

  • The use of Tolkien to defend fascism

    Today I discovered an interesting interview with one Stephen Shapiro, University of Warwick, which was conducted in 2003 by the German Tolkien fanclub (at least I assume that’s what it is). At that time it would appear he had been working on a research theme similar to that which I’ve gathered here and here, about…

  • Cyberpunk, post-modernism and orientalism 2: Race in Cyberpunk

    So I’m still struggling through the introduction of the PhD thesis I promised to read: understandable since the introduction is still going at page 50. In between my last post and this one I’ve had to wade through some sleep-inducing academic wank, but now I’ve got to the outline in the introduction of the importance…

  • A note on opinions of story-based gaming

    I posted this initially as a comment over at Zak’s blog, but thought I’d put it here too. There is a common view, I think, amongst role-players of all stripes, that later and newer editions of role-playing games encourage more “story-based” gaming than older ones, or that people who prefer to play later edition games…