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

  • Grindin’ for Gygax

    I am a regular reader of and occasional commenter at the left-wing political/academic blog Crooked Timber, though I don’t usually link my blog to them (the American political blogsophere is a bit scary). Recently, however, I discovered this post on the new Dante’s Inferno computer game, where anonymous commenter noen makes this great claim: The…

  • On the mischaracterisation of role-players as escapist loonies

    Over at Terra Nova there is news of the release of a study conducted with the help of Sony, which is essentially a large survey of MMO users’ role-playing style, their attitude towards the game, mental health and degree of social exclusion. It’s an interesting attempt to characterise the qualities of MMO players by their…

  • Have beard will argue

    This post at Grognardia reminds me of why I am uncomfortable with the “old-school movement” and its pronouncements on all things nerdy. Putting aside the strange fascination with naff artwork and Dr. Who style special effects, the weird, almost religious obsession with pronouncements by one strange, pedantic, over-opinionated game writer (i.e. Gary Gygax) is almost…

  • Cyberpunk, postmodernism and Orientalism 1: outline

    In my previous post I mentioned stumbling across an analysis of cyberpunk and orientalism, which interests me for a lot of reasons, and I’ve subsequently decided that since I’m living in the shadow of the zaibatsu without a job, maybe it’s time I embarked on a shady criminal information-hacking project, so I’m going to try…

  • Cyberpunk theory

    After the dispute over my opinions about the nihilistic elements of cyberpunk role-playing, I did a little more digging and found that this element of cyberpunk is not exactly considered unique. I also discovered that, rather unsurprisingly, cyberpunk is a rich field of theoretical endeavour. I discovered a cyberpunk course at the peer to peer…

  • The Internet, 10 years ago

    I found this through Monsters and Manuals, a website devoted to people kicking their World of Warcraft Habit. Nothing special! I hear you say – but it has a number for a suicide help line, and check out the comments. 2250 pages of them. Here’s a sample: It’s no game anymore it’s like a gigantic…

  • When Denmark is full, the dead shall walk the earth…

    I had this fantastic moment of lego madness pointed out to me today: Zombie Apocafest 2009. It’s creativity such as I thought lego was no longer capable of sustaining. I particularly like the starbucks under zombie siege. The photos are on flickr so I can’t put an example here directly, but there is very creative…

  • Current reading: The Elfish Gene

    Before I left England I was reading this book, The Elfish Gene by Mark Barrowcliffe, which I was given by my flatmate, but for some time I couldn’t get very far into it because it was so nasty. The book is essentially the biography of a man who grew up as a role-playing nerd during…

  • Sacrilege!

    I spent today engaged in a profane and sacrilegious ritual such as would incur the wrath even of the Old Ones[1]: Installing Windows 7 on my 20″ iMac, which only has Mac OS 10.4 on it. I leave it to you, dear reader, to judge whether or not the greatest profanity lies in the act…

  • In place of Japanese Reading, Randomised Block Experiments

    I use a Japanese social networking site called Mixi, that is a kind of blogging/photo uploading/community/facebook style site all rolled into one, minus (mostly) the spam weirdness of facebook, with a lot more privacy settings and slightly more obtrusive advertising. Recently I have been roped into playing a farming game with my friends, called Sunshine…