Chris

Okay, if you'd like to make threads, try now. I overrode that permission and folks should no longer need to accrue 10 posts first.

I really loved Rob's observation about how the dynasty mechanics of this game help illuminate why hereditary monarchs have often been such absolute bastards. Giving the player that kind of perspective into off-putting or completely despicable actions--especially actions that closely resemble actual human history rather than pure invention--seems fairly unique to strategy games or at least most frequently achieved by them. Games in which the player is expected to fully inhabit one avatar for the entirety of the game tend to be beholden to power fantasy above all else. This game (I gather) puts the player close enough to the events at hand to invest him in a way that his imagination will want to fill in the fictional gaps (the "middle layer"), but preserves enough detachment to allow the kind of bastarding around that authenticity demands.

You need to accrue 10 posts (as I recall) before being able to start new threads. We may want to look into a workaround for the 3MA forum on that for now though.

We agree.

Wow! That looks amazing. I really have to track down the movers who are currently in possession of the majority of my belongings and haven't gotten back to me for months.

Failing some crazy thing happening in those extra 45 days though, generally if a project can't hit its target in 30 days it's not going to happen in 45 either. I believe longer projects actually statistically have a lower rate of success. Many projects get a big surge of support at the end to help push them over, and that's going to happen regardless of how long it is. If you're so far from your target at 30 days that such a push isn't going to get you there, it's hard to imagine why your daily pledge rate would increase much at all towards the end, especially since your project is old news by that point and not likely to keep getting lots of press. That's not to say this project will suffer because of its 45 day limit; it's just probably unnecessary if it has the audience to become successful at all.

If it has ads in it, you're still bringing in revenue for the company.

I didn't perceive that character in the way you describe. I don't really remember specifically what aspects of his personality or history were described in whichever chapters would have been included in a free sample, but the notion of somebody who once held strongly liberal ideals that have in some ways atrophied through expedience or misguided intentions seems entirely plausible to me, whether or not it's a stereotype.

Walking around in a Minecraft world is far more interesting and evocative than loading up a bunch of SketchUp files that people have made, or browsing somebody's gallery of Maya work, though. I think that's why it's meaningful and important. I don't even have to create anything in Minecraft to enjoy it. I can just experience a place.

I loved it dearly in my teenage years. It's not the kind of thing I would newly read now, but that doesn't mean it's bad or anything. I think I read those books at the right time in my life.

Whenever the video game podcast comes back. We don't know yet. We're still developing the new site. Hopefully soon though!

For what it's worth, this isn't really why I think someone like Franzen writes more vital fiction than someone like Tolkien. In Freedom, Franzen's powers of human observation are astonishing. That book genuinely affected the way I see other people and the world. There's a depth of humanity present in the work of a fiction writer like Franzen that I have rarely encountered in genre fiction--that's absolutely not to say it doesn't exist, but I don't think genre fiction writers treat it as their highest responsibility the same way literary fiction writers do. When you're writing in a genre you're necessarily beholden to whatever tropes and conventions exist in your genre; you certainly may try to transcend or subvert them, and may do so successfully, but to me those elements can't help but be the centerpiece or at least steal a lot of the show. (That is after all why people read a particular genre.) I think this is especially true when (as is the case for many, many genre writers) you're writing these series that seem to go on forever, with book after book, and then your responsibility becomes to this self-contained universe you've created, which exerts its own pressures on itself in terms of needing that world and its characters to remain viable as an indefinitely-lasting or at least fairly long-term concern, which to me is at odds with how fiction operates at its best. I know this is all highly subjective, and I don't claim any of this is automatically the case for any one given author. But having read a whole lot of various kinds of genre fiction during different stages of my life, it is part of why I have largely abandoned it.

It will be monthly.

This isn't an episode of Idle Thumbs, but we talk too much on it, so it might as well be. http://flashofsteel.com/index.php/2012/03/31/three-moves-ahead-episode-162-guess-whos-coming-to-podcast/ This week we stopped into the Three Moves Ahead podcast with Rob Zacny and Troy Goodfellow to discuss what our upcoming partnership means. Since we don't yet entirely know what it means, the conversation was as much an exploration of possibilities and tone than it was a clear roadmap. We're excited about our two podcasts hitching their wagons, and we hope you are too!

It actually is explicitly a book club. We'll be picking one book each month. We'll probably talk about what else we've been reading as well but there will definitely be a primary selection for each podcast.

Our game is playable on OS X and Windows: http://whatwouldmolydeux.com/display.php?GameID=271 During development half of us were using Macs and half of us PCs!

I suspect we'll talk about the underlying motivations related to this, but we absolutely would not be scolds about it. I don't even think Jake, for example, feels the same way on the issue, so if it does come up it would be as a dialogue, not a unified front. And despite having linked to that article and agreeing with many of its underpinnings, I would never have taken the author's angle if I were writing the article myself.

I agree with all of this, and the bolded bit in particular is essentially my thesis on the matter. I get the sense people claim they "read everything" in the same way people say they "like all kinds of music"--almost always, when you press somebody on that, it is not even remotely true. That in itself isn't really a problem. But I do think there is something profoundly important in serious fiction that deals with the actual world in which we live and how human beings exist in it, and that challenges us to reconsider our assumptions about it. There's nothing inherently wrong with A Good Story and Compelling Characters for their own sake, but the more you engage with that kind of fiction, the more you train yourself to thinking that's what literature is all about, and then when you read an incredible and vital work of fiction that doesn't revolve around those things, you can easily dismiss it by saying things like "The characters aren't likeable enough" or "It was too slow." Again, purely on the face of it, those are not inherently worthless judgments, but genre fiction trains us to look at literature as primarily entertainment, and while great fiction SHOULD entertain us in the sense that we should enjoy the experience of reading it, it should not be beholden to that, because works that strive for entertainment above all else generally do a disservice to the deeper meanings and truths we can get out of something with more substance. It's my belief that in 2012, unless one operates as some kind of extreme hermit, it is essentially impossible to avoid engaging with Pure Entertainment a huge chunk of the time, and we all have a limited amount of time. So when it comes to books, I really do think that at least in that one medium, people should make a concerted effort to push themselves. I know it's not realistic to actually expect people to operate the way I think is ideal (it would in fact be delusional), but I've already put my opinion out there so I might as well explain it further. This sounds good to me.

Well, there's empirical evidence from the publishing industry indicating that adults are reading more young adult novels than ever before, and since people have finite time in which to read books, and an ever-increasing number of kinds of entertainment with which to fill their time, I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that reading more young adult fiction is broadly coming at the expense of reading more adult fiction. Similarly, there is empirical evidence to suggest people are drinking more soda than ever before, and empirical evidence showing the deleterious effect that is having on society's health at large. Edit: You are obviously correct on an individual basis. Nobody can know a stranger's motives, actions, or beliefs. But especially in modern society it is generally possible to be aware of broader trends.

In case anyone is genuinely in some kind of doubt that this is an almost entirely all-male forum, let me just say this: it is.

We'll see how it goes. Young adult fiction is on a spectacular commercial rise right now. The number of YA books published per year keeps increasing. I don't feel it's a genre that particularly needs extra advocacy right now. But nothing is set in stone.

This piece was one of only seven editorials published together on the topic of young adult fiction, and most of the pieces were positive. http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/03/28/the-power-of-young-adult-fiction The New York Times didn't produce that documentary, and in fact gave it a negative review. Disagree with the content of the article itself. A publication you do not respect can publish a piece with which you agree, and a publication you respect can publish a piece you find unreasonable.

I think it's considerably less common for genre fiction to fall into that category, but yes, mutually exclusive would be putting it strongly.

Hello!

If that's what I said, I didn't phrase it correctly. I don't mean Dan Brown is youth fiction. I mean it's not adult fiction. (If you want to apply a label to it, it would be genre fiction, or thrillers, or something.) When I refer to adult fiction, I don't mean simply stories about adults, I mean stories that actually demand an adult's level of reading comprehension and that are best experienced by people with an adult's breadth and depth of life experience. Similarly, a game being rated "M for mature" doesn't make it a game for adults. If anything, games rated M are generally pretty ridiculous.