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Balloon Juice

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Republicans in disarray!

If ‘weird’ was the finish line, they ran through the tape and kept running.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

I would try pessimism, but it probably wouldn’t work.

If senate republicans had any shame, they’d die of it.

I desperately hope that, yet again, i am wrong.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

So many bastards, so little time.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

With all due respect and assumptions of good faith, please fuck off into the sun.

America is going up in flames. The NYTimes fawns over MAGA celebrities. No longer a real newspaper.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

Museums are not America’s attic for its racist shit.

It’s pointless to bring up problems that can only be solved with a time machine.

Innocent people do not delay justice.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Too often we hand the biggest microphones to the cynics and the critics who delight in declaring failure.

The unpunished coup was a training exercise.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Rupert, come get your orange boy, you petrified old dinosaur turd.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

Giving up is unforgivable.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

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You are here: Home / Archives for Popular Culture / Gamer Dork

Gamer Dork

Now Buying Stories! (i.e. Pre-introducing: My Adventure Game)

by Major Major Major Major|  July 13, 20244:32 pm| 49 Comments

This post is in: Authors In Our Midst, Gamer Dork, Open Threads, Popular Culture

Besides gardening and other various home improvement stuff, I’ve used most of my free time these days making a video game with my friend. It’s been a massive undertaking. I’d heard that game development is fractally difficult–every sub-component just as tricky as its parent–and boy did that ever turn out to be true. We’re both pretty experienced programmers, so we were able to manage the scope creep, at least; no features we don’t absolutely need, no matter how cool they would be. Anyway: I’m happy to say we are finally at the point where we can start introducing people to it! Before I do, I’ll note that this is not really shameless self-promotion; we are looking to buy some fiction, but you need context first, and also the pictures are pretty and I want to talk about something I think is exciting. (The shameless self-promotion will come later when I do one (1) post about the Kickstarter.)

So without further ado, here’s our first piece of promo art.

Pre-introducing: My Adventure Game

Starspawn is set in the Cthulhu-mythos universe, drawing primarily from the works of H.P. Lovecraft himself. Rather than paraphrase myself, I’ll just quote from our website:

It’s shaping up to be a beautiful spring at Miskatonic University. Finishing your independent study is your only real concern. One night, you dream of a strange frozen wasteland full of monsters and ancient ruins. You wake up shaken, but not worried—until you realize that your classmates, too, seem a little less human than they did yesterday. To top it off, somebody’s ransacked the geology lab, ruining the project you need to ace to keep your scholarship, and stealing something irreplaceable–a deep core sample of very ancient Antarctic soil.

Were the things you saw in the dream real? Was the quest you received more than the hallucination of a stressed sophomore? And what are you supposed to do with the knowledge that your best friend is some sort of fish-monster?

Explore worlds magical and mundane while evading monsters, solving puzzles, and maybe finding love. Starspawn: A Miskatonic Mystery offers a game mode for everyone, with top-down exploration, arcade minigames, 90s-style point-and-click puzzles, dating sim elements, and visual novel storytelling!

This is a story-driven game with lots of point-and-click first-person puzzles, as well as areas to explore in a top-down 16-bit mode. There are also dating sim elements, where you have to manage your free time to develop your relationships (platonic or otherwise) with various characters, each of whom has a side narrative that changes based on the choices you make. We’re aiming for about ten hours of play time. I’m super excited to share more as we work our way towards the demo. It’s been incredibly challenging and rewarding and I have so many thoughts about the development process. And the artists we’re working with are amazing, too. We’re lucky to have assembled a great team.

Later this year, we’ll be doing a Kickstarter to make sure we can afford all the art we need to finish strong, but for now, I’m trying out something a little fun: we would like to do a short story anthology set in the game universe as a Kickstarter reward! Part of the backstory is a cool (imo) Cold War thing, and we thought it would be fun to let people play in that sandbox if they wanted to. I know we have some writers here, and people who know writers, so I figured I would share it with you all. Here are the submission details. They do contain some (marked) spoilers for the setting, obviously, so beware, if you care. We can only afford hobbyist-tier rates, unfortunately, but it is what it is.

Bonus Samwise and Momo, doing their best impression of a synthpop (or folk) duo liner notes pic:

Aaaand, open thread, naturally!

Now Buying Stories! (i.e. Pre-introducing: My Adventure Game)Post + Comments (49)

Monday Morning Open Thread: Buckle Up, Y’All!

by Anne Laurie|  December 18, 20238:39 am| 123 Comments

This post is in: Gamer Dork, Open Threads, Popular Culture, President Biden, social media

Santa Claus and his rocket sleigh.

Robert Maddox builds engines with an astonishing 1000 pounds of thrust, making them the largest (and most insane) pulsejet engines in the world.

No reindeer required for this jet-powered beauty.pic.twitter.com/lDECKSTXUj

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) December 11, 2023

In, hopefully, before the rumors get out of hand — report from last night:

Wow. Just saw this on the late local news here in the tristate. An SUV in Biden's motorcade was hit as he was leaving his campaign HQs in DE. Biden freezes at the sound. Secret Service, guns out, surround the car, but it takes a long time. Not good.pic.twitter.com/v6gpddw49e

— Victoria Brownworth (@VABVOX) December 18, 2023


Per CNN, “Biden safe after car crashes into motorcade vehicle at campaign headquarters”:

A car unintentionally struck an SUV in President Joe Biden’s motorcade Sunday night, causing damage to both vehicles and appearing to startle the president as he left his campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware.

The US Secret Service confirmed that a vehicle in the motorcade was hit by another car as Biden got into his car. There was “no protective interest associated with this event,” Secret Service spokesperson Steve Kopek told CNN in a statement, meaning that the crash was not intentional. It had been raining heavily in Wilmington…

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The crash caused a loud bang on the street, and Biden looked over to see the commotion. US Secret Service surrounded the silver sedan that caused the crash, telling the male driver to put his hands up, according to pool reporters traveling with Biden.

The impacted SUV wasn’t the president’s. Secret Service personnel escorted the president to his vehicle, where first lady Jill Biden was already inside.

The Bidens had been visiting the president’s 2024 campaign headquarters, greeting staffers at a holiday happy hour. It marked the first time the president has visited since staffers began working out of the Wilmington office over the summer.

The MAGAts, of course, are already sharing ‘false flag’ phantasies.
 

NEW: Two weeks ago, the White House threw the first-ever holiday reception for digital creators.

The combined social media audience of those in attendance approached 100 million followers. ??https://t.co/nfPnajJgDF

— Kyle Tharp (@kylewilsontharp) December 15, 2023

interesting move from the WH team which has long focused on leveraging influencer accounts’ reach going back to the campaign
(Some of this strategy came about because Biden doesn’t always “trend” or “go viral”). https://t.co/uIfoQ3hGkK

— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) December 15, 2023

That is actually a great question they answered in the interview – for many of these creators, most of whom are non-political, there is very little audience overlap. Whoever follows someone from Dance Moms on TikTok may not follow someone from the Lincoln Project on Twitter!

— Kyle Tharp (@kylewilsontharp) December 15, 2023


 
Props to the gamer dorks:

#Today in 1979, the LEGO character—known simply as a “toy figure”—was patented.

Complete with movable arms and legs, it suddenly introduced an entirely new dimension to the franchise.

Faceless and following a basic human form at first, the toy figures soon acquired identities… pic.twitter.com/yZBxSqUwrD

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) December 18, 2023

#Today in 1987, the first Final Fantasy adventure game in a long series was released.

The franchise has since branched into other video game genres, as well as branching into other media, including films, anime, manga, and novels.pic.twitter.com/q23ANVH6Yg

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) December 18, 2023

Monday Morning Open Thread: Buckle Up, Y’All!Post + Comments (123)

Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Good People, Not-So-Good People

by Anne Laurie|  December 12, 20236:28 am| 185 Comments

This post is in: Gamer Dork, Healthcare, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat, Religion, Republican Venality

Tuesday Morning Open Thread 10

(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)

 
After all, the original St. Nick rescued three desperate unmarried women by gifting them dowries. And the holiday celebrates a child born to a woman pregnant by someone other than her husband…
 
Won’t be here for holiday giving, but if you want the gamer in your life to feel recognized (or just old):

Agreed, although stamps are now almost less mainstream than D&D was 50 years ago ??

— Christian Schaller (@cfkschaller) December 4, 2023

Jewish Americans embody what the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said:

“A people whose capacity for joy cannot be destroyed is itself indestructible.”

Rallying with pride, unity, and even joy in the face of pain – just like the Hanukkah candles that defiantly burned miraculously. pic.twitter.com/34ppL7o4M7

— President Biden (@POTUS) December 12, 2023

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Elsewhere…
Tuesday Morning Open Thread 11

(Joel Pett via GoComics.com)

A comment beneath contempt. https://t.co/otmGRKLudW

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) December 12, 2023

https://t.co/0vDVsAzrsI

I mean who would’ve thought any different

— Johnny (@THELove_Muscle) December 12, 2023

New: JD Vance says Ukraine should cede land and cut a deal with Putin to end the war

“No one can explain to me how this ends without some territorial concessions relative to ‘91 boundaries.”

He’s not worried Putin keeps going.

w/ ?@megan_lebowitz? https://t.co/QjxcHSpznS

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) December 12, 2023

@JDVance1 pic.twitter.com/ajuZufjlmu

— ????MYSTIC??????I AM JACK'S INDICTMENTS ?? (@MDomino07) December 12, 2023

I really believe the R’s understand how important Putin can be in their campaigns with the hack and leak, the smears, the bot and troll farms, the dark oligarch money to super pacs, and they actively do things like this to attract Putins support.

— David Doak (@SouthPoint1000) December 12, 2023

Tuesday Morning Open Thread: Good People, Not-So-Good PeoplePost + Comments (185)

It Has Arrived

by John Cole|  August 3, 20239:54 am| 125 Comments

This post is in: Gamer Dork, Popular Culture

It Has Arrived

It Has ArrivedPost + Comments (125)

Rest In Peace, Klaus Teuber, the Original Settler of Catan

by Anne Laurie|  April 8, 20232:39 pm| 25 Comments

This post is in: Absent Friends, Gamer Dork

It is with profound sadness that we at CATAN Studio acknowledge the passing of Klaus Teuber, legendary game designer and creator of the beloved board game CATAN. Our hearts go out to Klaus' family during this incredibly difficult time. pic.twitter.com/gPPIVtleHJ

— CATAN – Official (@settlersofcatan) April 4, 2023

Dan Zak, at the Washington Post — “In a world of Monopoly and Risk, the maker of Catan settled for more” (unpaywalled gift link):

At some point early in the pandemic, I began to dream in hexagons. The hexagons were talismans of order and plenty. One depicted golden sheaves of wheat, another quarried gray ore, another the tufted wool of sheep. The outside world was chaos, collapse and deprivation, but the hexagonal pieces of a board game called Catan imposed a geometric peace on a doomy evening, if only for an hour at a time, with a glass of cab sauv and three covid-bubbled friends.

“I developed games to escape,” Catan’s creator, Klaus Teuber, told the New Yorker in 2014. “This was my own world I created.”…

I grew up in the 1990s, in a house without Nintendo, playing antique products of the Great Depression and the Cold War: Monopoly and Risk, with their 20th-century mandates of greed and confrontation. The exorbitance of Park Place, the alien sound of Kamchatka and Irkutsk — these were backward-feeling games that urged ravenous competition. The board game of my eventual adulthood, my pandemic, was being born around that time, but it would not become globally popular for several years.

In the ’90s, as I was fiendishly fortifying the Americas on a 1959 board of Risk, Teuber, a dental technician from a small village in central Germany, was descending into his basement to escape the doldrums of dentures and to craft a sort of utopia in the form of a board game. It would be a game of graceful simplicity, requiring both competition and cooperation, that would invalidate the zero-sum, total-war ethos of prior parlor pursuits. His invention was born of a childhood rapt by the beauty of an atlas.

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“I loved the old, musty-smelling, ragged maps that were rolled out as lessons,” Teuber wrote in his 2021 memoir. “I loved travelling in them in my imagination. Over mountain ranges in brown hues, the green valleys, blue rivers and lakes.” In elementary school, he began making maps of his own. He was fascinated by the Vikings, pictured their arrival in Iceland, envisioned the materials they would’ve needed to build a settlement. Teuber loved geography, then history, then chemistry. You need the essence of all three things, he would say later, to create a good board game.

In his basement he made hexagons of wool, ore, wood, brick and wheat that would make up an otherwise characterless, mystical island (“Catan” had no special meaning, he said). Players would stake out initial territory and use those natural resources to build roads, then settlements, then cities. Catan’s genius is its intrinsic leveling dynamics. On a board of finite resources, it was impossible to succeed without working with your opponents; academics made it a metaphor for nuclear proliferation and then climate change. Dice added luck and chance to a game of strategy and bartering, which kept all players involved even when it wasn’t their turn to roll…

The Settlers of Catan, as it was first called, debuted in Germany in 1995 and the United States in 1996. In Europe it won prizes and filled convention halls. Its success allowed Teuber to quit the dental field in 1998, though he never lost the qualities of a man whose initial tradecraft was small, precise implements for delicate parts of the body. Among hobbyists and gamers he was revered like a rock star, but he looked and acted and sounded like a man who tinkered with stuff in his basement. He didn’t have the swagger (or the command of English) to fully engage with American praise or interrogation. He was, at heart, a hobbyist.

Teuber credited a 2009 story in Wired magazine — headlined “Monopoly Killer: Perfect German Board Game Redefines Genre” — for helping to mainstream Catan in the United States. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly a fan. At one point the Green Bay Packers had a Catan obsession. During the first five months of 2020, as covid colonized Earth, sales of Catan climbed 144 percent, according to NPR.

I was one of the buyers. This sounds insane, but it was true in the darker months of 2020 and 2021: A game of Catan was a Brigadoon of cheer in an America gone rotten. Even now, a game of Catan at the end of a workweek — with all its slights, disappointments, imperfections and imbalances — settles a bit of the chaos. Or at least brings a gathering of friends together for more than repetitive gossip. It doesn’t require a cosplay fetish or a familiarity with specific lore. It takes skill, but not mastery; rookie players can win. It urges exuberant competition, not destruction. Players are in a race to accumulate points, and territorial disputes occur, but they are not truly at war…

Neil Genzlinger, for the NYTimes (also a gift link):

… “In the beginning, these games were just for me,” he told Forbes in 2016. “I always have stories in my head — I would read a book, and if I liked it, I wanted to experience it as a game.”

That was the origin of his first big success, a game called Barbarossa, which grew out of his admiration for the “Riddle-Master” trilogy, fantasy books written in the 1970s by Patricia A. McKillip.

“I was sorry to see it come to an end,” he told The New Yorker in 2014, “so I tried to experience this novel in a game.”

In 1988 that game won the Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) award in Germany, considered the most prestigious award in the board game world, Germany being particularly enthusiastic about board games. He won that award twice more, in 1990 (for Hoity Toity) and in 1991 (for Wacky Wacky West), before scoring his biggest success with what was known in German as Die Siedler von Catan…

Mr. Teuber told Wired in 2009 that creating Catan felt different than his other efforts.

“I felt like I was discovering something rather than inventing it,” he said.

The initial run of 5,000 sold out so quickly, according to Wired, that Mr. Teuber didn’t even have a first-edition version. Within a few years he was able to give up that stressful day job and devote himself to games full time.

Catan has been widely hailed as being challenging yet intuitive — children play it — and has been credited with jump-starting a new era of board games, which moved beyond the staid confines of Scrabble and Monopoly. Instead of sitting idly while other players take their turns, as in Monopoly, Catan invites constant wheeling and dealing.

“The secret of Catan,” Mr. Teuber told Wired, “is that you have to bargain and sometimes whine.”

For Mr. Freeman, that is what elevates it above older games.

“I truly believe Klaus created the greatest board game of all time,” he said. “Both complicated and approachable, it combines skill, luck, strategy and my favorite aspect: the power of persuasion. You can’t talk your way into winning a game of chess, but you certainly can in Catan.”…

Last year, in an interview with Nikkei Asia, Mr. Teuber was asked why he thought Catan was so popular.

“There may have been a good balance between strategy and luck,” he said. “For example, roulette is only about luck, and chess is all about strategies. However, if you win in Catan, you think, ‘My strategy was good,’ and when you lose, you might think, ‘I was just out of luck.’ This is the same as life.”

Ian Bogost, at the Atlantic, grudgingly admits that it wasn’t bad when “We Settled for Catan”:

Board games are hostage situations. “C’mon, it’s fun!” your brother or so-called friend says, and then for the next two or eight hours you’re stuck. Rules are read, cardboard chits are distributed, and rounds of wit or chance (or both) transpire. But it is fun, because the joy of gaming first involves accepting arbitrary rules just to feel the sensation of having embraced them.

And yet, board games are terrible. Candy Land is stupid, Scrabble takes too long, Risk is how you learn your dad is an asshole, and Monopoly—let us not speak of Monopoly. Better, nerdier options have long existed (Diplomacy, Vector, Gettysburg—not to mention chess, go, backgammon), but the same few products dominated American rugs and tabletops for much of the 20th century, and thus defined board-gaming as a mainstream activity…

Why did Catan become so popular? Not because the game is good. Look, Catan is fine, but both connoisseurs and amateurs tend to tolerate it more than love it. That’s the game’s secret: Teuber fell upon a design that every kind of player—geeks, kids, your mother—could stomach playing.

Reading about how a game plays is almost as awful as listening to someone explain how to play it, but here we go: Catan’s board is made up of hex tiles representing different land types (forest, field, pasture, etc.). Each bears a number, and the tiles are laid out differently for each game. On every turn, a player rolls two six-sided dice, and the corresponding land tile gives resources to the players with settlements surrounding it. (Unless a robber token has been placed there; rolling a seven allows the player to move the robber.) The player can then trade resources and build roads, settlements, or cities to expand.

That wasn’t too bad, actually! And it’s one reason Catan took off: It is not horrifyingly oppressive to teach or learn. A round can be played in an hour or two, which helps Catan avoid the common board-game fate of interruption and abandonment. If board games are prisons, then the best ones offer mild sentences.

Board-game aficionados—the kind who would insist I call their passion “tabletop gaming”—tend to find Catan insufficiently strategic. The use of dice gives luck a strong role in victory, and purists prefer to win by reason. But luck also prevents an experienced player from dominating novices, and the dice provide a familiar board-game ritual of rolling to start your turn. Their six-sidedness also distanced Catan from subcultural artifacts, such as Dungeons & Dragons: These are normal dice, the sort used for respectable activities such as Yahtzee and craps.

Catan is a social game, too. Trading resources with other players can mean the difference between winning and losing. It gives players something to do when they’re waiting for their turn, and encourages them to pay attention to what’s happening rather than zone out because, ugh, board game. But unlike, say, Cards Against Humanity or Pictionary, the game’s social dimension is constrained: You’re not expected to be creative or performative, merely to persuade others to swap bricks or wool. That makes Catan less embarrassing for misanthropes like me, and also saves it from the isolation of a game like Scrabble, which is played mostly in your head…

This is Klaus Teuber’s great accomplishment, and I mean that earnestly. One needs a deep supply of both skill and luck to make a game that lots of people love. But creating a game that will be universally indulged is much harder still. Producing something that brings so much modest pleasure is a worthy goal. Too many people want to change the world; too few yearn to roam its pastures.

Rest In Peace, Klaus Teuber, the Original Settler of CatanPost + Comments (25)

Friday Night Cat Update

by Major Major Major Major|  April 1, 20231:45 am| 30 Comments

This post is in: Cat Blogging, Gamer Dork, Open Threads, Pet Blogging

My parents are cleaning out a storage unit so we got to take some furniture from it. We got a nice leather armchair and a matching ottoman, and we’re going to get a couch later too. The armchair is great. I’m working on a reading/writing nook in the office, and it’s perfect for it.

No sooner had I gotten it set up, when…

Friday Night Cat Update 1
Friday Night Cat Update

I’m ambivalent about the protector I put on… it’s ugly, but I can shore up the fit, which should help. More importantly it will keep the chair from getting ruined in a month. But now I never get to see most of the leather… choices, choices.

Open thread! I’m playing Return to Monkey Island, which is really fun and also good homework for the adventure game I’m working on. What are you all up to?

Friday Night Cat UpdatePost + Comments (30)

What The Kids Are Reading

by Major Major Major Major|  January 14, 20235:00 pm| 105 Comments

This post is in: Books, Gamer Dork, Open Threads, Popular Culture, Recommended Reading

‘Tis the season for retrospectives. Since I don’t read or watch that much stuff the year it comes out, my annual lists are always about what I consumed during the previous year, regardless of when it was made. Last year I wrote about John le Carré’s A Perfect Spy. This year I have a little more to say. I’ll write my Best Books post later (Le Guin, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and Gene Wolfe, this time around); right now I want to talk about the other books.

In 2022, I tried to catch up on some popular contemporary fantasy, and I was sorely disappointed. I hope I simply ran into Sturgeon’s Law—ninety percent of everything is crap–but I suspect I was also dipping into some pretty craptastic wells. Recent trends are… not promising. I took a number of recommendations from the r/fantasy subreddit. It’s Reddit, so a lot of the users either are or act like fourteen-year-olds, but I wanted to see what the youths were up to. It turns out they’re up to two things: loving Brandon Sanderson, and reading self-published anime clones.

Sanderson is fine. I like the writing podcast he spent many years contributing to. His books are, whatever, not to my taste, but I get it. Characters a bit shallow, plots a bit paint-by-numbers, narration a bit overlong on exposition, everything rather unsexy (befitting his devout Mormonism), but he builds great worlds, and is loved in particular for his intricate magic systems. He is one of the best-selling fantasy authors of the modern era. He’s also insanely prolific–during the pandemic he woke up one morning and found he’d accidentally written four extra novels. Good for him! But his success has led publishers to release a lot of high-concept mimicry–it’s like Brandon Sanderson but xyz–which, unsurprisingly, is not to my taste.

I was especially disappointed with Foundryside by Robert Jackson Bennett. I’d seen its (excellent) cover on shelves for a few years and finally decided to read it. I was sort of excited. I adore Bennett’s City of Stairs, which I’d recommend if you’re in the mood for a good diplomatic spy thriller. But–nope. This book was not for me. The huge Brandon Sanderson blurb on the jacket should have been hint enough. Intricate magic system? Check. Decent action? Check. Bloodless romance… check… twisty-yet-predictable plot… you guessed it. Check.

On to the next trend: self-published anime clones. Let me begin by saying that I am not trying to crap on self-published authors, who have written some excellent books and who we have a number of among our readership. No, this is about a narrow slice of contemporary fantasy, largely written by people who got their start with fanfiction. And it’s an interesting phenomenon.

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There are two major subgenres here, isekai and LitRPG, which are not entirely new ideas, though in this context they share an important attribute: they are not, at a fundamental level, inspired by books, but rather by anime and video games. Add in the tendency for these authors to not use developmental editors, and you get some unusual (or all-too-typical) stories. One fun thing about them is the palpable, insane enthusiasm level of the authors–they love writing these things, and it shows. That’s great! A lot of trad-pub authors don’t manage this. But they can also get swept away by their own, ah, brilliance. Less great. Ultimately, though, what I take issue with is the lack of… I hesitate to say literary merit, barf… let’s just talk about the specific subgenres.

Isekai. Portal fantasy. Not a new idea. A person is displaced from their reality–usually our own–and ends up in a fantasy or science-fiction land. But these particular books are inspired by anime, usually episodic anime, and often originally written as web serials. This works well enough with an episodic structure, if you’re into that, but collected into a ‘novel’, it… does not. Especially when authors don’t try to fix the pacing and arc issues when it’s time to bundle it up for Kindle Direct. The novel is a form, with conventions and expectations, and these often just don’t engage with that.

Don’t get me wrong, I like a good serial. I’ve been reading Pale this year, a dark urban fantasy story inspired by “magical girl” shōjo anime (e.g. Sailor Moon; Puella Magi Madoka Magica). I’ll pick it up before bed sometimes. But it’s long, and it’s a serial, and it can be a grind, just a constant, episodic ratchet. I wish it felt like a series of novels, but it doesn’t. It feels like a series of cliffhangers. Still, I want to see how it ends.

LitRPG shares many of these flaws. These are stories like Ready Player One and Sword Art Online–a character is in a video game, engages with video game dynamics, gains power in video game ways, does video game stuff. Needless to say there is a lot of Japanese material inspiring these works. Video games usually take the form of episodic loops, so it’s no surprise to find that structure here. There’s a power progression, at least, which shares a lot with traditional hero’s journey stories, but these are mostly still serials with a fanfiction vibe. They also often feel like adolescent male power fantasies, which is hardly new in fantasy, but at a certain point, to quote Stephen King, everything starts to taste like beans.

So yeah. That’s what the kids are up to, I guess. I think I’ll go back to being an old fart who reads classics that have withstood the test of time, and leave the anime and video game stories for when I watch anime and play video games.

They say to end blog posts with a prompt, so: what disappointed you last year? Haha.

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