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Minecraft? Microsoft? (The Builder Generation?)
As I write this it is still only rumor that Minecraft may be sold to Microsoft, so my rambling here might be completely irrelevant (but what is the Internet for anyways, if not to host my rambles?) Minecraft is a valuable product. I think in more ways than any other game, it has really infiltrated culture. Yes, games like Mario and Pokemon and the like are huge, but I don’t recall them having quite such a hold on kids (that said, I was not a parent during the rise of those franchises, so I may be mistaken). My sons and their friends play Minecraft-themed games all the time. By this,…
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Slender Man
The other day my eldest came home and went on and on about a new game of tag they were playing at school. They called it “Slender Man Tag” and as he detailed all the weird rules they had created for it, I have to admit to no small amount of confusion. I had no idea what a Slender Man was or why kids would play a tag variant based on it. So, after assuring him that the game sounded absolutely fun, I scurried to the Internet. ( Wikipedia is my friend.) I learned that Slender Man is an Internet meme about a tall, spooky looking dude who has cropped…
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Minecraft – Everything a RPG Should Not Be
While RPGs seldom are on the cutting edge of visual quality (unlike shooters) there’s always been a continual player expectation for improved graphics. Over the past decade or so there’s been a push towards realism and a higher visual fidelity — resulting in an escalation of costs to develop large-scale RPG projects. And then a game like Minecraft comes along. Minecraft has dreadful graphics. I know several people who won’t play the game because of the low fidelity ‘art’. Yet clearly, given its impressive sales, there are many more who do not care what the game looks like (or possibly they even play it *because* of the way it looks).…
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Children of Minecraft
So my kids love Minecraft. However, when they started playing with friends, online, I noticed that the servers they played on were filled with a fair bit of inappropriate conversation. Given that I didn’t want to be looking over their shoulder the entire time they played I eventually created my own server. I still monitor it a bit — to ensure they are not being obnoxious to one another — but I was curious about how other parents handle stuff like this. I come from the games industry and was often frustrated by the negative commentary from media — and some people, including those I knew — that disparaged video…
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March Madness
A few days late posting this but we were busy over the holidays. Anyways, March turned out to be an interesting month, in terms of writing. I ended up selling three stories. I’ve previously mentioned “Great White” being included in Crossed Genre’s anthology “Oomph: A little super goes a long way” and Perihelion accepting “Magic Circles”. In addition I’ve sold a fantasy story (that I had previously sold to a market that ended up folding before the story was published). I’ll give a few more details once contracts are signed but this is a market I’ve sold to previously. And in unrelated news, I finally found out what happened to…
