Morrowind's Creation

Great read over at Polygon, "Morrowind: An oral history" by Alex Kane (and some great accompanying artwork by Ben Bauchau).

"I like to tell people that if you ever fell through the world in Morrowind, or got stuck on a piece of geometry, that was my fault." -Erik Parker
YES I HAVE DONE THAT - me. (Falling through the world is kind of cool, but you don't want it to happen too often.)

There are a lot of good quotes in there, a nice long piece that is probably best read over a few sessions.

"I’ve worked on games that I will never see again, and I spent years of my life on them. They will never be seen by another human ever again. And that sucks. They just go away, or you can’t play them because you don’t have the console anymore." -Mark Nelson

I haven't worked on any games, but this resonated with me (not because of academic papers) but because this is somewhat of a problem when it comes to video game canon, which is a longer story.

FDG 2019 SLO

FDG was a great conference! Small (I think 175 people?), great people and many great and diverse papers (from digital humanities topics to code and algorithmic efficiency).

One of the keynote speakers was Tarn Adams, of Dwarf Fortress fame, a game I have described as "I can never play it again because it would ruin my life", meaning, it's so great I would just get sucked into all of its amazingness and details. Actually, maybe I could just oh okay there you see? But maybe! Just be good about limits (it's difficult to limit with DF). But anyways, Adams gave a great and interesting and insightful talk about procedurally generated content and storytelling within the setting of DF.

Is that Tarn Adams back there in the blue shirt? It is! Selfie time!

One of the attendees also made this cool and beautiful card game with everyone's papers as a part of the game! I managed to find one of mine and may have kept it to put on my refrigerator.

Pedantic and Accurate Tyepsetting

For years I have wondered how to italicize and capitalize newspaper titles such as, and I will do it correctly here, the New York Times. I always wondered, should the initial "the" be capitalized, because it seems like part of the title? (No.) How much should be italicized, since isn't all of it the title, or not? (Not the location.)

I figured the exceedingly pedantic (but in the good way) New Yorker would, one day, give me guidance on that. They have! I thank them.