Only a Game

All Good Things…

Have thoroughly enjoyed my Autumnal Social Media Break – so much so, in fact, that I don’t particularly want to come out of hiding (nothing personal, entirety of the online world!). However, it has to happen, and I’ll be back to blogging next week with the first of a small set of Winter blog-letters.

If you left me a comment, I will get back to it shortly; if you left me spam, I’ll be deleting it very soon… I might rejoin Twitter tomorrow morning (1st December) or I might put it off until next week. But ‘I’m on my way’, at the very least!

A Virtuous Interlude

It is time once again for my autumnal social media break, a chance for me to exercise my cyber-restraint, pay less attention to my pocket robot’s distractions, and peer more deeply into the world around me. When I come back in early December, I have a small handful of blog-letters to share before the Winter Festival hits – mostly on or around game topics, and following on from discussions that have already happened here or at events I went to this year. I have room for one more that I haven’t started yet, so if you want to write a blog-letter to me while I’m away it would be more than welcome.

Then, as the Gregorian New Year comes around again, it will only be two months to the release of The Virtuous Cyborg and I will be gearing up for the book’s launch events. I will be touring, so if you would like me to come for a guest lecture or other speaking gig please get in touch through the contact link at ihobo.com, or directly if you already have my email address. So far, I am focussing on the UK but a US trip is always on the table and Europe is only a short trip away even if the current political climate makes it feel more distant.

To everyone who has continued to support the discussions here at Only a Game, my unlimited love and gratitude. Enjoy the silence, and we shall speak again soon.

The Game resumes in December.

Ecologies of Play

Over on ihobo today, an extended comment replying to some very interesting challenges raised by Bart Stewart in connection with Are Videogames Made of Rules? Here’s an extract:

For a tabletop game, the rulebook this set of practices eventually becomes can be seen as a static snapshot of the player practices of the design team in respect of the game, discussing how their game is played. That each group of players will inevitably vary those player practices is one of the reasons I am suggesting we treat player practices as constitutive of games rather than rules, because the rules as written remain the same but the games being played with those rules can be quite diverse – even if all you take into account is the differences in interpretation and not greater variations like house rules. I don’t think any two groups of players engaging with a Fantasy Flight game are playing the same way, as the rules often leave open a certain number of ambiguous points that the players have to negotiate and settle on their own.

You can read the entirety of Ecologies of Play over at ihobo.com, although if you haven’t already read Are Videogames Made of Rules? you probably ought to begin with that.

Prime Time: A Dialogue

Prime Time was a five part dialogue between veteran Nietzsche scholar Babette Babich and ‘outsider philosopher’ Chris Bateman, looking at the relationship between music and priming, Nietzsche’s books, and life within social media.

The dialogue originally ran from October 3rd to October 31st 2017. Each of the parts ends with a link to the next one, so to read the entire serial, simply click on the first link below, and then follow the “next” links to read on.

The five parts are as follows:

1. Nietzsche in Hypertext
2. An Analytic Lamp-post
3. Prime Time Culture
4. The Hallelujah Effect
5. Your Brain on Social Media

If you enjoyed this dialogue, please leave a comment!