Search results

My professional inclination towards education is rearing up. If you want to discuss any of it, feel free to PM me, but I'm not going to respond further here since the mods did, in fact ask us to drop it. It's at best tangential to the discussion, even when I'm careful to keep it to facts.

They don't surprise me at all. :) I've been all up in (or quietly lurking around) some of the conversations he's referencing. The design perspectives or the business perspective behind the changes are interesting, but secondary to something simpler: a fun game is a fun game and the rules...

More facts to bring to the *cough* table: The iTable has a version that is priced at $2400, bit it doesn't appear to be as sturdy. I don't think $1500 is happening yet, but consumer versions of this tech (albeit without a real custom interface, they're just running XP) are already available...

Perhaps because the experience of many, like myself, is that it is not true. Or, at least, it is not true often enough to be sustainable. EDIT: Sustainable for a mass market game, at any rate, which D&D strives to be.

Depends. I wonder how many laughs I can get by setting things up so that when I say, "Tea. Earl Grey. Hot." something relevant happens.

This I agree with. A lot of the rest of your post is a bit out of date. Paper is an ecological blight upon developing nations rivaled only by textiles, and it isn't doing us any favors, either. Chesapeake Bay isn't exactly enjoying the effect of the toxic waste generated by paper milling and...

It's probably a bit of both. The more recent rule systems (I think) require less DM adjudication, which will make things more similar, and we have the internet to guide people (especially new DMs) somewhat. In my case, I think the internet made a HUGE difference. When I got into a 3e game...

Ah. Now we're getting somewhere. :) It's not going to replace computers. It will supplement them and expand them into the living room for a larger segment of the population. It's going to be a new (occasionally better) way to do some computer applications. It will also be a new way to do...

Yes, because of the demographics mentioned above. Senior citizens have Wii bowling leagues. They buy maybe 2-3 games, total, but they play the heck out of them. Typical console gamers buy a game, play it for 3 months, and then never play it again, with rare exceptions.... many of which are...

Have you used multi-touch? It's amazingly intuitive. My grandmother doesn't even own a computer but can use multi-touch almost as well as my niece. The learning curve is substantially easier than using a mouse, from what I've seen. Heck, I've seen TV remotes that were less intuitive.

Nonsense. The war for game developers was fought with contracts and high def, not gameplay. Many videogame developers refuse to program for it because the system is not HD and their core demographic is primarily on Xbox and PS3... because of HD. The controller isn't the problem, the...

At its current price level, its niche is early adopters. It is no more or less ridiculous than Plasma TVs were when they were new. Those were in living rooms, not board rooms. EDIT: Also, it is NOT 10 years out. There are development kits out for people to make software already. Therefore...

Indeed. Even people who don't like board games often like throwing dice. And some optional flashiness is needed to reinforce how those rolls impact the game. Roll a real die across the table, with the sides ID'd the same way the tokens and miniatures are. Table reads die and immediately...

Isn't that enough? (Reference: Plasma TV) But actually, it can do all that stuff while acting as a point of social gathering. A single computer is bad at that, which is why people gather through MMOs and other networks. A dining room table is already a gathering place. Now that dining room...

Thank you for the nightmare scenario :uhoh: This is where I begin work on a portable clean room bubble so my wife doesn't pick up H1NWTFBBQ!!1! from one of her students next year.

As far as I can tell, around here it's causing fewer deaths than seasonal flu does most years. I don't follow that literature anymore, though, so I can't say with any certainty. But it remains that this is NOT a huge risk to individuals. It is a "public health risk" only insofar as it eats up...

My experience is that indie stuff is more likely to be fairly egalitarian nowadays, but the mass market stuff is, at best, filled with extremely mixed messages. I think old Rock Hudson romantic comedies from the 50s and 60s are more progressive in their treatment of relationships than most...

I really just see this in a very different way. Cumbersome and needless rules for something as intuitive and fundamental to the human experience as social interaction should usually just get the heck out of my way. And then when you get into something as unintuitive as combat, rules should be...

The ubiquity of the internet and open source formats and communities is solving this problem, though. pdf, mp3, etc. Fast format shifts are typical of a new tech. Digital storage is becoming a mature tech. Industry is fighting us on it, as industry will, but they are moving to portable...

I'm going to quibble slightly. The 4e module design definitely suggests this. I am not convinced the design parameters of the game itself (the game engine, as it were) do this. In fact, with skill challenges and what not, there's more "design" and structure to non-combat events than there was...