As you might have guessed from some of my earlier posts, I’m fascinated by storytelling in video games, but I also feel like there are some severe impediments to narrative engagement in the way games are currently designed. I find it useful to criticize what games might be doing that actively screws up narrative engagement, like letting your protagonist die repeatedly, but in a way, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. An even greater issue, I’d argue, is in the range of input and interaction techniques that games offer, effectively pre-determining what kinds of stories get told.

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All right, here are all the links that didn’t make it to one of the “themed” posts I did recently. Please pardon me if you suggested one of these links a long, long time ago and I forgot to give you credit—they’ve been sitting in my bookmarks folders for pretty much forever now.

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I recently had a nice conversation with Carolyn Johnson for a Boston Globe piece on ROFLCon and internet fame, “Web celebs consider their role: Internet ‘geeks’ gain niche in mainstream culture.” (Thanks again to Dan for sending along the link. As before, he remains my source for articles that quote me.)

The focus in this piece is on how the internet has enabled culture to develop in niches, where people can feel comfortable about reveling in the things they might have otherwise hidden. As one interviewee notes, “Until I launched my company in January, I always kept this part of my life—Internet, humor, in the closet. […] I had no real purpose except to meet kindred spirits.”

It’s more for non-geek audiences, so there won’t be many surprises here for most of you readers. I will say, though, that I found it more respectful than many other newspaper convention pieces (which have a nasty habit of sounding patronizing about the attendees).

Also consider checking out The Weekly Dig’s ROFLCon-themed issue, available for download online, complete with headlines written in LOLcat/AOL-speak. If nothing else, you may find it kind of funny to see articles that ostensibly have nothing to do with geek culture get so thoroughly web-ified.

I wrote a post yesterday exploring how girls and women identify themselves or get identified as geeks. In the course of doing that, I thought it was important to point out some of the sexist and misogynistic behaviors that seem unfortunately somewhat common in some geeky circles. That post spawned some very interesting comments, but I was concerned that we were going down a different avenue of conversation, focused more on why male geeks mistreat female geeks than on how female geek identity is formed. I hope nobody minds too much that I figured that conversation deserves its own post.

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A question that comes up a lot in the course of my research and blogging, both implicitly and explicitly, is why geek culture is typically described and understood as a male phenomenon, and why female involvement needs some sort of special explanation. This has been on my mind a lot lately for a few reasons, not least of which being the articles that occasionally cross my screen.

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Today we have another link from Church which was destined for a link post, but kind of blossomed into its own entity. You see, Doree Shafrir writes an article for the New York Observer that introduces me to a phenomenon that’s news to me: The body-toning of the American nerd.

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This is a short list of links with some brief observations I felt like sharing. (Some of this information is likely going into a paper to be revised for journal submission shortly.)

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I’ve been working on a really long links post in short fits and spurts over the last few days, realizing part way through that some of these links are thematically similar enough that they might as well be their own posts. Yesterday we got geek typologies; today, links and comments on conventions; and later this week, some links on geek fashion and on being a geeky woman.

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You may have seen a certain graphic making the rounds on the geek blogs lately. It’s “Wired’s Geekster Handbook, a Field Guide to the Nerd Underground,” describing six different kinds of geeks based on their interests and some (affectionately mocked) stereotypes. The list includes fanboys, music geeks, gamers, gadget guys, hackers, and otaku, perhaps hitting the major media of geek culture in broad swaths (and throwing in one so hip and mainstream that I doubt it would’ve made this list ten to fifteen years ago).

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John Rose recently wrote an article for Gamasutra titled “Fewer Mechanics, Better Game,” a look at what makes games not just enjoyable, but objectively identified as good. I found the article thoughtful and interesting. I also (almost) completely disagree with it. It fits neatly into the recent posts I’ve been doing on game narratives, appeals, and play styles, so I thought I’d take a moment to analyze another person’s perspective and explain how our opinions differ.

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