This has broader implications about how incentives are structured — the presence of a reward for not doing something versus the desired outcome of taking the action. To my mind, incentives can only delay such a thing, never actually forestall it for certain.
Read MoreMore than anything else – as several reviews I’ve written over the years indicate – I’m interested in tabletop role playing games. These games are fascinating for several reasons, but the one I want to focus on is an intuition that I’ve been working with for a while: Tabletop role-playing games – which don’t, in any but the most loose sense work anything like other games – are toy models of political economy, and I suspect that they could be used as models for alternative political-economic systems.
Read MoreWhat I’m trying to make clear is that game design, on the level of mechanics assembled to make the game produce a narrative through player interaction, already cribs a lot of its procedures from politics, including political economy. A means that a powerful tool could be built from these pieces.
Read MoreI don’t intend this piece to be a pure review of what other people have said; I have written a number of things on a variety of subjects, and there are a few ideas I wish to bring in. Chief among them are the concepts of the “Paradigm-Syntax” dyad (which can be connected to the GNS or the MDA sections) and that of “Complex Pleasures” (which connects to the Eight Kinds of Fun.) I also have the compulsory commentary on Nostalgia and Genre that readers of this blog will know is coming.
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