The writer of the ending to Minecraft (the End Poem) never actually signed his rights away to the work, and now he’s surrendering it to the public domain. Here he tells the story, together with some commentary on how badly copyright law screws artists. It’s worth the read.
For the last few days I’ve been playing Idle Acorns . It’s an idle/incremental game for iOS with a bright, cartoony aesthetic. Probably the best thing about it is that there are no ads and no IAPs: just pay your A$2.99 upfront and you’re good to go! 😅
It’s really good to have open while writing, because every time I hit a momentary block I can spam-press “Shake Tree” until I get an idea of what to go on with, instead of doing something like opening up Reddit and getting side-tracked reading posts. There’s something to be said for mindless ways to occupy yourself with like that!
Update: I realised the game’s also available for macOS , if you’d prefer to play it that way!
Article about a long-running (30 years!) project to keep an MUD game going based on Terry Pratchett’s Discworld universe. Particularly cool that Pratchett himself gave them his blessing, so long as they didn’t turn a profit 🙂
Liked this article about Cult of the Lamb (which I haven’t played myself, but I know people on the timeline really like it 😄).
I find it interesting that its standard difficulty level adapts to the skill level of the player, because that makes it much more accessible to more people. Sounds like the devs gave real thought to this, and that’s awesome imo.
Last week, I spent a few hours going down the rabbit-hole that is experimenting with interactive fiction. This is a rabbit-hole that I do go down every once in a while, because I catch myself longing for a game to play that has a specific set of features (turn-based/not action, “quality” stemming not from difficulty but from story or general fun vibe, builds up complexity over time …
A role-playing game (RPG) is a game where a player takes the role of a character within the game universe, and takes actions as that character in order to try to beat the game. I’m mostly familiar with single-player RPGs you can play on a computer (browser games or video games) but the genre itself existed before computer games did; at that time it took the form of tabletop RPGs (which still …
Turn-based RPGs are a sub-genre of RPG where gameplay is conducted in turns (player turns, certainly, and sometimes also enemy turns). I’m mostly familiar with the single-player kind you play on a computer (browser games or video games) but I believe the mechanic has its origins in (usually multiplayer) tabletop RPGs. The subgenre forms absolutely one of my favourite types of games to play, …
“Browser games” is a term for games on the Internet that can be played through an ordinary web browser. Their “heyday” was probably the 2000s, as in the 2010s mobile games came into existence and captured a lot of the market of “people who want something casual to play in short bursts in between other things”. That said, there are still a lot of browser games …
Interactive fiction is a genre of games which is largely text- and story-based. There are two main subtypes of interactive fiction: parser games, where a player has to type instructions into the game (e.g. “examine bottle”, “go north”) and gamebooks (a.k.a. choice games, or choose-your-own-adventures), where a player chooses what to do out of a list of author-provided …
This was such a great article, and having a physical disability myself (limited mobility in my right arm) I found a lot in here to relate to.
There are sooooo many games that I’d love to play, but they require quick reflexes and a level of dexterity that I don’t think is possible one-handed. Pretty much any action game rules itself out for me, even though there are a ton I would have liked to play – action platformers like Hollow Knight, action roguelikes like Dead Cells, and innumerable action RPGs. I’ve also never really been able to play console games (except games with motion controls, which was mainly a thing in the Nintendo Wii era…) because controllers require two fully-functional hands. Actually, through this article I’ve now discovered that accessibility controllers exist, which expands my options a little.
I also liked the point, though, that the gatekeeping about “games shouldn’t offer ‘story modes’ that let you skip the hard stuff or make it easier because it’s contrary to the intent of the game” is a toxic attitude. It’s bad for disabled gamers but also bad for like, newbie or casual gamers who just wanna experience a game everyone else is talking about. In the past I’ve played some turn-based strategy games where even the easiest mode is impossibly difficult, and I just… don’t like it. I get that it’s a genre that mostly attracts people who do like it, but I don’t see how those people would lose anything from the existence of a beatable “easy mode” alongside harder modes. I don’t want to waste hundreds of hours on repetitive content I keep failing at when I could go play something that’s actually fun, lol. Give people the choice! 👏
Jessica Smith is a socialist and a feminist who loves animals, books, gaming, and cooking; she’s also interested in linguistics, history, technology and society.