I don’t have a games backlog

In video games, there is the concept of a “backlog”—a list of games that you want to play, but haven’t gotten around to playing. This is commonly discussed as a source of anxiety, as people accumulate hundreds of games in a list that they have no hope of ever completing. There are lots of videos and articles giving tips on how to clear your backlog, or else chronicling a journey to clear a backlog.

Talk of backlogs is so ubiquitous that people seem to think every gamer has one. This isn’t true. There are myriad ways to approach the consumption of entertainment media, and the backlog is just one. I’d wager that many people would even consider the backlog to be counterintuitive. Would you have a backlog for books, movies, or TV shows? You could, but I think most people just check what movies are available in the moment, and then pick one out.

I recently watched a Transparency video in opposition to the idea of a backlog, from the perspective of someone who doesn’t have one. Now, I also don’t have a backlog, but it struck me that Alicia’s approach is still different from mine. I think Alicia assumes that any list is a backlog, but I actually have a list that I don’t consider to be a backlog.

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Crazy about cat men

In one of those meatspace conversations, we were talking about crazy cat ladies, each of us trying to do cursory research on our phones. Why are crazy cat ladies a thing in the public imagination, despite none of us knowing anyone like that? Does the crazy cat lady archetype appear in other cultures? Why doesn’t anyone ever talk about the possibility of a distaff spear counterpart, the crazy cat man?

You can find plenty of popular and scholarly articles talking about the crazy cat lady archetype and its long history of association with witch trials, spinsterhood, women’s suffrage, and animal hoarding. On the other hand, to speak of crazy cat men is to speculate on an archetype that doesn’t truly exist.

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Link roundup: April 2024

Lots of articles to share this month.

Health in the Ace Community (2021 Survey) | Ace Community Survey – Full disclosure: I’m sharing this because I’m a director of the survey.  However, I do not personally perform analysis or write the articles anymore.  This month, the Ace Community Survey published an article discussing health statistics (drug usage, disabilities, suicide, and more) in the ace community.

The Great Sex Rescue: Marital Rape | Tell me why the world is weird (cw for anecdotes of rape) – This article is part of a series (that I’ve plugged before) going through The Great Sex Rescue, a book that aims to correct sexual attitudes in (Evangelical) Christian culture.  In the chapter covering marital rape, it’s not making any moral statements that aren’t obvious.  It’s still rather horrifying how prevalent these Christian attitudes are, and how women and men are deprived of the hermeneutical tools to really understand it.

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The Trump memestock

I don’t usually cover news, but I want to highlight some recent finance shenanigans. Much of what I’m doing here is recapping the Wikipedia article, with some additional context.

Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) is a company that owns Truth Social—Donald Trump’s alternative to X. TMTG recently merged with Digital World Acquisition Corp. (DWAC). DWAC is a type of company known as special-purpose acquisition company (SPAC). A SPAC is basically an empty shell company, whose entire purpose is to go public (meaning, publicly traded on the stock market), and then merge with a private company so that the private company can be public. SPACs are a method of skipping the usual bureaucracy required to take a company public. (See: educational video on SPACs.)

In other words, thanks to this merger, it’s now possible to buy and sell shares of Donald Trump’s Twitter clone.

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Origami: Snail

Snail

Snail by Mark Bolitho

Last month I attended the East Bay Origami Convention, which is a small event near me.  Origami conventions are generally organized into sessions with an instructor teaching models.  This snail was part of a session that folded a few simple models by Mark Bolitho. (The instructor was not Bolitho, it was someone else.)  Basically anyone can sign up to teach anything, so sessions can be a bit of a mixed bag, but this one was very nice.

Origami spaces are rather interesting.  They’re extremely age-diverse from preteens to retired folks, and you can’t judge a person’s skill level from their age.  There are a variety of interests, with figurative origami (i.e. origami that represents various forms like animals) generally being most popular, but there are also people like me who are more interested in abstract stuff like modulars and tessellations.  Sadly modulars and tessellations tend to be less suited to convention sessions, because you can’t really fold them in one hour.

There are also dual tendencies towards complexity and simplicity, with people wanting to impress with their skill, but also appreciating elegance and accessibility.  I’m situated somewhere in the middle of that.  I’m a very non-competitive person, so the show-offiness of origami spaces can be a bit off-putting sometimes.  But I’m also quite interested in technique and in mathematics, so there’s some complexity that comes with that.

Games that are just books

Back in 2021, I was persuaded to play a little game called The House in Fata Morgana. It’s a Japanese epic visual novel that follows a series of tragedies across the ages, each with multiple twists and turns, and a mysterious thread connecting them all. Throughout that entire time, the player only makes a handful of choices.  We might say that the game is basically a book–and a fairly long one at that, taking me 35 hours to finish.

I enjoyed it enough that I would play a few other long visual novels over the years. I read a couple furry visual novels—Echo and Adastra—and the Japanese visual novel STEINS;GATE. I’m currently reading Umineko When they Cry, which has about a million words, the length of a whole series of novels.

Something that occupies way too much of my brainspace, are those snide comments about visual novels on gaming websites: “It’s not much of a game if you’re not making any decisions.” On the one hand it denies the legitimacy of the visual novels–and on the other hand, it literally does nothing of the sort. After all, visual novels can be legitimate without being video games. Just as novels and movies don’t need to be games in order to be legitimate, neither do visual novels.

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Islands of Insight teaches logic puzzles

Islands of Insight is a recent puzzle game taking place in a shared online world. This, by itself, is an extremely ambitious concept, because normally “puzzle” and “MMO” do not go together.  I know only of two other games that tried to be puzzle MMOs: Uru, a 2003 game in the Myst franchise that dropped the MMO aspect before commercial release; and Puzzle Pirates, another game from 2003 which is a “puzzle game” in the sense of Tetris.

There are three challenges facing a puzzle MMO: Puzzle games generally have small cult followings at best, whereas an MMO requires some level of mass appeal to be commercially successful. Puzzles are often solitary activities, whereas MMOs are social. Puzzles generally require careful bespoke design, whereas MMOs want endless content.

Did Islands of Insight succeed in squaring the circle, to create the Puzzle MMO? No, not at all. Despite the shared world, it’s not a very social game, and would work equally well solo. And while players seem to like it, it wasn’t commercially successful enough to support its development team.

But the game successfully addressed at least one of the challenges of the puzzle MMO.  They created over 10,000 puzzles with high quality standards to populate a large 3D world. These include perspective puzzles, mazes, hidden objects, moving block puzzles, and many more. I’d like to focus on the most numerous type of puzzle, the logic grid.

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