Shores of Night

As I'm on a break from gaming, I'm thinking a lot about what I want when I come back to it (I have at least determined there must be a 'come back to it', if only to see if it's still a hobby I want to be involved in). A thread over at RPG.net ( here ) made me think of what puts me off in terms of games, as things that are written or designed rather than things that are played. Of course there's behaviour at the gaming table that's off putting but here I'm focusing on things that designed into the games themselves rather than the annoying things players do. 1) Gear Porn As I get older, the more I just want to play, or create. I find that I don't really care about equipment, and that nothing really annoys like an equipment list that runs to several pages because you have descriptions, tables and so on. This is especially egregious where the differences between pieces of equipment are so slight that, arguably, the choices could be boiled down to lig...

The Guardian has been waxing lyrical (and fraught) over the resignation of Maria Miller from the cabinet. They're not overly bothered by the fact she's gone; she's a Conservative after all and the circumstances of her resignation are such that only a fool would support her now. It has just brought out the paper's usual anxiety over whether Britain has enough women MPs, doing enough to promote women, in enough key positions and so on. Plus la change, one might say. It feels as if the Guardian has been fretting about this sort of thing for most of my lifetime certainly. I started reading the paper about twenty years ago and if anything its coverage of women's issues has only become more strict over the years. This is not to say that women in politics do not matter; quite the reverse. Women in the UK have not even had a century of being able to vote, and women MPs are a vanishingly rare breed. Labour has the bulk of them, mostly thanks to implementing all women ...

Genre is a relatively young creation, one spawned in the early 20th Century with the birth of the literary canon and the development of the business of publishing as a result of cheaper paper and ink. Before this, there was certainly high and low fiction but they were personified by the novel, the romance and either Gothic or the penny dreadful (which grew into the pulp magazines of the 1920s and 30s). Genre came later when there more people with the leisure time to read and likely dates to the 1920s. Terms like Science Fiction (a bastardisation of the term 'Scientifiction' which was deemed so awful that nobody took it seriously)  come to us from people like Hugo Gernsback, the Belgian magazine proprietor who specialised in that sort of story. I believe, despite its use, genre has become effectively useless as a term because there are so many strands within genres that a flat 'Fantasy' or 'Science Fiction' or even 'Horror' (which arguably has been the mo...