Freckles & Doubt

I had an outbreak of Summer on Tuesday and madly encouraged the nice hairdresser man to chop my hair short, in the interests of getting it the hell off the back of my neck. It's now a shortish bob, which as per usual I will defiantly refuse to blow-dry at any price, and which will thus never look quite as sleek and grown-up as it does when I leave the salon. I've noticed a bizarre thing, though. Yesterday and today have been filled with colleagues being ridiculously and uncharacteristically chatty at me. They bounce into my office to discuss minor points, they engage me in conversation while I'm swearing gently at the photocopier, they laugh at my involuntary word-play in meetings. (I am incapable of professional meeting language. There will be play, and often metaphor, high-coloured, for the use of. Mostly people just look blank.)

I am driven to the conclusion that this haircut is possibly (shudder) ... cute. At any rate, it seems to make me more approachable. I'm toying with the idea of seeing what black-rimmed hipster spectacles do to the effect.

A quick public service announcement: the PC version of Dragon Age: Inquisition is released tomorrow. I pre-ordered it from Origin, on the grounds that it was half the price of the disc version on Loot for the deluxe edition and comes with Cool Bonus Stuff. They opened it for preload on Monday, and, the cardboard-and-string internets of our beloved country being what they are, I have been gently downloading it in the background (and swearing at the resulting slow loads of Tumblr gifs) ever since. We were at about 82% this morning. The gods willing and the geeks don't rise (or the damned cat doesn't climb on the keyboard in my absence and accidentally halt the download again), it should be finished just in time for official scratch-off tomorrow. I shall thereafter vanish into obsessive Dragon Age companion-flirting with a muffled squeak, probably for the next few weeks. Or months. Posts, and actual human interaction, may be a little thin on the ground, and unduly dragon-flavoured. Don't take it personally. With any luck they won't fumble the dismount as badly as they did in Mass Effect 3...

The car music system is still with the Death Cab. We're now in Transatlanticism, which I think is the last album I have on this player. I must acquire more Death Cab, I only have about three of them, and You Can Play These Songs With Chords is worth it for the title alone. For the record, my subject line is from "Expo '86".

In the Department of Random Awwww, I am more than somewhat tickled by this artist's alternative dragon hoards. I think it's because her dragons look so pleased with themselves, and so absolutely convinced of the desirability of their ridiculous piles.

Further to the above department and in a curiously related stuffed-toy vein, if you are into the Fallen-London-style card-based storytelling game thing and are also prone to enjoyment of off-beat cute, I thoroughly recommend Ursula Vernon's Cryptic Stitching, which is an epic narrative about plush creatures in a sort of Ice Age scenario. I am bumbling around as a confused mouse, hunting the corduroy aurochs, learning the ways of Great Plushthanga, and being very, very kind to Pludwump and Quippet. Given Ms Vernon's characteristically odd sense of humour, it's frequently a highly amusing game. The Story Nexus version is 1.0, she's busy porting it over to a different engine at the moment, but it's worth a play nonetheless.

It's bucketing down outside, and in the interstices between lectures the foyer of my building is filled with damp-puppy students staring dolefully out into the downpour amid the smell of wet hair. We are clearly in autumn, a season of pleasing damp and benevolent chill, and I have broken out the first boots of the season. I am happy. I am, however, also faintly worried to consider the inexorable drift of my language vis à vis students towards dehumanising diminutives - when they're not gazelles, they're puppies. The latter is perhaps a more healthy characterisation along the maternal/cute axis than than the former, which has a lurking hint of the predatory. I do, of course, owe the "gazelles" designation to starmadeshadow, who views the quivering herds from the vantage point of her own leopard-like stalk. She is planning on returning her big-cat self to Cape Town more permanently in the near future, causing much callooing and, for that matter, callaying in the ranks.

I have spent the morning immersed in the inevitable realities of my working life, viz. checking student transcripts. This has vouchsafed to me several insights, most notably (a) that my advisors, train I them never so carefully, are bloody useless at checking course pre-requisites despite repeated reminders and pointed inscriptions on lists of "common advisor mistakes". Insight (b) is, however, more interesting and rather less depressing. Honestly, the skills and experience on which I draw most frequently in this job are those of my frivolous role-playing proclivities. I spend my days wrangling student character sheets, the lists of numbers which quantify experience and achievement, each individual mapped carefully within the constraints of the system. I am alert to rule-breaking, to player dissatisfaction and lack of success, to the judicious balance between challenge and reward, test and fulfilment. I also rely heavily on the experience gained from DMing players like rumint, whose control of the system and its potential exploits is absolute and terrifying. It's all one in the eye, really, to anyone who thinks of D&D and beyond as a waste of time. Not only is play intrinsically about experimentation and learning in a low-stakes environment, it's about understanding the shaping of behaviour through structure. Which also explains, I suppose, why I've drifted inexorably into genre theory in my academic life.

Talking about genre: David Bowie is busy releasing his first album in about ten years. The one single, "The Stars (Are Out Tonight)", and particularly its video, is an utterly fascinating disquisition on fame, identity, androgyny, and an explicit and rather wry dialogue with his own past. Also, Tilda Swinton. The music is very Reality-era, which works for me.

I am catastrophically grumpy this morning, mostly because of (a) waking up, and (b) spending an hour in the traffic department after getting lost twice in the rain, failing dismally to book a learner's licence. (Because I didn't allow enough time for queuing in the wrong queue to pay, being told I should be in the other queue for the eye test, and realising I didn't have time to re-queue before my first plaintive student of the day). In retrospect, I am also homicidally grumpy because (c) the traffic department has clearly violated my religious principles, viz. LOTS OF CLEAR, UNEQUIVOCAL NOTICES TELLING YOU EXACTLY WHERE YOU NEED TO BE. I could probably sue them for abrogating my constitutional rights.

I am possibly also imitating the surly action of the badger because I'm halfway through the extended ending to Mass Effect 3 and have stopped in sheer boredom. Because really, being told exactly why in excruciating detail the three choices you have are equally lousy and don't allow you to role-play your character with any consistency, does not in any way prevent them from being three equally lousy choices. I have decided that I am probably mostly furious because the only choice which would allow my Shepard to live is a no-no in roleplaying terms, and I strenuously object to a game which requires that I rescind any further imaginative investment in the character via a pointless death I have no way of intelligently avoiding. If I want pointless death, there's a lot of real life for that. I thus have very little motivation to actually complete the game, as the imaginative investment ends the moment I do. Phooey.

On the upside, however, my mother arrives from the UK tomorrow, which is a Good Thing. I am also booked with plane tickets and accommodation for the Great Dual Conference Trip in August/September, am surprisingly unbankrupted by above, and almost have a Nesbit paper for the one. The other paper is on Catherynne Valente poetry and I kinda know what I want to say, so levels of academic angst about the whole thing are pleasantly low. Also, being a keynote speaker at the last one was a pleasing exercise in perspective. These two papers are 20-minuters, and I am a fundamentally obscure academic so no-one will really care if they're not plug-you-in-the-eye wonderful. It's a remarkably liberating feeling which bizarrely increases the chance that, joyously unpressured, I will actually write a good paper.

On a related note, I am planning on being in London for a sort of quantum period somewhere between the 1st and 5th September, and propose to drift happily between as many different venues as wish to see me and are able to offer me a horizontal surface upon which to sleep. Offers gratefully received, and will instantly solidify the quantum dates by observation.

I am a sad fangirl. I still get an unholy kick out of sharing a birthday with Joss, who is 50 this year and still comfortingly older than I am, and who moreover validates my fangirling utterly not only by intelligently being born on the same date I was, but by producing things like The Avengers, thus neatly conflating several of my personal fixations. (I shall leave identifying the exact fixations as an exercise for the reader).

I have had a lovely birthday, doing not much in an entirely self-indulgent way - playing computer games (which is no different to a lot of other days, then, but without the guilt), eating chocolate, chatting to random lovely friends who dropped by for one reason or another, and going out to dinner with the usual crew to La Mouette, whose winter special tasting menu is a damn fine thing. There is still a ridiculous amount of chocolate in the house.

The computer games have not been materially assisted by the affectionate nature of the Hobbit, whose favoured position is recorded for posterity below. I need my right hand in Amalur for moving forward, parrying, swapping weapons and chugging healing potions, so it's not an entirely felicitous confluence of cat and gamer. The aching wrist from the heavy Hobbit-head, however, neatly balances the aching wrist on the mouse hand from clicking "attack" and clenching all my muscles while I swear.



I should point out that the weird brown box/paper thing behind Hobbit's left ear is my Evil Landlord's idea of a good birthday present, which is to wander into Tomes, the larney chocolate place in the Waterfront, and request two of every kind of dark chocolate they have except the ones with coconut. He is a civilised man and knows me well. Have also scored tea and chocolate biscuits, groovy clothes, cute cat-toys, interesting plants and umpteen wishes from people all over the show, for which my happy, grateful thanks.

Things I Have Learned About My Stupid Body: sometimes there are glandular days. These are the days when I'm exhausted when I wake up, my voice is down about an octave, I have a lurking sinus headache, and there's a throbbing and generalised ache under my chin. What I have learned is that these days are hopeless. If they happen - and today is a good example - I am going to be non-productive. There's no way out of it: my brain is in a state of feeble and lassitudinous wibble. It is therefore imperative that I don't add to the bodily stress and strain by feeling guilty: rather, I should rejoice in such small victories as I do achieve - emails answered, notes written up, students not bitten in half.

I should also rejoice that these days give me a low enough energy level that I simply cannot work up a good snit. So when a parent-of-student sends me an entirely unjustified email blasting me from on high for officiousness, insensitivity and gods know what else, I merely look at it vaguely, think, "Silly man", and send a placatory reply. On non-glandular days at this time of year, when the angst-mark in my office is above head height, I would explode into jagged shards, delete the email, undelete it, write three scorching replies, delete them all and then burst into hysterical tears. Fortunately, I simply don't have the energy. Besides, incendiary karma ferrets will eat him. (And possibly have done so retroactively, given that his house just burned down).

Also, it is giving me a certain peaceable immunity to annoyance, to know that my marking is done for the year, I don't have pressing papers to write, and the last third of Mass Effect 3 can have my undivided attention when I've wended my weary way home. (ME3 is terribly world-at-war and doom-laden and apocalyptic, but not without moments of quiet enjoyment, such as the bit yesterday where I swear Shepherd shamelessly checked out Kaidan's butt). All the best pleasures are simple.

I am not entirely enamoured of the feline tribe, right now. Not my feline tribe - or, at least, only my feline tribe by extension and adoption. Jo&stv are away bestmanning a wedding in the UK, and I've drawn catsit duty owing to the unaccountable whims of their previous steady catsitter, who went and got herself her own house. The duty entails feeding the cats daily, and also keeping a weather eye on the houseplants, garden and general property value. (The garden bit has been dead easy owing to the weather, which is currently rather pleasingly inclined to the vertical descent of water from above).

The cat-feeding gig has become somewhat fraught with danger, given my tendency to a slight unsteadiness on my pins even when sober, and the reaction of young Sproing, half of the jo&stv feline tribe, to the prolongued absence of his pink blobs. He becomes extremely needy and clingy, prone to walk just in front of one's feet nearly continuously, while he yowls and purrs in a slightly schizophrenic fashion and I fall over him at intervals, cursing. I can hear the yowls from the moment I get out of the car, as he lies in wait behind the front gate, presumably drawn by the sound of the engine. (It's amazing how quickly cats learn the finesse of engine note distinction which generally characterises only professional mechanics and Tony Stark).

The cat-sitting gig has also led to the occasional night spent in the house, by way of reassuring the kitties that they haven't been utterly abandoned. Sproing's state of clinginess is such, however, that he is a far from ideal bedmate. He curls up reasonably peaceably in the crook of one's knees, but is also driven, at random intervals during the night, to sashay up the bed to stick his nose into one's face, purring loudly. I am not accustomed to this. My own felines, by virtue of my fragile and dependent relationship with sleep, have been rigorously trained not to do this sort of thing. The third time he did it, it woke me up out of a fairly deep sleep in a state of disorientation which caused me to react instinctively and adversely to a giant, blurry, orange and white shape filling my entire field of vision - i.e. I went "aaargh!" and batted it away with enough force that he landed on the floor several feet from the bed. I am somewhat guilt-ridden about this involuntary action, but am pleased to note that (a) he appears unharmed and just as clingy, and (b) he didn't disturb me again last night. Also, you can see what I mean about the rigorous training of my own cats.

None of which, of course, prevents me from reacting with absolute approbation to the latest lovely quote from Joss Whedon. In reply to the query "Cats or dogs?", he gives us: "Cat! Dog: need need, poop, chew, need, lick, need. Cat: whatev. Meow, yo. Here's a mouse." Also, the Avengers movie is at about 96% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, causing me high levels of anticipatory fangirly glee. ("The Avengers is neither overwhelming nor underwhelming. What it expertly is, is whelming." Hee). I'm going to go and see it tomorrow. Possibly twice.

In other news, I finally finished Mass Effect 2, as a result of which (a) I'm wandering around the house twitching vaguely from the withdrawal symptoms, and (b) this Harry Potter paper is actually taking shape. Also, as you may have noticed, (c) I'm blogging again. Blogging is clearly adversely affected by computer game obsessions, except, of course, when it isn't because I'm blogging obsessively about computer games. Watch this space.

You know I make those oven-baked baby potato thingies for braais? Where you halve the baby potatoes and sling them into a pan with garlic and olive oil and whatever other seasonings occur to you at the time (herbs, lemon, spices, the flesh of the living), and bake them until crispy? Well, this evening Jo & I, via the essentially random processes outlined above, accidentally created the best ever version of this. The One True Crispy Potato. The Platonic Ideal. I undertook to blog it quickly before we both forgot what we did. Herewith.

Excessive Potatoes

So, you need:

• 1kg baby potatoes. (This serves 4 of us. Don't mock). I like the Woolies yellow-fleshed Mediterranean ones, but any will do.
  
• A generous splodge of peanut oil.
  
• A couple of fairly heaped tablespoons of crushed garlic/ginger mix.
  
• Two mediumly ferocious chillis, chopped, seeds included.
  
• A mad sprinkling of Thai seven spice, to taste, but I tend to sprinkle a bit wildly.
  
• Half a pack of uncooked bacon bits.
  
• A couple of tablespoons of honey.
  
• A couple of tablespoons of soy sauce.
  
• A dash of fish sauce.
  
• A generous couple of handfuls of chopped spring onion.

So, you halve the potatoes and sling them into a wide roasting pan sort of thingy. Splosh generously with peanut oil; add ginger/garlic and Thai seven spice, and salt liberally. Whizz the potatoes around with a spatula to coat evenly with oil and seasonings. Chop chillis finely and add. Whizz around some more.
Stick the pan into a preheated 200^o oven, uncovered, for 30-45mins. If you remember you could come and mix up the pan a bit halfway through so they brown more or less evenly, but I usually forget.
At a point around 20 mins from the meat coming off the braai, add the bacon bits. Swirl around madly to coat/mix. Sling back into the oven.
Ten minutes later, haul the pan out of the oven and slosh over the potatoes the mixture of honey and soy/fish sauce you have previously prepared by warming the honey very slightly in the microwave before mixing in the soy and fish sauce. Once again, mix madly. Sling back in the oven.
As the meat arrives onto the table off the braai, triumphantly haul the potatoes out of the oven and decant into a serving bowl, making sure to scrape out the somewhat delectable sauce remnants and bits of crispy bacon. Add the chopped spring onions and mix together. (We contemplated adding sesame seeds, but it seemed redundant at this point).
Serve, to universal adulation and overeating.

I have only two things to add, being a bit overwhelmed by too much registration, too much braai, too much braai smoke, and a two-day headache.
(1) The possibilities for Skyrim mods seen in this video are making me drool more than slightly. Also, the editing on that irritatingly catchy tune is sheer genius. (I know that irritatingly catchy tune all too well because my OLs insist on using it every year for their opening presentation thingy. It's a terrible ear-worm even without all the arrow in the knee bits).
(2) I am utterly enjoying Veronica Mars anyway, but the last episode I watched completely made my weekend by developing precisely the 'ship I've been rooting for madly for about half the season. This makes me feel smug, and gratified, and prescient.

I have to note for posterity that my subject line will make absolutely no sense to anyone who doesn't read Pajiba. If you did, you'd know that the site has a running gag where they refer to Channing Tatum solely by the sobriquet of Charming Potato. You have to admit it's terribly apt.

This is an interesting, if slightly superficial, article from New Scientist about game transfer phenomenon, which is effectively the response to real life as though you're in a computer game. The article drifts off a bit into burble about visual hallucinations, but what really caught me was the writer's description of their own experience driving icy roads and pulling out of a vehicle slide by instinctively using a move from a computer driving game.

Embedding yourself in a computer game for extended periods can have really weird real-life effects, particularly if you're tired and a bit spacey - after the Dragon Age marathons earlier this year, I would catch myself coming out of a social interchange or work interaction and thinking, "Hell, that didn't go well, I need to reload and make different conversation choices". A sort of mental groping for the escape key to access the menus. But it particularly interests me because I think there are similar effects with non-computer gaming, specifically roleplaying.

About fourteen years ago I was the victim of an armed robbery/home invasion; the guy barged into the house, waving a gun, when bumpycat opened the door to him, and proceeded to tie up both of us and force me around the house at gunpoint, demanding I show him where all the valuable goods were. (A bit doomed; this was back in the impecunious grad student days, and there really wasn't much of value in the house). Fortunately the burglar slamming the door behind him had set off the house alarm; I'd heard the fracas at the front door and, while half asleep, was able to answer the phone for about three seconds when the armed response company phoned to check, and tell them to come quickly. Which they did; but there was an incredibly surreal moment when the armed response guy, receiving no answer from the front door, came round to the bedroom window, to see me, half naked and with my hands tied behind my back, kneeling on the floor. (I'd just woken up, and was wearing only a dressing gown, which had fallen down around my waist. I still remember the puzzled, slightly embarrassed tone of voice in which the guy asked "Is everything all right, ma'am?" I think he was afraid he'd interrupted kinky sex games).

The burglar, hearing the knock at the door, had moved himself out of line of sight by putting his back up against the wall next to the window, keeping the gun trained on me; he'd hissed at me to send the armed response away or he'd shoot me. The interesting thing is that I still have a very vivid memory of exactly how I reacted, which was to suddenly see the whole thing like a hastily sketched roleplaying tac-map - room layout like this, threat here, ally out there, these are your resources, what do you do? It was an astonishingly clear mental image, I can still see it in my head. I reacted exactly as I would have done in, for example, a cyberpunk scenario with rumint putting us through the wringer again: tactically, and with an analytic calm which detached me from the situation in exactly the same way you are detached while gaming. However emotionally invested you are in the moment, there's always a meta level of thinking about what's happening. I told the armed response guy that there was a burglar with a gun, but he'd gone round the back of the house. The armed response guy promptly rushed off after him, allowing the burglar to leave via the front door without actually shooting anyone. It was very neat. Serious experience points there.

The thing is, the response wasn't just about using gaming tools; it was, effectively, for those few vital seconds, to access the game mindset and, vitally, reflexes. I didn't have to think about it; there was no conscious decision of "OK, let's think tactically now." I think you have to be a lot more experienced with having guns pointed at you in real life to be able to consciously employ tactical thought in that sort of situation. I didn't have to; the gaming reflexes kicked in. I honestly don't think I would have been able to respond as cogently if I hadn't had that experience behind me, and that mindset to access.

I'm playing through Skyrim at the moment as an archer. It would be fascinating to see if the repetitive experience of focus/draw/aim in firing a computer game bow actually had any measurable effect on my extremely basic real-life archery skill. But in a more global sense, shouldn't the in-game experience of a tactical approach to efficiently completing quests give me more facility with real-life goals? I might attain a job I actually wanted if I collected all these journal articles before speaking to the key person at the other end of the map. And, to return to the tabletop issue: we played Fiasco! last night. The reflex in Fiasco! is towards making each particular scene punchy, cinematic and dramatic, with a slant towards disaster. If there's any logic in the world, habitual Fiasco! players should be self-destructive drama queens. Probably it's a good thing we don't play more often.

There's this rather sad fact about Skyrim: its designers don't always seem to actually think like players. You realise this if, like me, you really enjoy both the house-buying and the crafting aspects of Skyrim play (look, ma! It's not all about the violence, promise!). I get personal about my houses. Many of them are rather lovely spaces, and it's easy to become emotionally invested in the idea of living in them in between bumbling off slaying bandits and dragons and undead, oh my! I get an unreasonable kick out of games which actually expect you to sleep at night. There are no real penalties if you don't, but there's this sense of ineffable satisfaction (probably not unrelated to my ongoing state of real-life fatigue) in having the "Well Rested" message pop up on the top of the screen.

What I don't enjoy is coming home after a hard day's adventuring, laden with loot, and having to dash across half the town in order to access the blacksmith's forge to upgrade the weapons and armour before I sell them. And then, when you lug them back home to enchant them at your nifty enchanting table (which the Whiterun house doesn't have, what's with that, dammit?), your storage for soul gems and what have you is upstairs in another room because the designers couldn't be arsed to stick a chest or strongbox or barrel next to the place where, you know, you'd actually use it. Ditto with alchemy and your ingredients stores. And the barrels are full of apples, anyway. I have eaten a quite ludicrous number of apples in Skyrim, just to get rid of them. The country's fruit industry must be rolling in it. (And you find the wretched things down in sealed dwemer ruins, locked up for centuries but still perfectly fresh. Undead apples. Explains a lot).

In short, the designers construct the houses without much thought given to the most likely activities a player will pursue within its walls. How difficult could it be to put a grindstone or armouring table in a corner? A chest next to the enchanting table? Instead, houses are filled with an awful lot of pointless "decorative" guff, most of which you can't alter in any way; the things you can alter, like baskets and bowls, are pretty much useless for storage because it's such a royal pain to put things into them.

The quest for Sensible, Efficient Living Space led me to my first encounter with Skyrim mods. Someone has expanded the basement of the Solitude house, which is my favourite anyway, to include a full smithy and lots of storage, plus an update on the currently rather brutal sleeping arrangements for your housecarl (she has a pallet on the floor in a cellar). It's beautiful. I installed it no problem, and wandered around blissfully storing everything, and then left the house, took two adventuring steps, and hit a crash-to-desktop bug which was completely insurmountable. It's a known bug with this mod, and was mostly resolved with the latest patch, but even so still affects a minority of players for inexplicable reasons. I got unlucky. Growl. (And I shall not inflict on you the righteous rant about Skyrim bugginess generally, and the evident cardboard-and-string construction of a game when modding the interior of a house causes save and fast travel crashes a day later at the other end of the world map. But it's a righteous rant).

However, as another inevitable step, this whole debacle has led me to discover the developer console. In fact, half an hour of research on the web and some judicious fiddling, and I have managed to fill my very own basement with smithy tools and barrels and chests galore, my very own self. (The "placeatme" command, and using "help" + keyword, chest, barrel, whatever, to add it where you're standing). It's fiddly and trial-and-error bound, but actually not that difficult. You would not believe the degree of empowered satisfaction this causes. It wriggles right down and pointedly prods the particular and personal button which makes me rejoice in the correct utilisation of system for good. (As an added bonus, the basic object/NPC interactions are nicely done; you stick a grindstone into your house, and your spouse promptly starts using it as part of their wander-around-vaguely domestic routine).

But it also interests me, inevitably, on a broader cultural level. As with Dragon Age, the Skyrim developer console is perfectly accessible, and the web is rich with how-to pages giving codes and tips. This is a base level of player empowerment which is quite a lot more universal than the far more complex and technical toolset available to the much smaller subgroup of players who actually write mods. But the interesting point is the same: while a computer game is a commercial product, it's not, like a movie, a monolithic product. The base assumption of interaction which a game has and a movie doesn't, is expanded outwards: you are not simply expected to interact with the game, you're expected to interact with its construction. To, in fact, adapt it to your own needs via creative input. Compare this to the attitude of film producers to their product - thou shalt not, in their book, do anything other than passively consume it; they frown on excerpting clips, creating mash-ups, using stills - hell, they don't even like their trailers to turn up on YouTube, which is inexplicable to me. A computer game, on the other hand, actively enables the use of the game as the basis for personalisation, adaptation and play, on a meta level quite above the freedom of your avatar in the game world.

It becomes inevitable to put this aspect together with the other striking aspect of Skyrim, which is its community. This is the first time I've ever played a computer game the instant of its release, i.e. at the same time as the rest of the world - hitherto I've played the Evil Landlord's hand-me-downs, sometimes years later. It has been something of a revelation to find out how many people on, for example, my Twitter feed, are hacking through it at the same time as I am. You end up contextualising your own play experience across a very broad spectrum of shared play, whether it's amusing tweets, tips, discussions on wiki pages and forums, or silly Skyrim memes (viz. my subject line).

All of which is leading up to saying: gawsh, computer games, while commercial products, also have a component which speaks to folkloric functions. They are communal, and they actively encourage not just consumption, but production in that communal sense. The fact that they're communally created even at the commercial level probably contributes to this - DRM and bloody Steam authentication notwithstanding, the idea of creative ownership is already distributed. And, of course, in the interaction between you and a game, you are already putting your own storytelling stamp on it in a way you can't with a movie (unless you're a mad fanficcer, and that doesn't really give you access to the images).

And it's fascinating that this personal-production element is reflected on the level of actually stuffing with the game's construction in the same way that a designer does, not just re-shaping on the level of play. That is, the production company doesn't just allow tailoring of game elements, it actively encourages them through the accessibility of the tools. It's a clever commercial move, because it facilitates investment and a sense of ownership, and thereby builds a loyal following, but it also neatly mimics, even in a limited sense, far older, pre-literate patterns of production and distribution within a communal context. And it also suggests, to go full circle to the whinge with which I started this, that some of the omissions and logical thoughtlessnesses in house construction may be a sort of designer shrug - why bother, if the players will sort it out themselves? Thereby increasing their investment and loyalty. Sneaky.

Then again, I'm a fairy-tale theorist, and therefore by necessity a bit of a folklorist. Give a fairy-tale theorist a hammer, and everything looks like a glass slipper.