Hello and Happy New Year. I hope you’ll join me in collectively wishing for a better 2015 than 2014.
Given the new year, many people are naturally thinking about making resolutions. Of course, making a resolution is easy, but having the resolve to stick to that resolution is hard. You have to make the choice to commit to it and to let that choice alter the course of your experience and perception. As I pondered my own resolution, I began thinking about what resolutions look like for player’s in game spaces. So this month on Blogs of the Round Table, let’s talk about ‘Player’s Choice.’
This month, we’re interested in hearing about self-regulated or self-inflicted rules. For instance, do you take stealth games so seriously that any detection causes you to restart from the last save point? Or maybe, when you played Skyrim you completed the game without once using a melee weapon? Alternately, perhaps you refuse to run left in side scrolling games – no backtracking allowed. Maybe you only ever allow yourself to rotate Tetris pieces two times. Maybe you played with an all female cast in Fire Emblem? Maybe, just maybe, you always choose the last dialogue option in games, no matter what it is. These are the circumstances we want to hear about: choices you make as a player that aren’t dictated or necessitated by the game, but which alter your experience and understanding of the game. Tell us about your choices and commitments to self-regulated play circumstances. Let’s talk about the resolutions you’ve made and how strong your resolve was in sticking to those modes of play.
We’re accepting blogs until January 30th. You can see current submissions here:
Use this code to embed the links in your blog, if your publishing platform allows iframes:
<iframe type="text/html" width="600" height="20" src="http://www.tinysubversions.com/bort.html?month=January15" frameborder="0"></iframe>
Please email us your submissions or tweet them to @thejoycean or @critdistance with the #BoRT hashtag. Happy blogging!
Rules of the Round Table
- Blogs of the Round Table is not curated. If you write it, we’ll publish it, as long as it’s connected to the topic and has been written specially for BoRT or up to one month prior.
- This BoRT post is the home of the discussion: as I receive new submission blogs, we’ll update the ‘BoRT Linkomatic’ so new blogs are reflected on this page immediately. We’ll also use the @critdistance Twitter account to post regular updates, so follow us!
- Your duty as a knight of the round table is to leave a comment on a blog to which you respond with a link to the response piece, to give them a ‘right of reply’. Keep the conversation going.
- If your work contains potentially disturbing content, please include a suitable warning at the start. Use your common sense.
- You can submit as many articles as you like throughout the month, and it doesn’t matter if they are commercially published, paywalled or available for free. We will need a transcript for paywalled content to be approved.