Links of compelling inportance

“It’s changed the nature of the hobby, it’s turned comic books into a medium of exchange instead of a medium of entertainment,” groaned James Friel, who works at Comic Relief, the longtime landmark store in Berkeley. To Friel, who has been collecting comics since 1958, “it makes these books a sealed-up commodity. You can’t read them. It makes me sad. Some of these books will be sealed up forever.”

So I picked up the final copy today, because I was passing a cash register and it was the last one after all. Even allowing for the probability that it was filled with articles they’d commissioned and hadn’t run because they weren’t very good, or that they were reprints, it… well, the whole tone of the thing felt wrong. The articles were just silly. It wasn’t story logic any longer. A baby gets delivered in an avocado because the sperm donation got mixed with avocado sushi… There wasn’t the feeling reading it that anyone could have believed it. Not children, not the stupid, not someone who’d been born and raised on Mars and this was the only thing they’d read. It was like the joke had become nobody could believe this stuff. And now nobody was buying it. It had a Sergio Aragones drawing though, and some comics…

The two belong to different universes, but most comic book veterans would agree that they are both excellent leaders, strong, skilled, as well as resourceful. Playing co-op with these two would be a great experience. Captain America boasts of superhuman strength and agility; and as for Batman, he is the most skilled mortal ever. One can demolish a tank with his bare hands, and the other can form a battle strategy to defeat an army within minutes. Maybe he should have had 300 Spartans behind him, no offense to King Leonidas. I believe this would be the ultimate combination of strength and intelligence in a game.

The gaming community’s perception of the stereotypical fanboy neatly mirrors the public perception of the stereotypical gamer, generally described as a male aged 13-16, whose potent mix of adolescent hormones and insecurity cause him to lash out against slights both real and imagined. Obviously not every identified fanboy conforms to this rather unflattering stereotype, and as with the exaggerated “comic book guy,” this teenage straw man is probably inaccurate more often than not. image However, if we set aside questions about the accuracy of the imagery and explore why the stereotype exists, we can identify how the unique characteristics of the game industry shaped the fanboy into who he is today.

He explains that linear forms like film and novels are better at telling stories than games—something that’s looking to be flat-out true at the moment—and concluded that inference (such as the ruins in Morrowin) is the best way for gamers to experience compelling narrative which can, at peak, invoke an intangible melancholy.

In the Renaissance, melancholy was a sign of genius. We don’t think he was necessarily referring to that interpretation.