This article is about board games, how they are designed and played, but most importantly how they are talked about. My goal in writing it is to help people who give reviews of board games to give better ones. My thesis will be that games produce certain subjective qualities of experience, and that a good board game review should analyze and expose these subjective qualities in an objective way.
Continue reading “The Quality of an Hour”Reflections on Completing a Chronological Reading of C S Lewis’s Works
I recently completed the quest of reading everything C. S. Lewis ever wrote in chronological order. Now when the moment is fresh, I’d like to clarify, celebrate, and reflect upon that quest. My chief goal in reflection is to make as much good out of the reading as I can as well as to pave the way for the second expedition through his works that I hope to make someday.
The Rise and Fall of the Lone Game Developer
In the early 80s, all it took to make a game was a computer, some graph paper, and a lot of determination.
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C. S. Lewis’s Letter to Tolkien upon First Reading The Lord of the Rings
J R. R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings over a long interval that began well before World War II and ended a few years after. Both Tolkien and his adult son Christopher regularly attended meetings of the Inklings, a literary group of which C. S. Lewis was the guiding star, and the two Tolkiens took turns reading The Lord of the Rings as it came together. Lewis had therefore heard most of The Lord of the Rings before receiving the typescript of the finished novel in October 1949. After reading it he wrote this letter to Tolkien.
Continue reading “C. S. Lewis’s Letter to Tolkien upon First Reading The Lord of the Rings”A Chronological Reading Guide
to the Works of C. S. Lewis
With a major C. S. Lewis conference getting underway in Houston this weekend, I thought that now would be a good time to publish my chronological bibliography of C. S. Lewis. It is now available as a Google Docs sheet.
I have prepared this bibliography in order to serve my own quest of reading all of Lewis’s writings in chronological order. If you are on this or another, similar quest, you may also find it useful.
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What Programming a Game in 48 Hours Taught Me About Programming Games
I participated in Ludum Dare 27 this weekend, programming a complete game, Spacetime Adventure, in 48 hours. I make games for a living but I’d never done that before. It was fun.
It was also enlightening.
Continue reading “What Programming a Game in 48 Hours Taught Me About Programming Games”Without Peer
John Hopper was born to pole vault: so said everyone who knew him. At the age of 1½ he could leap at a run onto his parent’s four-poster; at two he could jump over the railing of his crib and land inside comfortably on his back.
Finding C. S. Lewis’s Essays
I am on a mission to acquire a copy of everything C. S. Lewis ever published. The standalone books aren’t too difficult but the essays are a different story. They have been published and republished many times in diverse and overlapping collections. Some collections are out of print. Some are available in the UK but not the US. The essays sometimes change titles as they move from editor to editor. The task of deciphering the minimum number (or minimum total cost) of books necessary to own all of Lewis’s essays very nearly requires the help of an artificial intelligence.
Continue reading “Finding C. S. Lewis’s Essays”What is Ethics?
Imagine that Alien Robots From Outer Space come to observe the earth. They listen in on our conversations, trying to figure out what kind of creatures we are.
Continue reading “What is Ethics?”An Invitation Back to Faith
I am writing to those who, like me, would have called themselves Christian as a child but who left aside that faith in the teenage or college years.
My aim will be to show that the reasons—the doubts, the discoveries, the emotions—that led you to set aside faith as you came of age were, although probably reasonable, not ultimately correct. You will see in what I’m about to argue that the reasons that persuaded you then should not persuade you now; that in fact the intellectual insights that moved you away from faith as you came of age were tainted with a kind of naivety, and that the more sophisticated reasoning and greater experience available to a more mature adult not only warrants a return to faith, but compels it.
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