Chip Morningstar

You need to make multiple games and think about what did and didn't work. Very few developers it was their first game. The early PC developers were pumping out multiple games a year. While it won't help with real time games, Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design: An Encyclopedia of Mechanism, will get you thinking about game mechanics. If you want to make social games, then read The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html There's also 21 years of blog posts worth reading here http://habitatchronicles.com/category/general/ Also don't signup-gate web games, players need to be able to play them instantly, without an account.

One of the best reads is "Lessons from Habitat" [1]. While things have changed in the 30 years, one of the conclusions is still valid nowadays: the implementation is relatively unimportant. The entire paper is a gem; worth checking it out. It has aged wonderfully well, and I never get tired of re-reading it over the years. [1] http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html

One of my favorite pieces of deconstructive criticism: http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html How To Deconstruct Almost Anything My Postmodern Adventure By Chip Morningstar, June 1993. "Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right." -- Donald Norman

Related: How to Deconstruct Almost Anything http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html - basically a detailed explanation of the equivalent of modern art in modern literary theory from a scientific person who went to great lengths to dig into it and understand what these people are talking about.

It sounds like they might have learned the lessons of Habitat (http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html - long but worth it; if you want to skip to the relevant portion, scroll down to the "A Warning" section, or to the "Keeping 'Reality' Consistent" and keep in mind this was about 25 years ago).

I got "Yo, check it: I'm a chick who breakdances in Sydney's sausage fest scene. Gonna ramble about why there ain't many ladies busting moves and how we can flip gender norms on their head. Gonna throw in some fancy philosophy words to sound smart, talk about my own experiences, and interview some homies. Basically, I'm saying breakdancing can mess with gender roles and let people express themselves however they want. Oh, and I'm filling a gap in research 'cause apparently no one's thought to mix hip-hop and fancy French philosophy before. Boom." I didn't expect to actually respect it more after the transformation ("I'm saying breakdancing can mess with gender roles and let people express themselves however they want." -- okay, that can be thought-provoking), but I guess that shows the trouble with academic prose selecting for obfuscation. Related classic, "How to deconstruct almost anything": http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html

Not sure if this helps or is even especially correct but: some decades ago there was a movement towards 'inner space', meaning rather than looking outwards at actions and effects on the world, it was about introspection and what was going on inside characters. This may be what they're talking about with interiority, and probably about the convoluted psychology. Those few books I read of this ilk tended to be very dull. Also bear in mind that literary criticism may be prone to being done for show and self-exhibition, much less about the book itself. This http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html (starts with a quote from Donald Norman "Academics get paid for being clever, not for being right") is a painful example of somebody discovering this. It's not funny, it shows somebody's time being wasted as they try to genuinely understand WTF it's all about, and finally 'getting it'. It's well worth a read.

> I was always under the assumption that they independently coined the word. I guess it's possible? I certainly hadn't heard of Habitat in 01992, or indeed until after I met Chip, and the correspondence with the Hindu concept is quite arresting. But then again, I never had a Commodore 64, and Neal Stephenson always loves to be plugged into everything that's trendy. Farmer and Morningstar gave a paper http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html at The First International Conference on Cyberspace in 01990, which seems like the kind of thing you would maybe go to if you were writing a novel like Snow Crash in 01990. But they say Habitat (or rather Club Caribe) only had 15000 users at the time. > (if you're familiar at all with TVTropes, I love TVTropes! If we're talking about the cyberspace avatar trope rather than the use of the word "avatar" for it, you could maybe trace that back to Vinge's 01981 True Names, as mentioned in the talk I linked above.

To me Mutiny looks like Lucasfilm Habitat down to the UI and C64 platform. https://twitter.com/wwwploguecom/status/628896016381685760 http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html

See also: The Lessons of Lucasfilm's Habitat http://www.fudco.com/chip/lessons.html

Sadly this isn't entirely new news: http://www.physics.nyu.edu/sokal/lingua_franca_v4/lingua_franca_v4.htm… http://www.fudco.com/chip/deconstr.html

>"Hello, I'm not a terrorist" I'm afraid that under no circumstances would this be a good idea. It reminds me of the phrase "John F. Kennedy was not a homosexual" from Chip Morningstar's essay How To Deconstruct Almost Anything [1]. To present an example of deconstruction Morningstar deconstructs the phrase thus: "It is not generally claimed that John F. Kennedy was a homosexual. Since it is not an issue, why would anyone choose to explicitly declare that he was not a homosexual unless they wanted to make it an issue? Clearly, the reader is left with a question, a lingering doubt which had not previously been there. If the text had instead simply asked, "Was John F. Kennedy a homosexual?", the reader would simply answer, "No." and forget the matter. If it had simply declared, "John F. Kennedy was a homosexual.", it would have left the reader begging for further justification or argument to support the proposition. Phrasing it as a negative declaration, however, introduces the question in the reader's mind, exploiting society's homophobia to attack the reputation of the fallen President. What's more, the form makes it appear as if there is ongoing debate, further legitimizing the reader's entertainment of the question. Thus the text can be read as questioning the very assertion that it is making." Shift the above text to the present tense and replace "John F. Kennedy" with "the passenger" and "homosexual" with "terrorist" as needed. [1]…