Open letter to Elsevier employees, from @FakeElsevier.
This half-hour radio documentary on egg donation in Canada is well worth a listen.
Google is changing its privacy settings, so if you want to delete your Google browsing history before it gets merged with data from your other Google sites (email, reader, etc), EFF has some instructions on how. (Thanks, S.!)
Women in games, and the fallout from one woman’s suggestion about how to make games more appealing to women.
Ahh, Melis’ ghost story! She’s fantastic, it’s so true.
I’m really interested in that Jennifer Hepler article–obviously gaming is an inherently gendered topic, but it’s funny how the visual novel idea seems so sidelined as a “woman’s interest” thing. Heavy Rain and Indigo Prophecy were envisioned as “interactive cinema” and while there are challenges (like punching people out and stuff), they’re much more along visual novel lines while somehow avoiding the apparent stigma of being “for women.” Weird? I’m not sure what my point is–I guess that the vitriol against the concept confuses me when there’s already proven to be a market for it for any gender. (And that’s not even counting all the visual novels and dating games made for, at least, both heterosexual men and heterosexual women in Japan. Not much has been made outside of rigid gender and sexuality lines that I’ve seen–unless you count the pseudo-bestiality of Hatoful Boyfriend?–but, y’know.)
I was talking to A. about it (who is much more involved in the video game community than I), and he thinks that there’s a faction of gamers who just think that there should be one single (usually shoot-y) way to play a game, because it’s the struggle to push all the right buttons in the right way that gives the game meaning. If there’s an option for someone to go through it without having to do all the combat, they feel that their experience/time investment/etc is cheapened because someone played the game in an easier or quicker way than they did. He and I both think this is a ridiculous way to approach video games in general, but I think he’s right that there’s a faction of gamers who feel that way. I’ve a few things to write about gender and women and video games, if I ever get around to it :/
Also I may or may not’ve gone “oh, ghost!!!
” at the end of Melis’ piece.