Posts made by Gingerlily

I was going to just Rickroll you guys all five times in a row but I decided to be better than that. It wasn't easy.

@mietze said in Raising Baby Gamers:

I once got the hairy eyeball at a parent ed talk about screentime when I commented what a classist and somewhat racist bunch of garbage this "Screen time is ruining our kids! They should be playing with legos and running around outside!" stuff is.

You can play minecraft on a computer, which is often used by family for many things as a communal resource. Legos are pretty much only toys (unless you have an adult hobbyist) and are extremely EXTREMELY expensive unless you get lucky on craigslist.

Being outside is great! Do you have enough land/a useable backyard? Does your city have enough money for park upkeep? Do you have a car/gas money? Are the outdoor/common spaces accessible by bus if not? Will you get CPS or will your children be harassed while at the park if you don't "look right" for the neighborhood?

How many jobs are you working? Are you home during daylight hours when it's safe to walk/are you comfortable with your latchkey kids going out while you're not there?

I do limit my kids screen time and kicked them outside of the house in the summer when they were younger to go play outside until a certain time. BUT we have an awesome property, with lots of wooded areas and even a kind neighbor who allowed the kids to play in the creek that's on their side of the property line. At the time all our immediate neighbors were old school elderly people who enjoyed seeing/hearing the kids run around (and often would give them old junk boards and nails and tools they didn't want anymore for my kids to build forts with). There were also 3 of them close in age, and pack safety helps. Also it helps that they look 100 percent white. So no one questioned our belonging in any neighborhood park pretty much anywhere they showed up. I always had access to transportation. I didn't worry about some idiot calling CPS on me (though I had plenty of people clutch pearls because I allowed my children to play outside on our completely shielded from traffic wooded property BY THEMSELVES where I could not always be there to make sure they weren't kidnapped by the white slavery pedophile ring.)

Now I see my teens laughing and chatting and playing games with friends both online and when they get together at our place (which often involves RPGs and board games as well, in person). They are silly computer game and magic dorks. It's very sweet, and goofy, and social. We can't afford $1k per kid to have them do sports teams and all the stuff that is the rage, and that's fine.

And all of them have perfectly good working brains (as annoying as they are sometimes) despite having watched TV now and then and played computer/console games.

This x1000. Looking down on parents because of the screen time they allow their kids is both racist and classist. I go on home visits for my pk students (all of them under the poverty line to qualify for services) and often there is a large flat screen and people watching it. I get enraged when people bitch about 'poor' people buying TVs. That's their entertainment, they can't buy theater tickets or take their children on vacation, this is what they do to unwind. Everyone is entitled to downtime and relaxation.

Woot to 'Smarter Than You Think' I hope you both love it. We can have a book club thread when you are finished reading. There's a lot of cool stuff in there.

Double reply but just adding this because it is also relevant:

I've been reading studies and articles lately about neuroplasticity, because after the years of migraines and medications I want to get my brain 'back in shape' so to speak, and they mentioned several means by which to improve the healthy functioning of the brain.

One was mindfulness meditation, which is pretty predictable and now recommended for all kinds of things, so that's cool.

But another was video games. Not specific stuff like Luminosity or whatever marketed to improve brain function. Just any video game.

@2mspris

Yes yes. And while the 'Smarter Than you Think' book isn't just about games and gamers, (that's just one chapter, the rest is about technology effecting society in other ways, but all of it fascinating and useful and backed up by scientific studies) It does spend a -lot- of time discussing the 'down with screentime' mentality that pediatricians and teachers (some, not me!) and parenting blogs, and how they are not necessarily based in truth.

Obviously children need time actually playing with toys, and friends, and outdoors. But that does not mean that screen time isn't ever acceptable of even valuable. The games around presently are not the original Nintendos we were raised pounding the controllers on. They require strategic thinking, planning, comprehension skills, and so much more. And I'm not talking games marketed as 'educational'. I'm talking your regular rpg or Minecraft and all that. Just games. My daughter blows my mind with the elaborate stuff she builds on Minecraft, her visual-spatial skills are on point, I don't think I could make stuff that neat if I tried and she's 8. And yeah sure, she could build stuff with legos, but legos can actually be super frustrating as a fine motor task and lose their appeal from that.

When they get old enough to actually start messing with code...I mean wow. It's fantastic.

So yeah, I'm a primary educator with 15 years of experience and certifications in early childhood and English language learning and special education...and I am totally good with screen time. So long as once in a while they get some Vitamin D from the sun, and hit the playground to keep their physical health handled...screen away.

@Lisse24 said in Game Stagnancy and Activity:

@Apos Exactly. It's a balancing act to find enough change where people feel impact, but not so much that people feel like things are coming out of the blue.

By the way, I think HBO's The Leftovers should be required viewing for people running plots on MUs, because I think they hit that sweet spot perfectly. On that show, Big Things happen: 2% of the world's population disappears, cults swindle people out of money, a nuclear bomb goes off, BUT the story never focuses on those things, the story focuses on how those things affect people and how people's personal reactions to the Big Things flow from and cause more Big Things. The Big Things are never important. How they impact people's lives is what's important. The result is a fantastical story that feels real and grounded, impact is always felt, and when something comes out of left field that people didn't see, the reaction afterwards is "Oh, well, that makes total sense, how could we think anything else would happen?"

Now taking that sweet spot and getting it into MU form? That's the hard part.

I had to bow out of The Leftovers midway through the first season because it just wasn't the sort of show I wanted to spend time with at the time, and it was not funny the way I'd imagined it would be because of the Tom Perotta book. But I should totally binge it now, I always meant to get back to it.

I do love that aspect. In the book its almost even more so...like you never know why the people disappeared ever, you never knew a lot of major plot things. They just happened, and then the story was about how various people coped with all of it. Perfect analogy for a MU

@2mspris

Yeah my best friend is a granola gal who does not allow her children to drink juice (too sugary) nor have any screentime during the week. They watch a family movie on the weekends. She knows how much my kid is allowed and has never -said- anything to me but I can read a shocked expression when I see one.

Still both she and I have advanced degrees in teaching and child development, so criticizing each other's parenting would never happen.

There is an amazing book called "Smarter Than You Think" by Clive Thompson and it puts a whole new perspective on 'screen time' and the stigma it has and whether it should. Highly recommend.

Ooops, I deleted my post instead of editing it. Sorry!

I think teaching kids rpgs is awesome. As a teacher who has taken too many classes about how developing minds work and what is 'good' or 'bad' for them, I'm super pro. There are a lot of skills that are developed in tabletop gaming that we grown up players don't think about. Mathematics in various levels of complexity. Strategy, which is -huge-. Social awareness beyond being kind to each other but in the game itself, figuring out who does what or who should do which role in some big battle scene requires presenting your case well, and sometimes yielding to someone else's better idea. There are a LOT of complex learning tasks that go into things like gaming that are oft derided as wastes of time or conjuring satan or whatever.

I am wondering people's thoughts on kids regarding online roleplaying games. My daughter went through a phase where she was obsessed with this game called Animal Jam that is run by NatGeo but also has a heavy social component...throwing parties and decorating your little animal. There are several games like this that are geared towards kids and that have moderation, some pretty heavy. I first had her set up so that her 'chat' mode only allowed her to click on certain choices and responses to things, single-player rpg style. She really, really wanted to just type what she wanted to say, so I eventually changed it. The system has a whole list of words, swear words and also just words that are mean and insulting, so she was reasonably safe. (Though upset when she saw someone say 'a**hole', some young protege who figured out how to curse with symbols.) We've been looking at some others, she's playing something called Amazing World now and I have similar control of her settings/experiences.

I'm torn about it though, she's 8 and to me that seems so YOUNG to be getting all obsessively into gaming, but I guess there are thousands of kids similarly obsessed with their consoles so I'm probably being overly neurotic.

What do you guys think? Anyone allow their child to play online 'social' games as I do? Anyone who absolutely forbids it? Why? (to either question). If you don't have kids pitch in with your opinions anyway, we all know games.

@Thenomain

Captain Eo WAS amazing I'd forgotten all about that but I think I was about 12 when I saw it at Epcot so that is understandable.

It's not a movie snob for me thing either, I just get overstimulated too easily and movies already have a lot of visual stuff going on on a large screen plus a lot of sound. I don't need even more things for my eyes to process. So I'm not into it.

@Coin

I remember absolutely nothing about Avatar except a lot of colors and deciding by the end that though I enjoyed the visuals, that would be the only 3-D movie I would ever see.

It wasn't, because when my friends wanted to see Gatsby (the new Leo and Jay-Z one, obvs) they wanted to see it in 3-D because they are cruel people. But now THAT was definitely the last movie I will ever see in 3-D.

@Thenomain because this is a thread about you, what's your take? 3-D movies, yes or no?

@Ganymede

I definitely want all the deets on your Political System when you have it!

Sorry if someone already said it, I've been skimming posts. But Handmaid's Tale on Hulu is my current favorite...it's super and intense and just as disturbing as reading the book was which seems hard to achieve. Also the soundtrack is impeccable, the timing of certain songs is magic.

Orange Is The New Black releases this Friday I think so I know my plans for Saturday.

Just here to say I look forward to complaining on MSB about how horrible MSB MU* and all the people on it are.

I am highly interested in this topic but I think I have more questions than answers. So...people with answers, keep at it. I like hearing people's ideas on the topic.

@Auspice said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

I sort of miss Arx, but my big issue with it wasn't issues like Custodius being around, sadly...

My issue was everything moved way, way too fast for me. And with my migraines now compounding my availability even more, I just... sadly still don't see it being a good fit for me.

Arx is the only game I am playing right now and as a fellow migraneur and otherwise often very rl distracted person I definitely get you. It is hard to keep up with everything, super hard, especially while learning the system and an original theme and etc.

I think the game is fantastic though. @Apos especially has gone out of his way to give me secrets and hooks and ways to engage. I would have been over the moon in love with Arx if it had existed when I was a college student or a young adult with no kids yet and a less intense job. As it is, I think the game is awesome, and I -am- able to have fun and find things to get involved with and do even if I do not always know all the details of the plot stories and that kind of thing. It's not designed /for/ the casual gamer, but a casual gamer can totally have fun there if they find the right niche to play in.

He had a solid point though. I fully admit that in certain moods, with certain people who I know also enjoy this kind of thing (so not with people who I know are totally bored/annoyed/etc, it's not a punishment on the unwilling) I sometimes will play just to play around with writing, and make flowery poses and put allegory and whatever in there and the actual pleasure of the task is just kind of playing around with language. In other words it may NOT be about these things we all know we love and seek in scenes, like plot pushing and character development and storyline exploration and meta-plot solving as a team and and and etc.

I know I could find other mediums for this but I don't usually want to do it for long enough to be one of the folks who is also writing a novel, or even writing short stories to share online somewhere, or whatever. It's using the already handy medium of the game and the characters to write for fun to unwind and relax. I don't do it all the time (or ever, lately) but I did enjoy it sometimes interspersed with the other kinds of rp, the ones more about the game than the thesaurus cuddling and metaphor dependency.

To bring this back around to the question of what kinds of writers I like writing with, I guess my response is 'it varies a TON'. I obvs love writing with @Coin as we have discussed and he likes brevity and probably puts my poses all through that website that helps you write like Hemingway to dissect them. I also love writing with people who are super spammy and flowery and nutty, because then I can be too sometimes. I've clicked with all kinds, and who I might want to click with on a given night of rp time may depend largely on my whim!

@Coin said in Good writin'.:

I think, @juke, your problem here is going to be that there are no games in which you'll find just the style you want. Sure, some games have a style most players adopt, but by and large, style is more of a person-to-person thing, in these cases.

For me, randomly looking back, the people I really love writing with when it comes to cooperative back-and-forth, and pose efficiency and clarity, while also maintaining some sort of poetry (and this, I stress, does not mean I don't immensely enjoy writing with others) are very few and far between. Many of them are not on MSB.

The following is an extremely short list of people I randomly remember who I also know the MSB usernames of:

@EmmahSue, who enchanted me as Meadow on The Reach.
@Eerie, who hasn't played in a while now, but who is just so much fun.
@Gingerlily, when I can get her to not scroll my screen like she's playing Galaga with words.
@Quibbler, less about the poetry and more because we just click when it comes to rapidfire back-and-forth, laconic shit.
@tragedyjones, because we share humor, even though he barely ever plays, the fucker.
@Scorn is furiously fun when she's on, which if I played now-a-days, I would hope would be often.
@ILuvGrumpyCat ditto the above, when she's on, she shines.

Honestly? If I seek you out for RP, especially to make groups or long-term stories, it means I like the way you write.

I love this all but my favorite part is how it was all sweet of you and you were making a list of people whose writing you think well of and enjoy...you still kind of managed to burn me too. It's just so very @Coin

I'm curious too, just because I've also heard this game mentioned lots and lots. WWII isn't my favorite subject matter, but I'd be willing to give it a whirl, if you open it up to strangers too.

@Thenomain said in Strange Game Dev Inquiries from surreality (condensed):

@Gingerlily

I think you and I (and possibly also @Three-Eyed-Crow and probably also @Ghost) are trying to bend the consensus that "non-constructive" doesn't always mean "using insulting words".

On Wora (since we're now merging this thread and the MSB Meta-Discussion thread), the exact rule was, "Attack the idea, not the person." This is what @Arkandel was reminding people of. I'll be honest I didn't think that @bored's original argument was attacking the person, tho I think that he and @surreality did slip into that without using the same four-letter words that Ghost did.

Here, the exact phrasing is, "Something besides the equivalent of 'NO YOU'. That shouldn't be hard, right?" But this isn't a rule. We were pretty hard-assed about the rule on Wora, while here we are, coming close to discussing what "constructive" really means. I think we can both agree that "no you" happened before Ghost raised the middle finger.

But then, we're both +1ing each other so much that people might think we'd need some alone-time. I'm not just preaching to the choir here, though, I promise.

P.S. I did not +1 this purposefully, but in my heart I did.