Way With Worlds: Recording Your World

by

Shelves

[Way With Worlds appears at Seventh Sanctum at at MuseHack]

So you want to build a nice detailed setting. You are ready to keep a record of everything so you review and expand your work. You’re ready to dive into this and put your world to pen, keyboard, map, and file.

This raises the question of just how you record everything.

If you’ve ever visited a fan wiki or purchased one of those “world of . . .” books that attempts to distill a novel or series of novels into a record of that universe, you know there is a lot of data. It can be a little daunting because when you want to create your setting in detail, really get into it, and you’re basically creating one of those. On your own. Along with writing your story or stories.  It’s a bit daunting

What’s the best way to do it?

Well, that’s actually several questions. So let’s get to them.

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A Real Christmas Display – No Greed, No War On Christmas

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I’m going to start with a rant, but this is actually about re-finding a real spirit for the Holidays, so hang with me.

2013 is the year Christmas finally became meaningless to mean. The shopping season gobbled up Thanksgiving. The usual complaints about the nonexistent War on Christmas were extra stupid (but I’m sure moved books and sold merch), and we got to see a newscaster argue that a holiday figure partially based on Turkish Saint and a Mediterranean Jew were white guys and that this somehow mattered for the kids.

Frankly, I was feeling tired, cynical, and fed up. I like the holidays, I like the fun, the festivity, the feasting, and the gift-giving. I like the gratitude and the simple things.

Not so found of the ever advancing Shoggoth of BS that Christmas has degenerated into over time. Somehow it seems to get stupider and more commercial each year, and we’ve been warned about the commercialism since those old Charlie Brown Christmas specials.

Then, something got me thinking.

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Geek As Citizen: Marketing, Games, And Our Un-Separate Culture

by

PuzzlePieces

Some time ago I was introduced to the article “No Girls Allowed” by Tracey Lien. It looked at why video games were considered “for boys” and the cultural and economic forces behind that attitude.

The article is well worth reading, but a thing that stands out is that there’s one huge factor in this issue – and many issues of gender divides – and that’s Marketing and the audiences it choses to pursue. Lien focuses on the role of marketing in our lives – and in how it can affect attitudes about gender. She chooses the geeky area of video games to do it.

Games were deliberately marketed to a male audience years ago. Now today, this has become a social norm, a social assumption – and one you see in geek culture and in people’s discussions of geek culture.

We, the geeks, got “normed” by people trying to sell games.

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