Bleed

Via former student Gabriel, Nathan Thornburgh's excellent piece on Nordic larp.  This is the world of my novel (only in Morningside Heights)!

Quest vs. picaresque: the final battle

"Could one make an RPG based on Candide?"

Today in culture

More good gaming links from Ed Park: the germ of a novel; Adventure Generator!

I had three books of high research priority Amazoned to the hotel in Miami last week, as shipping to Cayman is either very expensive or very slow; Access All Areas is interesting and relevant to TBOMS and deeply charming, but Pervasive Games: Theory and Design is UTTERLY BRILLIANT! In fact (I am laughing, it is implausible, but somehow my research interests always converge across genres/modes and centuries) I am wondering whether I could somehow assign a chapter or two of it in my spring lecture class on Restoration and eighteenth-century drama, which is going to have a "presentation of self" theme and include tons of Erving Goffman and theories of moral sentiments and so forth - isn't it possible that Garrick's Stratford Jubilee was one of the world's first LARPs?!?

In other news, I enjoyed the first part of J. D. Daniels' "week in culture" (I am a Daniels fan - I want a book! - but here are a couple shorter bits you can read for free online), even though the name of the feature slightly makes me laugh...

"I am a teenage elf"

"If someone told me about it now, I would probably think it's incredibly nerdy, but once you go out into the forest and get to hit monsters with a latex sword, there's no going back."