Are These Design Principles Relevant?

Jeff over at the Bottom Feeder continues to impress me with his observations and wisdom.  In this post, he reviews Minecraft, a computer game that, frankly, I know nothing about.  (Although after reading his review and the comments following, it sounds like a game any D&D player could love.)

But better than just reviewing it (which would be not very helpful, because he makes it clear very early that he likes it), he offers some thoughts on why it has been successful.  The question now becomes, could those aspects of Minecraft that Jeff thinks makes it a good game be applied to pen-and-paper adventure design?

Geomorphs Bonanza!

Go take a look at this if you like geomorphs.

Thanks to Thomas Denmark for showing me the way.

Zombie Fungus - FOR REAL?!

Yes.  This will be the last one, for tonight at least.

The video here is one of the creepiest things I've seen in a long time, especially toward the end when you are confronted with the sight of corpse after corpse while listening to strange children's-music-box music and the voice of that British guy whose name I cannot remember.

And for this, I have to thank joethelawyer.

Perhaps the best part is right at the end when the narrator says, "But these attacks do have a positive effect on the jungle's diversity, since parasites like these stop any one group of animal from getting the upper hand.  The more numerous a species becomes, the more likely it will be attacked by its nemesis, a cordyceps fungus."

Perhaps that species is humanity?!?

Nice.

Gaming Economics

To continue the trend from the previous post, I'd like to thank the Greyhawk Grognard for this little post regarding the costs of rpgs.  In his post, he discusses the cost of 1E core rules in their day and compares them to the cost of 4E core rules today.

Saturn Brilliant

For at least a few more weeks, I'm not going to be able to post regularly or with anything that requires much effort on my part.  What that means is that what little posting there is will probably be things of which I want to save a record.

This video is one such thing.  Absolutely amazing, in my opinion.

Many thanks to Trollsmyth for linking to it.

The D&D Article at Salon

I don't know if people have linked to this yet or not, because I've been away from the blogosphere for almost two weeks now.  (Busy at work in general, and focusing on that BIG project that is due the first week of April.)  It's nice to see D&D once again rearing its head in the mainstream media--especially when it is in a positive light.