well it's funny that you should mention that because i am ON THE VERGE OF SIGNING A CONTRACT TO WRITE A BOOK ABOUT THIS VERY SUBJECT

but here's the basics: start by identifying the most important rule of the game, and find the most effective way to teach it to the player. then start introducing her to the COROLLARIES and EMBELLISHMENTS upon that rule.

EXAMPLE: the most important thing in mighty jill off is jill's super-tall jump. so she starts at the bottom of a really deep pit. there's nothing to do down here but jump, and with a single button press jill jumps all the way out of the pit! now the player knows how far jill jumps! the second lesson involves another long jump, but this time with SPIKES at the top! the player learns the second-most important rule in mighty jill off, that jill can stop in the middle of a jump!

in the next part of the game, she practices jumping side-to-side from platform to platform, with nothing dangerous underneath. then, she does tall full-height jumps, but over burning flames! and then, jump side-to-side, but over flames! you introduce ideas, then you develop them, and then you start mixing them together. later, jill will have to JUMP really high, STOP beneath a row of spikes, then FLOAT sideways over hot flames to a safe platform.

all of the challenges in mighty jill off are laid out in a single, fixed order, bottom to top; that's not the case with REDDER - in that game it was impossible to know in which exact order every player explores every room in the game. but because there are only a few points of transition between different areas, i knew that, say, the player had always passed through an area containing automatic guns before she ever encountered a room with automatic guns that *ricochet*.

This is the first time I have thought about Jet Li in 10 years.

"miss andry?" what kind of made-up nonsense is that

is that like hippogriffs and cantoblepas and shit

Yeah, isn't it? I'm hearing more and more of that, too. Game jams have not traditionally had much press involvement, so I'm curious what I can do to help them as a form.

Nope. All my talents are kept on public display.

this is the question of the day are you fucking kidding

It's largely the subject matter, yes. I'm not huge on straight-up literary fiction - I WANT LASERS OR ELVES DAMMIT - and very little I've seen about Mad Men has me believing that it's more than a lush, exquisite soap opera. And nothing I've read about it - ever - has encouraged me to change my mind on the subject.

Whereas people whose opinions I respect, like blogger IOZ, have torn it apart: http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2009/09/sad-men.html

"I must say that Mr. Mannion gets it exactly right when he calls this coat-hanger abortion of a television program "one of the most relentlessly and deliberately humorless shows in the history of television drama.""

Or, for a less facetious critique, there's Jason Mittell: http://justtv.wordpress.com/2010/07/29/on-disliking-mad-men/

Interestingly, the only thing, other than my entirely shallow preference for shapely women, that has come close to convincing me to watch it is Abed's Don Draper impression from Community.

The Bechdel test is useful primarily for examining trends across a culture. The point being that, on a societal level, you examine the number which pass and fail says everything about the stories that society is willing to tell.

In a real way, any comic I write that has a female lead will probably pass the test (I'm sure every issue of Gen Hope passes, since we tend to follow Hope) and the ones with a male lead will occasionally fail. That's just pure maths. One woman is in almost every conversation. If the cast is roughly split between men and women, half the conversations will be with women, therefore it'll pass the test. If the lead's male, passing is reliant on independent conversations the supporting cast. A lot of comics are going to fail that.

I do find myself thinking that if you reverse the Bechdel test, and look for two men talking about something that isn't a woman, I've written quite a few that would absolutely fail - a chunk of Gen Hope issues and the female-lead Phonogram: The Singles Club stories* would fail a hypothetical reversed Bechdel test. That's also just maths.

In short, I view the test primarily as a device to make people think about gender and fiction. If someone uses it as a rule that fiction *should* apply to, it is - at best - an incredibly coarse measure of a story's feminist value and at worse a kind of bonsaification of the art form, in terms of what stories are viable.

I mean, Phonogram 2.6 is a story which fails the test because it's solely a story about a bloke sitting, by themselves, in a room. But it would also fail the test if it was - say - Laura sitting in her room. If you view the Bechdel test as an absolute test to pass, you can't do a story about female isolation. You can't do all sorts of stories. So it's not a good absolute test.

Which is why it's not that kind of test. For its purpose, it's great. In an ideal world, there would probably be an equal proportion of stories that failed the Bechdel and the inverted Bechdel. That we can look at art in our world and see that's not true is the test's true power. Why aren't there more stories that pass it?

As a rule to live by, no, it's not useful at all. However, as the length answer shows, it *is* a good thing to provoke thought on the topic. And I suspect if you write comics which never pass the test, it's the sort of thing which should provoke a lot *more* thought. I seem to pass it reasonably well, just because all the comics I write lean towards a 50:50 male/female cast, no matter who the lead is. Which is deliberate.

according to anthony flack i "ad hominem" a lot and then apparently just call him a prick because i'm really tired of trying to explain the difference between gender and sexuality to terrible nerds who i know are never going to get it. i usually try to correct them, not because they're necessarily ever going to get it but because someone else who might be reading is on the fence between terrible nerd and enlightened being and needs a gentle push in the right direction, and for the sake of other gender outlaws who might feel they have no voice in that kind of community.

this question fell into my inbox four weeks before anthony flack tragically unclamped his jaw, which is pretty telling about the state of gender ignorance in games.

The ability to endure goofy anonymous questions from the Internet?

being afraid to ride down escalators when wearing heels

I really haven't played PC games with any semblance of regularity since the '90s. With that in mind, I'll go with these: X-Wing (which I played without a sound card), The Secret of Monkey Island, Fantasy General, You Don't Know Jack Vol. 3, Diablo

I liked X-Files. I might like Firefly if I watched more of it. I might like Fringe if I didn't think the acting was so silly. Battlestar Galactica is too nerdy.

Not as such; we have simply ceded to one of their slightly less important demands.

Moving my little toe independent of my other toes. Genetics!!

These days you can develop games from just about anywhere. The tools have never been cheaper, and the options to sell have never been greater. That being said, there's no real community to speak of, and while local governments may say they want more tech business to move in, they don't seem to want to do anything to help it.

Also, socially, it's hard to be this far away from other game developers. You can feel very isolated, and you have to go to events like GDC, DICE, or E3 to do any networking. It's an uphill battle, that's for sure.

I don't know that I personally ever found the comic strip or the shirts offensive. But it looks like a lot of people did, and I have a lot of respect for their feelings. A significant group of people said they felt pushed away or unwelcome in the games space because of the Dickwolves thing, and those people's right to feel comfortable at a convention or in a web community is way more important than my right to... I don't know, wear a Dickwolves t-shirt, like I felt a strong need to do that anyway?

In other words, there are numerous arguments that favor being sensitive to the offended parties' feelings and no argument I could make that people should ignore those feelings.

Thank god I have never been a victim of a sexual assault. I can't imagine the permanent impact that has on one's life. I do not have the right to tell anyone that their sensitivity about the situation is inappropriate. And from what I've observed from the conversation, it's far from only victims who find the humor insulting or in poor taste.

I mean, even leaving aside the rape culture discussion and your feelings on it: the game industry has enough dick-related jokes to last it forever. I mean, do we really need any more dicks? I don't think the game industry has a problem of being too mature or too diverse, or that it's suffering from a lack of pervy guy "humor." This is just one thing: Penny Arcade will still have fruit fuckers, dickerdoodles and wank humor on the regular. It's not like you're "censoring" anyone by asking for understanding on this one thing.

I love Penny Arcade. But what have we got to lose by having some respect for people's feelings in our community when they speak up and ask us to hear them? I don't want to be part of a community where people say "hey, we're really hurt," and we say, "shut up, bitches."