Maybe someone can explain what the appeal of this is. Since I still have classes that ask me to use it now and again. Not that I want to knock interactive building/social/business/whatever projects too much, but I find the interface clunky and it keeps freezing up my (really quite nice) computer. Has anyone had a good experience with this program/found a good use for it?

After talking with teza, majic13, and corrosivevision, I am going to reroll a character and give Fallout 3 another go - this time with lockpocking and hacking skills. And I will be taking notes on what I find for narrative purposes. Since this is not a Fallout journal and not everyone on my friend's list is a gamer/snotty game analyzer, I have created a special journal just for this purpose: babayagafallout. I will not experience a personal tragedy if nobody friends it, but it will be a nice tool for me. I am very interested in narrative in games and this is a kind of narrative I haven't given enough mind to. Also, it's a break from my endless graduate work, what.

... mice wrestling in my ceiling.

How can I sleep with an Olympic tournament of tail-twisted, scrabble-footed wrestling going on over my head?

In context with a quick phone conversation about asathena about the potential negative correlation between game size and strong game narrative (because the focus shifts from story to exploration), here's the number of named areas in each of the three Fallout games:

Fallout 1: 12
Fallout 2: 23
Fallout 3: 163

I'll probably revisit this yet again (because I love talking about games, have you noticed?), but this is a little more serious. I don't know how many of you have played the old games. They have a very different narrative feel from Fallout 3, probably largely because they were created by a very different set of developers at a very different time. The narrative arcs of Fallout 1 and 2 are fairly basic. Your home is at risk. You must venture out into a dangerous world to save your home. As is only appropriate to pastiches of 50's pulp themes, the games are in a way very reactive or even reactionary. You're not trying to make the world as a whole a better place, you're just making sure that the people you care about survive, that the current threat passes you by. However, because the game developers were very concerned about giving the player plenty of choices and attendant consequences, the actions you take to save your home have wide ripples. And these are games where character development is possible, even inevitable. You start out as a sheltered person who has never done anything terribly wrong (or right, for that matter). What you end up as is entirely your choice.

This is not to say that Fallout 1 and 2 are clones of each other. After all, Fallout 1 is an elegant, fairly serious (and quite brief) story about the loss of innocence. The NPCs you can recruit are cyphers, purely utilitarian (and of doubtful use late in the game), but the universe you wander is textured and dark. Fallout 2 is . . . frankly insane. Brilliant, but insane. It takes pastiche to giddy and at times very juvenile lengths. The fourth wall is cracked constantly, you get blatant and joke-y callouts to everything from Terminator to Strangelove, and you're guaranteed to run into absurdities like super mutant magicians, radioactive giant geckos, and exploding toilets. The NPCs are much more fleshed out, the dialogue is more extensive, and the game has a much more exploratory narrative -- and is thus much longer. As a story, it makes less sense, but as a game, it is far more replayable, and perhaps even enjoyable.

Fallout 3 is something else entirely.

( But what is it? )

I totally have not had time for this, but in playing my wussified Fallout 3, I have noticed a few important cultural things.

( Cultural analysis. Of a violent RPG/shoot-em-up. Yeah. )

I'm pretty much failing at Nano because this is my last month of the semester and my time/thought energy's been abbreviated. I will work on the novel in bits and chunks and prep to do a real Nano in December - but I'm happy with it so far. Far happier than I've been with my creative work in a long time.

This has been a ridiculously good school day. A teacher I've been nervous about all semester paid me a very detailed compliment over a paper that I still don't think I could have possibly responded sufficiently to. If I do end up pursuing a Ph.D., it may end up being partly her fault.

The paper was okay - it was the discussion afterward via email that went deep. I wanted to share a bit, because I reached a kind of small epiphany with this teacher's coaching. About insular Mormon towns and their Mormonness and censorship issues and we can go on. But. But. We are often such bookworms and fantasy buffs because of this kind of quiet Kantian search for the sublime. Underneath this prudery is the quest for the inexpressible. Verily. Okay. Working on novel now.

1,768 words, including probably the worst poem I've ever written in my life and a spider-vulture-rat-bat. Okay.

. . . when I wake up. All I know for sure is that it's a fourth draft of my Ivan and the Firebird efforts, that there will be shark/fish people, that it will be more steampunky than strictly fairy tale middle-ages, that Baba Yaga will factor highly, that my own weird magic will factor highly, that a river will factor highly, and that Ivan will be a trickster-y wise fool in a serious setting as per the wisdom of holyspigot. Verily.

It will also be in first person even after I swore it wouldn't be.

How do you write something magical?