I am a gamer, which is not quite the same as saying that I play games.<\/p>\n
I do play games, of course: board games, wargames, computer games, role playing games, games of chance and games of skill. But just playing games doesn’t make me a gamer.<\/p>\n
I am a gamer because I am fascinated with the rule systems that structure games. Much of my gaming time is spent learning new rules or pouring over old ones. I find beauty in well-constructed rules that anticipate my questions about a game, that knit together possible actions without devolving into tangled prose.<\/p>\n
Rules appeal to my sense of the universe as a disorderly place made more tidy by everyone’s voluntary adherence to an organizing structure. So I study rules by playing games and, now, discussing games and the rules that drive them here, at Movement Point<\/a>.<\/p>\n Science fiction gets some treatment, too, as the literary form most concerned with rules, more than even Victorian manners novels or form-based poetry. Science fiction examines the effects of a rule on a system, extrapolating what happens when a variable changes (or doesn’t). A work of science fiction is interesting not because it has robots (or sentient widgets or kitchen-sized teleporting devices) but because of what changes when there are robots (or whatever). Good science fiction provides a coherent, systems-based look at a world with different rules than our own.<\/p>\n And, because it’s a blog, Movement Point<\/a> will sometimes deal with stuff I find interesting that has nothing to do with games or science fiction. Can’t have rules without bending them…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am a gamer, which is not quite the same as saying that I play games. I do play games, of course: board games, wargames, computer games, role playing games, games of chance and games of skill. But just playing games doesn’t make me a gamer. I am a gamer because I am fascinated with … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-basics"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pedXm-5","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6335,"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5\/revisions\/6335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chrisbaer.net\/mp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}