Alexander Williams

"I'll tell you what: try it. Give it a go. Put together a game without inherent mechanical limitations which keep a character from achieving things in their character concept. Play it. Tell us what happens. Because what you're really telling me is that writers don't have fun. That writers do not enjoy the act of creating stories. That writers, who have no inherent mechanical limitations on what they can define their characters and even environments doing beyond what they can persuade the reader is reasonable, can only create the exceedingly dull. I think something is bollocks here, but it's your point rather than mine. I also like the way you employ a strawman here, suggesting that I have advocated for unlimited power for every character in every situation in every story. That's exactly the opposite of what I've done. In fact, I've given multiple examples, vast examples, of characters with limitations which are advocated for by the player. I've been very clear about when and where such..." - Alexander Williams

"Max, I'm going to put it simply: If you have deliberately chosen and created/used mechanics which keep players from engaging with the story for arbitrary reasons, you have prevented them from engaging with the story via mechanical limitations. That's not a semantic differentiation, that's not a subtle shading, it's simply true. My point is that by and large, that kind of mechanical architecture works to stifle the creativity of the players and stomp all over engagement with the story. That may be what you want! There's certainly stories in which playing up the relative helplessness or focusing on the limits of choices that the characters have within the context of the experience is exactly what you want to do. A lot of survival horror plays on those themes, and gets a lot of mileage out of mechanics to control how much ammunition can be expended in a given encounter (typically extremely little, giving rise to feelings of pressure and stress). Mechanics which talk about randomly..." - Alexander Williams

"Personally, I love "power gamers." Absolutely adore them. No matter what game I run, no matter what the setting is, no matter what the mechanics are, I know that I can count on people who take as their primary engagement with the game the maximization of how much effect they can have on any individual scene. I know I can count on them to pay attention. I know I can count on them to know the rules. I know I can count on them to do something interesting, no matter what. I would rather have a table full of "power gamers" than almost any other gamer type known to man. The fact that they want to use the game and play the game in order to get something out of the game is a total positive. That's not something I want to step on; that's something I want to leverage to get a better game out. I generally deal with them by patting them on the back and letting them be interesting. The only problem that comes up with any sort of regularity is sometimes that I need to remind them that there are..." - Alexander Williams

"I find whether or not someone tells me that a tool that I use, frequently, and get great results from is both dead and useless a real red flag for judging a tech journalist competent or not. The second really huge red flag is the suggestion that "if only a social network had more content like Facebook, it would be more successful," because Facebook has never been a site I go to in order to get quality content. Facebook is the "drive slowly by a car wreck" of the social space; the spectacle is the only reason you drop-in. Of course, by that measure Scoble becomes clearly the asshat in this discussion; he's never met a Google product he ever liked. Don't worry though, in six months the tech journalism churn-industry will get around to breaking out the next "Google+ is dead – isn't Facebook awesome?" template-perfect articles and will keep doing what we've been doing the same time, connecting with interesting people who have things that we want to hear on subjects that we care about." - Alexander Williams

"More than half of a new Lytro Illum." - Alexander Williams

"I've seen enough modern performance art installations to make that my first question. Statistically, that's MORE likely, and has been for many decades now." - Alexander Williams

"If we want to discuss this from the perspective of whether or not it functions as an effective piece of marketing – that's easy. It's complete crap. As advertising, it fails on almost every level. No immediate idea of what the product itself is, no connection as far as a casual observer can see between the mood of the piece and the product being sold (which would be made immeasurably better if they made it clear that their macros are designed for creating moody, dark, near-monochromatic imagery). It makes absolutely no sense if we read it as promotion for the photographic house themselves; in that case, I would expect to see at least a couple of other examples of their work in set into the ad. It's a terrible advertisement. But unless you are offended by people doing a bad job of advertisement (a position I waffle on from day to day), there is nothing inherently offensive about this piece. It is no more and no less inherently offensive than the cover of a horror novel called The..." - Alexander Williams

"You can have your opinion, but it's wrong. I mean that as in "it's objectively wrong." You can see that in any basic analysis of arts, and in many displays of it. The origin of the Santa Claus image in Coca-Cola's advertising? Art, and well considered and criticized art at that. The images of the Marlboro man in the production of those pieces of advertising, considered quite excellent examples of commercial art and even debatable as examples of high art. In fact, if we take the definition of art that usually promoted by artists themselves: a piece intended to evoke an emotion, provoke a response, communicate an idea – there's nothing in that inherently incompatible with commercial activity. If it wants we would have to immediately strike from the rolls of "art" any piece that actually sold. In fact, any piece up in a gallery with the intention of selling is exactly that – advertisement. Your objection is that you don't like your response. You're provoked. But rather than spend time..." - Alexander Williams

"Except they never claimed that. They were pretty upfront about the fact that they knew it was provocative, and they had a message – however loosely connected to the product that they were putting out – to convey with it. People brought their own baggage, manufactured outrage, and told other people about it? Where I'm from, that's called "unmitigated success." The real question in my mind is how many news agencies, web services, and other news outlets will be calling them for the right to use that exact image in their next Black History Month trailers and headers, because if there is anything that is a complete circus, it's the coverage and outright gnashing of teeth coupled with self-flagellation during Black History Month. I imagine that number will be fairly significant." - Alexander Williams

"It is a strong indicator, however…" - Alexander Williams

"Anything beyond that is brought by the viewer. Perhaps that's really the problem here – a single stark image is capable of evoking enough emotion in enough people who have their own emotional baggage lugged around waiting to be exploited and they dislike having it pointed out. Isn't that part of the purpose of art? To provoke, to incite thought, to demand questions be asked of the self? Seems to me that far from being a mediocre photography house, as someone put it elsewhere, these guys are pretty good. It's a great advertisement." - Alexander Williams

"Yeah, we definitely shouldn't use illustrative description when we talk about things. People might be able to make some sort of personal connection with an intuitive understanding of what were talking about. In fact, let's eschew language at all. That's so "lowest common denominator." Instead, let us communicate using only this random series of gestures and the patch of grunts that I have laboriously designed over the last fifteen minutes. Despite no one having any sort of understanding of how and why it exists, I think that that will be the best means of getting people to communicate with my message. No, that would be stupid. There are two measures of distance and range which, when named, create a visceral sense of understanding in the majority of the civilized world. Those two things are: "A football field." "A city block." It is a useful quality of both of them that between the two they cover 95% of the people that you would ever want to talk to while simultaneously not being..." - Alexander Williams

"Ironically, this is a perfect moment to refer to "Miracle on 34th Street" ..." - Alexander Williams

"You should be more worried by the fact that all the signs show that we've already seen all of these tactics deployed in every major "social media involved" tempest-in-a-teapot for the last decade, and before that the same techniques and tactics were employed at a much more glacial pace – but still employed – as both a means of manipulating public opinion and, near orthagonally, for self-aggrandizement. Once you start thinking about it, you start wondering how much of all public polling, "public" involvement, and activism in general is just the equivalent of a small group of people with nothing better to do shouting stupid things at another small group of people with nothing better to do and journalists pretending that it means something." - Alexander Williams