The Novelist—developed and published by Kent Hudson/Orthogonal Games—is an interesting and only slightly flawed game. When I heard about it, it was characterized as kind of a take on The Shining—the Kubrick film, more than the King novel—in that it involves a novelist and his family in an isolated house shared by an invisible presence. There’s one big difference: the viewpoint character that you play in the game is the ghost. Well, sort of.
This is probably of limited interest to most readers, aside from tabletop RPG fans. (Basically, I recovered (from the Wayback Machine) a snapshot from a time one and a half decades ago, when I was running an online turn-based tabletop roleplaying game–sort of–by email, without all the amazing resources available to RPG enthusiasts today.)
Update (17 Nov. 2014): You, too, can enjoy this wonderful die… if you use an Android device and can read Korean, anyway, or if you visit Insadong (and can read hanja). See the update at the end of the post for more details. Original Post: As promised the other day: the Korean d14 from the Shilla Dynasty, used for drinking games. (Yeah, given the popularity even now of group drinking games in South Korea, that’s hardly a surprise.) But the d14 is unusual: it’s a rather bizarre polyhedral die called the 주령구 (Juryeonggu), which I first ran across during a visit to the Anapji palace in …
I normally don’t post about computer games, and think of the “Gaming” section of my blog as being about tabletop RPGs. However, both Mrs. Jiwaku and I have enjoyed Frozenbyte‘s Trine 2 quite a bit, so I’m going to make an exception: By “quite a bit,” I mean the degree of enjoyment, not the amount of play: it’s taken us ages (and I mean, months on end) to finish the game, but that’s because we’ve rationed it to sessions of about an hour at a time, of only occasional frequency. Still, it’s been great fun playing together, and working out how …
Attention conservation notice: This post will mainly interest those who are curious about my experiences using RPGing in language teaching as a method of generation motivation, focus, and interest in language learning (a topic I discussed in a recent essay of mine published in the WyrdCon 2012 Companion Book).