Upcoming Article

My next article likely won't come out until the middle of June or perhaps the middle of July. When it gets here, it will be on one of two topics:

Possibility #1: An article about the nature of personhood, the nature of suffering, and what they tell us about how to narrate a good RPG game as a GM (or ST, or whatever), geared particularly for horror RPG settings. This is an article that I have secretly wanted to write for a long time now, but have had a very difficult time struggling with the ethics involved in writing such an article. The problem with it (and the reason why I still might not write it) is that it will basically end up having contained within it a cookbook on how to rip people's souls apart, like down to their core. I'm not sure if I can really stomach publishing something like that to a bunch of people I don't know. While my intent will be for it to be used for good fun roleplaying... it's kind of like teaching some one how to make a nuclear bomb so they can make better fireworks...

Possibility #2: I've also been strongly considering writing a series of articles (which might turn into a book one of these days) about various theories and high-academic materials as they relate to RPGs and Magic: The Gathering. Since my two great loves right now are the big theoretical works in the academy and these sorts of games, and since the two communities have so little contact between them, I'm thinking of trying to bridge that gap. So the articles would try to aim at both communities, as a "Games explained to Academics" and "Academics explained to Gamers" at the same time (rather than writing separate articles for each which used totally different approaches). Alternately, I'm considering doing a more concrete look at demonstrating different religious worldviews and how they get integrated into Whitewolf's oWoD material. I might save these ones though, just because if I do it, I want to do this one RIGHT, which means like... a big book, not a big article.