Following the review of the 7 day roguelike Fatherhood on Play This Thing Jeff Lait has written up his design notes of the philosophy behind the game. It is well worth reading for to see how he uses simple mechanics to reflect real world behaviour and how those translated into the game.And off-topic from roguelikes, but interesting nonetheless, I've been enjoying Chris Bateman's series on the works of Michael Moorcock. I immensely enjoy Moorcock's approach to fantasy writing as opposed to the staid generic fantasy worlds of so many other authors. You definitely have to start with his earlier work to build up to the incomprehensibility of some of his later novels and get a feel for his rhythm of writing and ideas behind the worlds.
Michael Moorcock, now that's a name I'd completely forgotten. I remember running into his work many years ago, and was very impressed by one of the two books I read (can't remember what it was called), I loved the lack of the traditional simple fantasy morality and the anti-hero that was so different from most fantasy. It's Strange I forgot him, since that was the probably last fantasy book I really enjoyed, as my interest in fantasy was drifting away at that time. What would you recommend as his best works?
ReplyDeleteThat's a tough call: I massively enjoyed the War against the Angels trilogy - Blood: A Southern Fantasy et al, but you may want to start with some of his earlier stuff e.g. Jerry Cornelius' stories for instance.
ReplyDeleteYou can get plenty of recommendations from the original articles as well.