Breaking Player Immersion, or Why Fable 3 is a remarkable failure

I should start this post by emphasizing that it is more or less spoiler free. While I treat on a number of the mechanics and design decisions in Fable 3, I've kept almost everything about the game narrative out of it. That said, if you haven't played Fable 3, reading this post might make you disinclined to get the game. Oddly enough despite the title, that isn't actually my intent.

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Buffy

After all of the noise around Buffy yesterday, I finally sat down and watched something from the original Whedonverse. The episode happened to be Destiny which is the eighth one in season five. After completing it, I'm a mere 14 episodes away from completing my second viewing of the BtVS/Angel arc, and it happened to be a particularly good episode for thinking about the series holistically.

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Thinking about MMOs

I've been promising some thoughts on MMO design in this blog for quite some time already, and now that I've finally started playing a little WoW again (with the impending release of Cataclysm and what not), I figure now is a pretty good time to share a couple of the ideas I've had over the years. The real impetus for this post came from playing through the pre-Cataclysm quests. I had just stepped away from them at the point that I started writing this (two days ago), and on the whole I was struck by how the narrative pressure that's building in the Warcraft universe was almost completely washed out by the basic format of questing which remains more or less unchanged. More after the jump.

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Narratives of American Educational Systems: Part I

According to the degrees I hold I'm an educational researcher. Hence, despite the fact that my work generally focuses less on educational policy and the activities of public and private institutions, and more on understanding learning and designing tools to facilitate it, I do actually have a pretty intense level of exposure to research and writing focused on the history, policies, and outcomes of educational systems, especially in America. Because I have this background, I need to come out of my digital media hidey hole for a moment here to share a few thoughts on education in America that I've been having in light of some recent noise on the internet and in the public sphere.

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Yeah, that's right