Maybe I’m too much of a pattern-making story-making animal, but the questions this time really built a single coherent body of inquiry for me. I felt like I was addressing a single important topic from multiple angles of attack.

I introduce the video with a warning, but I’ll say it briefly here as well: this Q&A presentation is not screwing around. I say things which aren’t nice about things which I think are bad.

The Adept Play posts about Väsen are Skräck i gamla Sverige and Neck and neck.

Just after 4:00 in Part 3, I did not quite succeed in saying that, according to the mistaken engineering-for-purpose viewpoint, the alleged purpose is not somethng you (plural) do, but is instead given to you by the game, after you’ve been entrained to its little incentive reinforcements. 

The Comics Madness posts relevant to Jon’s question include Striking twice, some day, Marvelous, meet miraculous, The Big Bang: The Punisher, 1986-Present, Batpulp and its antecedent The not so secret cabal. You can follow the Rorschach and Watchmen tags for a number of posts as well if you can handle not seeing what everyone is supposed to say about them. In Part 4, I should have landed the point better about Captain Marvel in the mid-late 1980s, when they invented the notion that he always has the mind of Billy Batson, and made him not only a kid, mentally, but a singularly goofy and naïve kid. It’s outlined clearly enough, I think, in the Marvelous/miraculous post. 

In Part 6, I should have been more specific about system features in The Shadow of Yesterday, I but wanted to avoid the impression of a picky review. For example, I think more dedicated playful-play, instead of the fetish for cleverness and the rush to publish, would have dialed back the X.P. system for Keys, so that racking up points merely by according with the description would be gone, and therefore switching-out Keys would not have been so constantly available.