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Anyone who had truly looked at Tuesday could not have possibly seen a coyote. But the woman had not truly looked, and the injustice of this hit him. Why was it acceptable for apparently well-meaning people to see the world in such a general way?
Sam, Sadie, and Marx had debated whether it was the right time for a game as “soft” as Mapleworld. As it turned out, in the late fall of 2001, Mapleworld was exactly what people craved. A virtual world that was better governed, kinder, and more understandable than their own.
Similar to Animal crossing during covid
“Despite everything that transpired at Unfair Games on December 4th, 2005,
Uh oh
Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know—were persimmons his favorite fruit, or had they just now become his favorite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard?
“It’s the fear that time is running out and that you’re going to miss an opportunity. Literally, the gate is closing, and you’ll never get in.” “That’s me,” Sam said. “I have that constantly.”
I thought things had to come from you for you to even be able to see them,”
“You think you can know a person from playing their games?” “I do. No better way, in my humble opinion.”
“You’ve been here, sure. But you’re fundamentally unimportant. If you weren’t here, it would be someone else. You’re a tamer of horses. You’re an NPC, Marx.”
Sam is a real jerk, huh?
Your mother is in the bedside chair. She is wearing a dress printed with strawberries and birds. Using a long needle, she is stringing brightly colored origami cranes into garlands. You know what she’s doing: It’s a Japanese custom called senbazuru. If you make one thousand paper cranes, you can restore someone to good health. Though you cannot see him, you become aware of the fact that your father is sitting on the floor. He is folding cranes so that your mother can string them.
Video games don’t make people violent, but maybe they falsely give you the idea that you can be a hero.
“Is Banquo a good role?” Sam asked. “I’m not particularly familiar with Macbeth.” “It’s the best friend. It’s not Macbeth. It’s not ‘A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.’ But it has its moments. I have a name! I get to die! I have a ghost!
There are no ghosts, but up here”—she gestured toward her head—“it’s a haunted house.”
“If I’ve done the work in the scenes before I die, if I’ve made a real impression, they’ll feel me in the scenes I’m not in anyway.”
At this point, you can choose from three different options: (1) the ‘workmanlike’ actor playing Banquo, who has been understudying Macbeth, (2) Richard Burbage, ‘who is demanding more and more money and may have the plague,’ (3) an actor of ‘unknown quality from a traveling theater company of unknown origin.’ ”
Almost this exact thing takes place in Witcher 3
“What is a game?” Marx said. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”
Her inky hair had been customized into plaits, and she wore round, silver glasses that seemed as if they belonged to someone else.
Similar to Marx's memory of Sadie
To depict her, Emily thought, I would require a great many circles. “Your eyes remind me of someone I used to know,” Emily observed. “Where do you come from?”
“Your prescription is incorrect. I question if these glasses could have possibly been made for you. They seem as if they came from a menu of preset, aesthetic options, and glasses should never be obtained this way.
“It is an imperfect trade, Dr. Daedalus,” Emily apologized. “I fear I’ve burdened you with an unequal portion of the work.” “There are no perfect trades,” Dr. Daedalus countered. “And I shall enjoy the diversion.”
“What is a ‘programmer’?” Emily asked. “A programmer is a diviner of possible outcomes, and a seer of unseen worlds.” “My. Is this something they do where you come from?” “Yes. I derive from a superstitious people.” Dr. Daedalus hesitated. “But that is not how I came to Go. I used to dabble in mathematics, but I had no gift for it.”
“My life was quite easy for a long time,” Emily said. “It would be a lie to pretend that I have suffered more than anyone else. I had work I liked and was considered somewhat good at. But my partner died, and now I detest my work, and I have been blue. More than blue really. I have been in the depths of despair. My grandfather, Fred, who I adored, recently died. It begins to seem to me that life is little more than a series of losses, and as you must know by now, I hate losing. And I suppose I came to Friendship because I no longer wished to be in the place I lived and sometimes I no longer
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A sign in front of the field read: do not shoot the bison.
“Do you mean marriage?” “It doesn’t have to have a name,” Daedalus said. “It can have a name if you want it to have a name.” “What would it mean, then?” “It means a very long game of Go, played without stops.”
As a wedding gift to Ms. Marks, Dr. Daedalus created a topiary hedge maze in the garden by her house. When asked why she had decided to make such a gift, the doctor replied cryptically, “To make a game is to imagine the person playing it.”
Emily B. Marks and Dr. Edna Daedalus are proud to report the arrival of their son, Ludo Quintus Marks Daedalus. Dr. Daedalus says the boy is healthy and has an area of 17 square pixels.
“The boredom you speak of,” Alabaster said. “It is what most of us call happiness.”
a horse breaker,
“What’s your favorite part of The Iliad?” “What’s The Iliad?” He paused, removed his hat, and a second later, as if possessed, the NPC had transformed into a different version of himself: “Then first of all came Andromaché, his wife, and cried—‘O my husband, thou hast perished in thy youth, and I am left in widowhood, and our child, thy child and mine, is but an infant!…Sore is thy parents’ grief, O Hector, but sorest mine. Thou didst stretch no hands of farewell to me from thy bed, nor speak any word of comfort for me to muse on while I weep night and day.’ ” When he was finished, he bowed
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EMILY MARKS DAEDALUS 1875–1909 SHE HATH DIED OF DYSENTERY.
To build a world for someone seems a romantic thing from where I stand.”
I’ve got to pick up my daughter from the sitter at five.”
Very little mention of how hard being a single parent is, especially at first. Just skipped it in her depression off screen
How to explain to Destiny that the thing that made her work leap forward in 1996 was that she had been a dervish of selfishness, resentment, and insecurity? Sadie had willed herself to be great: art doesn’t typically get made by happy people.
She favored casual games, the kind of thing that could be played while she was distracted with the business of keeping herself and a brand-new, insatiable creature alive.
Ah, good, some acknowledgement
Sadie told Sam he had tricked her, but the truth was, she had tricked herself. It was embarrassing how much that silly, exquisite world had meant to her.
Eventually, Sadie imagined that Marx would be reduced to a single image: just a man standing under a distant torii gate, holding his hat in his hands, waiting for her.
For most of his life, Sam had found it difficult to say I love you. It was superior, he believed, to show love to those one loved. But now, it seemed like one of the easiest things in the world Sam could do. Why wouldn’t you tell someone you loved them? Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning. Why not? Of course, you goddamn did.
The thing I find profoundly hopeful when I’m feeling despair is to imagine people playing, to believe that no matter how bad the world gets, there will always be players.”
We had so much freedom—creatively, technically. No one was watching us, and we weren’t even watching ourselves. What we had was our impossibly high standards, and your completely theoretical conviction that we could make a great game.”
You couldn’t be old and still be wrong about as many things as she’d been wrong about, and it was a kind of immaturity to call yourself old before you were.
