March 2015: ‘Extended Play’

Abstract image evoking bird silhouette

Hello, friends! March is here, and I, for one, hope Spring just gets on with it, already. While winter gives us the opportunity to hunker down, curl up, and stay under the covers just a little longer, this particular winter has also incited high levels of cabin fever. As a result, I’ve tried to pass the time playing games. Some of my recent play sessions have included Never Alone, The Banner Saga, Lost Constellation, and The Long Dark. Oddly enough, each of these games feature winter conditions, and have mirrored the environment outside my living room window. As a result, sometimes the line between game and reality has become a little fuzzy. That got me thinking about this month’s theme for Blogs of the Round Table: “Extended Play.”

Have you ever been so immersed or so invested in a game that it bleeds over (or extends over, if you will) the border of the screen and into your life? Maybe after a particularly grueling game session, you incorporated the game into your dream. Maybe while shopping at the grocery store you momentarily had to fight off the urge to see how much of your carrying capacity was left and whether you needed to “drop” a few items to lighten the load – or maybe you considered how many rupees you had instead of real-world currency in line at the check-out. Have you ever attempted to apply game logic outside a game? Forgotten you don’t actually know how to shoot a bow at all? We’d like to hear about the moments in your day-to-day where the line between game-fiction and reality have, even if only for a moment, collided. What was the result? Did the collision force you to think about the game in a different way? About reality differently? both? Share your thoughts with us on the expandable and extending barriers of play.

We’ll be accepting blogs until March 31 . You can see current submissions here:

Use this code to embed the links in your blog, if your publishing platform allows iframes:

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Please email us your submissions or tweet them to @thejoycean or @critdistance with the #BoRT hashtag. Happy blogging!

Rules of the Round Table

  • Blogs of the Round Table is not curated. If you write it, we’ll publish it, as long as it’s connected to the topic and has been written specially for BoRT or up to one month prior.
  • This BoRT post is the home of the discussion: as I receive new submission blogs, we’ll update the ‘BoRT Linkomatic’ so new blogs are reflected on this page immediately. We’ll also use the @critdistance Twitter account to post regular updates, so follow us!
  • Your duty as a knight of the round table is to leave a comment on a blog to which you respond with a link to the response piece, to give them a ‘right of reply’. Keep the conversation going.
  • If your work contains potentially disturbing content, please include a suitable warning at the start. Use your common sense.
  • You can submit as many articles as you like throughout the month, and it doesn’t matter if they are commercially published, paywalled or available for free. We will need a transcript for paywalled content to be approved.