CasiornThinks

by Dan Roque | Reading Time: 3 minutes | In  Metaphors & Analogies Everyday establishments—from high-end restaurants to your run-of-the-mill convenience stores—thrive on their predictability. The same principle applies to educational institutions, media outlets, religious organizations, and even your local hobby shop. These predictable, bounded structures act as " closed circuits " that serve as the foundation of human society, shaping how we live on a daily basis and guiding our expectations. Much like a train schedule or a Sunday Mass, board games operate as their own kind of closed circuit: they are mechanisms constrained by specific rules designed to generate a unique experience. The Ritual of the System I still remember a friend laying out the cards and resource tokens for the game Splendor , explaining to the group that we were up-and-coming medieval jewelers. Our shared goal was to amass enough facilities to win the trust and attention of noble patrons. Op...

by Dan Roque | Reading Time: 7 minutes | In Digital Literacy It’s always a little weird when people ask me if I do something. “You paint?” “You play tabletop RPGs ?” “You write poems?” “You can do that in Excel ?” “You play billiards?” Yes. All of them. And more. Usually their eyes light up—like they’ve discovered a rare species in the wild: a person with hobbies. Then they tell me the same story: how they’ve wanted to try it since they were young, how it’s been sitting on their “one day” list for years. And then comes the weirder part. When I say, “You should try it,” they recoil—softly. Politely. Like I’ve offered them a haunted object. They’ll say they can’t. Or they don’t have time. Or it’s “not for them.” Then they call it frustration , like it’s a personality trait. But most of the time, “frustration” is just fear wearing a nicer outfit. Fear of being bad at something in public. Fear of not improving fast enough. Fear of the unknown—and the humiliating first steps tha...