Friday, July 8, 2011

The Best Blog You Are Not Reading

Time for another installment of "The Best Blog You Are Not Reading".

This time I want to focus on a writer's blog that helps you figure out what your characters are all about.
The Blog That Helps You Diagnose Your Characters

So if you are not into role-playing and see your character only as a collection of numbers and no name, then this is probably not for you.

The author, Joshua D. Hoyt, is a writer and also has a Master's Degree in Counselling Psychology and working on another on in School Psychology. I have a Masters and Ph.D. (ABD) in Educational Psychology myself and working on a Ph.D. in Curriculum Instruction myself, so I appreciate what he is writing here.

Now most people reading my blog are not writers (though some are) and most are gamers.  But we all deal with characters of some sort.  Players might want some sort of insight as to why things are done and GMs in particular (who don't have time to RP a character from tabula rasa) will gain some help in making their NPCs more life-like.

Some of the work is rather simple stuff, his run on Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs was good, but his Schema and Traits discussion was very interesting.

My favorite so far though has been his working through the Erikson stages of Development.  I liked this since I have been working on a character life-span development idea now for sometime.

I like this blog since it allows me to use both my gamer and academic backgrounds.  And besides that it is kinda fun.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hmmm... Thanks for sharing - as a PsyD in Clinical Psychology I found it interesting and I'll have to think about it.

D.

Author Joshua Hoyt said...

Thanks for the mention. I am also a gamer and love playing all sorts of games from computer to RPG paper and pencil. I welcome any comments on my blog even if they disagree with my own. I find your blog to be very interesting as well and enjoy reading it!

Timothy S. Brannan said...

Josh,

Thanks for your blog! I plan to use it for some of my own work here.