About Me and This Website
QUERY1 ... "Is anybody listening?"
Hi!
My name is Nora, and my pronouns are she/they. This is my personal blog, Ivory Tower, which is about game design and technology (and sometimes other things).
The namesake of the blog is the metaphor of the “ivory tower,” a place of privilege and seclusion from reality. It’s the obvious name for a blog about how design affects real people. After all, long-form, blog-style essays about game design aren’t very ivory tower at all… are they?
Also, it sounds cool.
My purpose for this blog is threefold:
- Open an avenue for me to share my thoughts in a longer format. Social media nearly requires users to share posts quickly. Sometimes, it’s a hard limit, like X’s staggeringly small post character limit (unless you pay!). Other times, it’s a softer limit, enforced by the platform’s design and your audience’s attention span. I want to be able to share my thoughts completely and entirely, without worrying about feeling like I need to prune my thoughts to keep it concise.
- Provide a place for real discussion. I do this through the Ivory Tower Discord server, which doesn’t exist yet.
- It’s fun. Like, really really fun. I hope the webpage design and my writing show how much I enjoy things like this. This site will never run ads or try to make money. I’m just passionate, and happy to be here.
About Me (Nora)
Hi again.
My name is Nora Lucas (maybe you already knew that). Online, I go by Awurr.
As of writing, I’m a full-time student on the tail end of my cybersecurity degree. (I’m actually writing this page instead of working on a project… whoops!) I’m from Colorado, near some of the best hiking and skiing in the country, yet I spend all my free time on my computer. (whoops! x2)
Here’s some of my socials:
- X (Twitter)
- GitHub
- Steam (I won’t accept your friend request, but my profile is public!)
- Discord (Coming soon… whoops! x3)
About Me (Ivory Tower)
This blog was, in large part, created out of my growing qualms with social media (X and Instagram in particular) and the way we have discussions around the things we care about. Far too often, I’d find posts or comment sections filled with people being confidently wrong or blatantly disingenuous about all sorts of topics. I’d always resist the urge to reply, though. I knew, deep down, that doing such a thing would be pointless. After all, when’s the last time you saw someone get their mind changed in a reply section, no matter how well thought-out or sound their argument was? I’m willing to wager your answer is “never.” I know I haven’t ever seen it.
And, like, obviously! No surprises there. Maybe, once upon a time, people would have been more willing to have real discussions on the internet, in the era of IRC and chatrooms. But I come to you from late 2026, and it’s so rare to find critical thinking out in the wild.
On sites like X, you absolutely can try to have intellectual discussions with people you disagree with, hear them out, or even try to convince them! But you’d be wasting your brainpower. Social media platforms have conditioned users to reply quickly and carelessly. It’s simultaneously easier and more likely to get good metrics on your post if you make a quippy reply rather than a well thought-out argument (see The Alt-Right Playbook: Never Play Defense). I could go on and on about this (maybe I will, in a non-existent future post).
But I want to clarify: I’m not trying to solve this problem. That would be impossible. It’s systemic, and it’s a symptom of the greater techno-capitalist ecosystem that we have to have these discussions in. That doesn’t mean I can’t try to carve out my own little corner of the internet where slow, careful discussion is the point, though.
Philosophy
This section serves as a sort of “prologue” to any of my other writings. These are the things going through my head, constantly, as I write every post. If it didn’t make the post unreadable, I’d put a link to this heading after every paragraph. That’s just how much I’m thinking about these things.
That said, this isn’t required reading (nothing on this page is) but I feel the need to have it written down somewhere visible.
Critique
There is a very important distinction to be made between “critique” and “criticism,” and it’s a distinction that very few seem to pay attention to:
Critique comes from love, and criticism comes from distaste.
I’m not trying to rewrite definitions here, but I make this distinction because I will, very frequently, critique things that I love. Very few (if any!) games are absolutely perfect, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t games that we all love. Just because something is good doesn’t mean you have to love it, and more importantly, just because something is bad doesn’t mean you can’t love it.
I bring this up because I don’t want my critiques of something to imply that I dislike it. I critique games because I want to see them be even better, not because I want them to crash and burn.
Solutions
Overwhelmingly, my philosophy when it comes to design, whether it’s about video games or real-world systems, is elegance. I’m reminded of this famous quote from a Eurogamer.net interview with Nintendo game director Shigeru Miyamoto:
A good idea is something that does not solve just one single problem, but rather can solve multiple problems at once.
Miyamoto is speaking about game design here, but it absolutely applies to much more than that. It’s very easy, especially in the fast-paced world we live in, to quickly deploy so-called “band-aid” solutions to problems. I think about this quote a lot when I witness a band-aid solution happen, and I get this whiff of a more elegant solution hidden somewhere, especially because quick-fixes often lead to new problems, like cutting the head off a Hydra. The best solution is the one that addresses the root cause (the heart of the Hydra?).
Modus Operandi
This section is really just for myself. By all accounts, I’m a perfectionist, and I find it important to have consistency, especially on larger projects like this one. Here, I’ll enumerate some of my “rules” for Ivory Tower. This is a personal checklist that I go through for each new post to ensure it meets my standards.
Style and Formatting
I’m very picky about the way things look, so I’ve created a distinct style for this blog. The posts are written in Markdoc, so this is largely automated for the sake of my own sanity. If I make a style change, you can be sure that I’ll be going back through the catalog to update that everywhere. This doesn’t apply to archived posts.
Archived Posts
Archived posts will always be available if you have the link, but they won’t be indexed. I don’t like to archive things I’ve made, but sometimes it’s necessary, especially if a post contains outdated information, or doesn’t meet my standards for quality.
Page Edits
I try to refrain from editing my pages (with the exception of typos or important updates). If there is an overwhelming need for a change, I’d rather write a follow-up post. You will always know a page has been edited by me, since it will have a “Last updated…” flair under the post date.
The only exception to this rule is the About page (this one!). I update this page regularly, as this project is always growing, and I’m always changing. (Another advantage of this is that Ivory Tower’s birthday will always be visible on this page: September 24, 2026!)
Wrapping Up
Thanks for checking out this page! Check out my other posts if you haven’t already, and I look forward to chatting with you on Discord (when it exists).