How to write a blog post with your cat.

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

I’ve finally found a way to post to my gaming blog from my mobile. That means all of the incredible insights I have while walking my cat around the yard, freezing my ass off at midnight will finally make it out of my head and into the rest of the my-blog-reading world.

Enjoy.

Another thing I’ve discovered: the Mixotronic looks great in a mobile browser. So now you can get you solid-gold ideas ANYWHERE.

You’re welcome.

Railing on Mixotronic

Friday, March 13th, 2009

As part of my continuing self-education in web programming, I’ve decided to take a crack at revamping the venerable Mix-O-Tronic (which is still in quiet existence, by the way) into a Ruby on Rails application.

While I was sketching out the idea in my notebook, I suddenly got a flash of inspiration to use it as a sort of jump-off point for a social site.  Terms are still put together to elicit concepts from people – but users would have the option (if not obligation) to comment on any of the terms (I’m thinking of renaming them ‘phrases’), or the concept as a whole.  When terms come up for other users, they can see the trail of comments that people have left, some other concepts that have been created with them, and so on.  And if a concept comes up for another person, the same applies.

Terms could be added by users (subject to approval, of course) – which would cut down on the workload for keeping it up-to-date and back-cataloging the whole thing, which is still a problem.

I think it would be a very niche (but fun) social site, and pretty straight-forward to code in Rails.  A sort of high-concept pitch machine rolled in the madness of crowds.

In other Mix-O-Tronic news, I have the following books out from the library:

1001 Books to Read Before You Die

1001 Movies to Read Before You Die, and

The Encyclopedia of American Television (1945-2003).

Reading the entry on Benson alone is worth lugging around the last title.

New micro-feature on Elsewhere.

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008

I’ve added a ‘Mix-O-Tronic of the Moment’ bar below the first post on the blog.  Now you can get a solid-gold game idea with every refresh of the page.  So read early, read often.

Also, I’ve gone with an understated dervish theme!

iLuchacabra!, .org & the Mix-O

Friday, November 3rd, 2006

iLuchacabra! is the website of Daniel Solis, the newest of the People I Watch Closely in game design.  His Acoustic Games site captures the inherent simplicity and loveliness of what Jared Sorenson’s site (Memento Mori) was before he got caught up in the whole Wicked Dead thing.  Daniel has board, card and RPG-like games for free download.  Most of them can be read inside a New York Minute.

Taking a leaf from that site, and having been inspired by working with Ben Lehman to tinker up a new site for Polaris, I’m taking the main Kuma Pageworks site off of Joomla (which is way too much software for what it’s turned out to contain) and changing over to (yet another!) WordPress installation.  The transition will happen tomorrow evening sometime, and I’ll update thereafter.

And in case anyone’s still interested, the Mix-O-Tronic Challenge continues apace with its fifth exercise – Bleak Futures.  I’ve also allocated sub-administrator status to my good friend Joan (Joanie), a long-time collaborator.  She’ll be taking over some of the administrative duties and posting some of her own Mix-O products to the site.  Say hello, be polite, and try not to hit on her too much.

The Official Mix-O-Tronic Challenge site is a go.

Friday, October 13th, 2006

After a week of sweating and cursing, the Official Site for the Mix-O-Tronic Challenge is live and operation.  It comes with a Vanilla forum attached.  Signing up for the Challenge is as easy as registering for the site – posting is optional at this point.

I haven’t officially put the word out on this yet – I’m waiting for Monday, to give me time to work up a campaign and timeline for the whole series of Mini-Challenges and other things associated with the site.

But I thought I’d let the good readers of Elsewhere know what is what first, and get in on some of the activities leading up to the Grand Challenge in January.

The Mix-O-Tronic Challenge – Draft

Friday, October 6th, 2006

The Mixotronic Challenge thus far conceived (hence the word draft):

TENTATIVE START DATE: January 9, 2007 at midnight, CST (-6 GMT).

• Each contestant will register on the Official Blog (with integrated forums).
• When registering and in all correspondence, the contestants will use an original pseudonym (meaning that if they go by a pseudonym normally online, they choose a new one).
• Each contestant gets one (1) randomly assigned set of four (4) terms, fresh from the Mix-O-Tronic.
• Each contestant must then choose three (3) ‘game pieces’ from either board or card games, or a toy (something like Legos or Lincoln Logs counts as one item).No two (2) piece types can come from the same game.

Examples:

• Chess board/pieces
• Checkers/draughts
• Mancala board/beads
• Carcassone pieces
• Wargame chits/hex map
• Catan buildings/roads
• Dungeon tiles
• 3d constructible houses/ships
• Monopoly board/pawns/houses/Chance/Community Chest cards

The pieces must be specific to one game (for example, the contestant can’t use ‘any wargame chits’, but must use ‘SPI Terrible Swift Sword’ chits).

(I’m considering making an ‘official list’, but I’m not sure yet.)

• The game produced from the above must be recognizable as an RPG, per the Game Chef ‘intuitive’ criteria.
• Two (2) weeks are given for the design of the game.
• At the end of the two weeks, each game is submitted at random to four entrants (and/or judges).
• Two (2) weeks are given for judging.
• The results are tabluated, with higher scores in primary criteria breaking ties.
• Winner announced.

So far, for criteria (in rough order), I have:

• Originality.
• Completeness.
• Clarity of rules.
• Integration of the Mix-O-Tronic terms.
• Choice of pieces.
• Creativity in use of pieces.
• Integration of pieces with theme of game.
• RPG-ness.
• Fun factor.

Each of these will be ranked 1-4 for the games that a given judge has been assigned, and weighted by order (meaning a 4 in Originality earns more than a 4 in RPG-ness). The results for each game are tallied, and ties are broken by raw rank sums, starting with Originality and working down the list of criteria.

Designologue

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006

(n). a conversation between two or more designers, through the medium of said design.

I got the term from this site, where there are several graphic design dialogues going on at the same time.  I don’t particularly think that some of the dialogues are all that successful … but who am I to judge?  The idea stands though – I post a design nugget, you post a design nugget based on the same theme.  We re-examine and post new nuggets reflecting our reactions to the last exchange (and of course our own sensibilities).

More later.

My Very Own Game Contest.

Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006

Well, I don’t have one yet.

But I’ve been toying with the idea of firing up a contest along the lines of Game Chef or Reverse/Engineer here on good ol’ Elsewhere.  I admire both of those contests, and the work of the folks that enter them – there’s a great deal of creativity that goes into not only the entries, but the contests themselves.  I think that they’re quintessential for the hobby – they’re fora where the limits get pushed, again and again.

I have the will (and more importantly, abundant time) to dedicate to a contest.

So I’ve been rolling the idea around since I heard about Rev/Eng and saw the response that it got – I realized that folks can and do enjoy an interesting contest that isn’t Game Chef – and that you can have one of these more than once a year.  I’ve decided to start putting one together, and I’m going to take a leaf from both of those contests and lay out a rubric and get a site up ahead of time (it’ll be a h@xx0rd WordPress blog where anyone can register and upload, actually), and get the drumbeat going ahead of time.

At the moment, the idea plays into one of the on-going themes here at Elsewhere: Design a role-playing game that incorporates other gameforms.  An RPG that uses cards, a gameboard, some online (or programmatic) component, a toy … in short, an RPG that isn’t just the Holy Trinity of book, dice and character sheet.

RPGs with moving parts and interactive bits.
I have no idea what to call it.  I’m playing with ‘The Mix-O-Tronic Challenge’.

Comments and suggestions welcome, as always.

[Cross-posted on Story Games.]

Reverse Engineering.

Saturday, September 2nd, 2006

This looks like a wonderful contest/exercise.  I wish I’d been paying more attention when it was first raised – I’d certainly be in the mix.  The idea is amazing simple and Mixotronic-esque.  Create a character sheet for a non-existant RPG; randomly re-assign the sheets to the other participants, who must then reverse-engineer the mechanics of the game from the sheet.

Some of them are quite stunning.

I’d also like to point out that when given the task of screwing someone else over, these designers (and quite a few of these folks are game designers) go way way WAY out there.  I’d like to see more of this kind of explosive creativity in the future.  For my part, I’m going add some extra Tabasco for myself: one sheet, one Mixotronic result (I’m allowing myself two tweaks in this case), and try to sketch out a game design.

We’ll see what falls out.