Pardon My Dust (Again)

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

I’m overhauling the look of Elsewhere, and I’m also going to change what it’s about. I’ve kept this strictly game-centric since I started it, but my attempts at starting other blogs have failed miserably. So instead of trying to fire up yet-another blog, I’m going to roll my other interests into this one.

This coincides with the continuing convergence of my interests – mainly games and programming. I’ve started coding a new version of the famous Mix-O-Tronic in Ruby on Rails, and it’s pretty exciting for a first Rails project.

So pardon my dust (most people read this blog on Facebook and Planet Story-Games), so I don’t anticipate too many people throwing up their hands in disgust while I break the CSS of the site repeatedly.

Seriously Retro Gaming

Thursday, October 1st, 2009

Think playing the Virtual NES console online is retro?  How about playing Adventure for the Atari 2600?

I found a stash of really, really old-school gaming books at the Evanston Public Library.  Their collection is odd – they have enough graphic novels to stock a small comic store, but their kids’ DVD collection consists mostly of badly-produced documentaries.  I was perusing the games section of the stacks, looking mainly for a book on Go, when I found the following titles:

1. Naval War Games: Fighting sea battles with model ships, by Donald Featherstone
2. Wargame Design, by Strategy & Tactics – the house magazine of SPI (RIP)
3. A copy of Little Wars, by H.G. Wells (forwarded by Isaac Asimov!)
4. The Complete Wargames Handbook: How to play, design and find them, by James Dunnigan

And there were at least an armload more that I couldn’t get because I had to carry my daughter to the car.

There’s something poignant about reading these books – they talk about tabletop wargaming in the present tense – not with a wary eye to the future, but with a bright sense of optimism that wargames are the way of the future – particularly the Featherstone book (one of a series, according to the inside cover), which was published in 1965 and contains instructions for building scale WWII models out of wood with a Dremel.

I also picked up The Book of Games: Strategy, tactics and history, by Jack Bottermans.  It’s the only one of the bunch that can still be found on Amazon (scratch that – I’ve added links to the others that I’ve found).  It’s a weighty coffee-table tome that could easily put someone into a coma if you hit them over the head with it.  Inside are the rules for every ‘open source’ board game in existence, from Shogi to Chutes & Ladders, which I was stunned to discover wasn’t a crappy game from Parker Brothers, but a game used to teach karma in India.  There’s even a picture of one of the old stone boards in the book.

So why am I reading all of this?

I’m cramming my head with a critical mass of information, to try and spark the creative process and get back to game design.  It’s the last thing that I haven’t picked up from before this summer’s shenanigans.  I’ve been reading a lot of ‘modern’ stuff as well, online and in PDF form, but these books have filled me with ideas – old ideas at that – that are still quite relevant in to making a good game today.  I think the lesson that I’m learning is that what makes a good game isn’t tied to finding the next great thing.  It’s taking what we know now, salvaging what we can from the past, and fusing them together.  Wargames are still incredibly popular, after all – it’s just that with the PC they’re not played with counters and hexagons (at least physical hexagons and counters) anymore.

But more than retreading old game forms with new technology, these older games speak very plainly about what makes a solid game, because there aren’t any bells and whistles attached. It’s like peeking under the hood of a new car – there’s still a combustion engine in there that hasn’t changed since the Model-T.

I think sometimes we as designers forget that

Minor site changes.

Friday, September 18th, 2009

I’m doing a ‘light’ makeover of the site.  One of the things that I’ve done is remove all of my links – frankly, half of them were dead or at least comatose.  The landscape has changed a lot since I last updated the entire list, and it was taking up a lot of real estate.  I’m going to be putting together another list of current game links for myself, and if anyone wants it (or wants to be included on it), let me know at b.e.hollenbeck (at) gmail (dot) com.

Stones.

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

The wife and I went to the beach this afternoon, and found a profundity of very smooth basalt stones.  She mentioned that ‘these would make great game pieces’, so of course I scoured the beach for a couple of handfuls.  The result:

beach stones

Twenty-five stones in all of various sizes: twenty-one drak gray, and four white ones.  The mechanic: reach into the bag and draw out the stones for a conflict.  Grab as many as you want, but if you draw a white one (or more than one), you fail.

I’m also thinking about the arrangement above: the stones are laid out in a 5×5 grid, with the final pattern being significant in some way.

Now the question is: what’s the theme?  What sort of game would call for this as a mechanic?

H1N1

Monday, August 31st, 2009

I was in the ICU for two weeks in a medically-induced coma. I missed GenCon and blew my self-imposed deadline for becoming a published game designer.

And yet, I’m alive so it seems like a decent trade.

More from me soon.

Processing my process. Or: How to get better at game design.

Saturday, May 9th, 2009

I’ve sent my alpha version of Strangers out to some folks for feedback.  Most of the feedback boiled down to: ‘This is kinda complicated’ and ‘Where’s the fun?’

After getting the third return with the same feedback, I started to do some serious introspection.  While I don’t talk about it here on my gaming blog (heck, I don’t talk about much here at the moment) – I also do web design and programming.  Over the last few months, I’ve been lucky enough to gather a nice stable of clients and steady coding work.  It’s taken up a lot of my ‘free’ time, which is why I haven’t had much to say here.

Since I’ve been programming a lot more lately, I’ve started really honing my process for development, at least when it comes to web projects.  What I’ve discovered is that I’m: iterative, atomic and utile.  I’m no rockstar when it comes to coding – in fact, my programming blog is called ‘Groping for Code’, which it sometimes feels like I’m doing – looking at an end result that I want to achieve, and slowly building a scaffold to get me there, refining it along the way.

So:

Iterative: I make a lot of small changes, seeing what the result is along the way, and usually breaking shit.

Atomic: I work on one feature at a time, making it work, then integrating it with the whole.

Utile: I look for the best, cleanest way to do what I want to do, regardless of any sort of overarching programming principle.

I realize these things may even hold me back from being a good coder, but I’m working on improving – and more importantly, they’re working.  I’m getting things done.  Projects are moving.

So let’s contrast this with my game design process.  First of all, I don’t really HAVE a process, as such.  I just sort of jump into a design with both feet and see what happens.  Part of this is an artifact of how my completed (or mostly completed) projects to date have come about – they’re products of things like 24-hour RPG challenges or Game Chef, which imposes either a one- or two-week deadline.  Soup to nuts, make everything at least look like it hangs together.

But it’s not entirely that.  I have a sense of myself as ‘game designer’, so to some extent I’ve pre-judged the end result of my efforts: it will work, because this is hat I’m passionate about.  My designs tend to be all-or-nothing thunderclaps of effort.  This is just about as opposite an approach to process as you can get from my programming.  

I’m not iterative: Any changes that I make, I propagate them through the design without testing their viability, or the relative merits of the original version.

I’m not atomic: Games come out of me whole-cloth.  Any one section of the rules may or may not stand on its own.

Utile: I work from more formalist principles (the desire to create games that push certain envelopes, like integrating board game components, or exploring some facet of play) as opposed to looking for what works, then throwing mechanics at it until it sticks.

And the results are perfectly obvious: my programming gets done.  My games don’t.  So the question now is: how do I apply my programming process to my game design?

Iterative: Test, test, test.  Start with a framework for the game, then start hanging components on it, testing each component as I go.  If it doesn’t work, figure out what’s wrong and change it.  Question everything: is the form factor wrong?  Is the theme wrong? Is the approach wrong? IS IT FUN?

Atomic: Work with the minigame model – write up  mechanics for each aspect of a game, keeping in mind the overall shape of the project.  Test each minigame, then integrate and test again.  Obviously, some sort of testing mechanism is going to be crucial, here.

Utile: If principles are getting in the way, eject the principles for now.  If the principle is important, integrate it into the process at a lower level – does this facet support the principle AND the game, or just the principle alone?

Obviously, there are implementation problems that are independent of the process problem.  It’s a lot easier to iterate my web projects when all I have to do is alter a few lines of code and sync my localhost web directory.  But I like the shape of this, and I should invest brain cycles in trying to figure out a) how to make it work, and b) applying it to Strangers and Terrible World.

Strangers Rough Draft: Why Story Games are Hard.

Friday, April 3rd, 2009

I’ve completed the first full draft of Strangers, my game about ensemble dramas.  In doing this, I’ve come to the conclusion that story games are difficult to write. 

Let me back up a step and define some things.  A story game is (by my definition) a role-playing game where the mechanics primarily directly address the narrative of the game. This can be contrasted to (the majority of) roleplaying games where the rules address the theme or setting directly.  In D&D, for example, the rules are primarily concerned with the interactions between the character and the fictional world.  There’s no ‘Fade to black, cut to an exterior of the baron’s castle’  rule in D&D.  Sure, that sort of thing can happen a given game, but if it does, it’s the bailiwick of the DM.

Story game rules directly address the narrative being spun by the game – Strangers, for example, is chock full of rules on framing scenes, generating motifs and themes for your characters, and narrative arcs.  There is a ‘fade to black’ mechanic, in other words.  All of the players are co-authoring the drama in a literal sense instead of a rhetorical one.

What makes this so much harder is that mechanics become semantically challenging – the interactions between the players, the game itself, and the interactions that take place inside the game between the components, are hard to get your brain around because they all deal with abstractions.  What does it MEAN when I move my play card in this fashion?  What does it mean when I take chips out of this stack?  What does this interaction translate to in dramatic terms?  Have I covered all the obvious possibilities?

A lot of RPGs cover a lot of ground with their rules, trying to encompass the play experience.  But when the rules, to some extent, define the play experience itself, this metadrama gets really hard to think about.  

I’ve done my best to try and capture it – I’m test-driving the rules this weekend to make sure the wheels don’t fall off before I send it to a few people to pick it apart.  Finding a setting has proved challenging as well – I wanted to move away from genres that would put me in a rut (no medical dramas, etc) – but at the same time, I didn’t want the interactions between the setting and the characters to overwhelm the interactions between characters – which is at the heart of the game itself.

I finally settled on a compromise of a Jericho-like premise; a sort of World Without Oil: The RPG.  It’s 2019, and the economy has collapsed once and for all.  Peak oil turned out to be in 2011, and with the global economy so stressed by the shenanigans of Wall Street, recession becomes depression and a worldwide sense of feudalism pervades – the global village is dead, to a great extent.  Cities in the US have been abandoned for the most part, but when the tide of humanity tried to disperse into the rural areas, they found their country cousins less than welcoming.  Subdivisions in the exurbs became refugee camps, with extended neofamilies taking over cul de sacs and parking lots being stripped for asphalt to burn as fuel.

It’s in this setting that the characters, living on the edge of a dead Chicago, try and make their way in the new world order.

Welcome to the Pandemic

Friday, March 13th, 2009

I dropped my registration on a couple of domains I had, and with the extra room I picked up welcometothepandemic.com.  I’m not sure what I plan to use it for, but ideas are rattling around.

Theme and the Construction of Shared Imaginative Space

Saturday, February 21st, 2009

I’ve been listening to a metric ton of boardgaming podcasts lately.  In many of them, there’s a lot of talk about the theme of games, and whether or not it’s important to have strong theme, or mechanics that reflect the theme.  (If you want to take a listen, here’s a Q&A with Reiner Knizia where he talks about theme and his process quite a bit.)

A lot of talk about theme centers around the idea of a game ‘feeling’ right: Does a merchant game give you a taste of the experience of being a merchant trying to make it in 15th century Florence?  Does Lifeboat give you the feeling of trying to talk your way out of a grim death at the bottom of the ocean?

RPGs, particularly story-games, are all about theme.  They tend to be smaller in scope and focus their mechanical energy towards the theme that the designer has in mind.  For example, Jason Morningstar’s excellent Grey Ranks.  It’s a game about playing a teenage resistance fighter during the Warsaw Uprising in 1944.  More to the point, it’s about the emotional lives of those soldiers during the intensity of combat.  The character sheet and the grid that the game is played on are tightly bound to the theme – there’s no hit location charts for combat, no list of skills – nothing that you’d traditionally associate with a game about war and combat.

What’s most interesting about these two ideas, however, is how theme is approached differently between board game design and RPG design.  Theme in boardgames is primarily a physical function: do the pieces, the board art reflect the desired theme?  Process, while certainly part of the equation, has a much smaller role – many board game processes are identical to each other, or are structured around existing mechanical paradigms – the ‘chase game’, for example.  So theme, if we talk about it from an AGE Model perspective, is a function of the manipulation of resources in the gamespace.

This is inverted when we talk about roleplaying games.  Physicality is removed from many modern RPGs – dice and a character sheet can only do so much.  So theme emerges through play – do the patterns of the characters’ interactions conform to the themes as expressed in the rules?  So while the wellspring of theme is the same between RPGs and board games, the gamespace, theme’s ‘proper place’ in RPGs is in the emspace – in the shared narrative, and how the players interact.

Stepping back a bit – are these as different as they might at first seem?  It seems to me that board games simply don’t have explicit constructors for emspace – there’s nothing in the rules of Pandemic or Race to the Galaxy that promotes the idea of putting yourself inside the narrative flow of the game.  So does this mean that emspace doesn’t exist in boardgames?  No – I’ve played a lot of Pandemic lately, and Amy and I do enter a shared space inside the game.  We talk about our pawns in the first person (‘I’ll go to Bogota and cure there.’) – so the emspace appears to be present, though to a much lesser degree than in RPGs because of the lack of explicit construction of the shared imaginative space.

So is the emspace inevitable?  Is it inherent in play?  Reflexively, I’d say no – but there is an intriguing possiblity: perhaps there are two imaginative spaces: an emspace (or explicitly constructed shared imaginative world), and a second kind of shared world, formed from the collapse of the gamespace and the playspace.  I’d call this the gameplayspace, but that’s a very Germanic construct.  How about Ludospace (or Ludispace? – declension was never my strong suit)?  This, then, is the space constructed by theme in boardgames – the enhancement of the ‘magic circle’ of a game to include thematic elements.

How is this a different animal from the Emspace?

At first blush, the Emspace, while tied to the rules of the game (no matter how loosely), includes a much larger extraludic narrative component that exists independent of the rules of the game.  This is best explained (by me, at least), in computer terms: the Ludospace is a function of the Playspace and the Gamespace, and is wholly encompassed by the two.  For the Emspace, however, the game is a service - exposing some of the imaginative space to manipulation by the players, but not in its entirety – the rest of the space is manipulated directly by the players.  Again – a large portion of this is mediated in the Playspace, but is understood not to be encompassed by that. 

Taken another way, the Emspace in RPGs is assumed to be autonomous; in board games, it is wholly dependent on the structure of the game.  This essential difference is what gives RPGs their open-ended nature: the rules are the starting point of the narrative, instead of a description of it.

Elsewhere is now mobile.

Saturday, February 21st, 2009

I’ve added a plugin that makes Elsewhere mobile-friendly. It’s the same fabulous URL – if you go there on your handheld device of choice, you can read this blog without causing eyestrain or needless data downloads. You’re welcome.

Strangers: The relationship map as story machine.

Sunday, February 15th, 2009

In a recent post, I mentioned the two games that will (I hope) be accompanying me to GenCon: Strangers and After.  I’ve mentioned the former, but not the latter, so I thought I’d post about it.

The core idea that I’m exploring with Strangers is using a relationship map (a physical representation of the relationships between the characters laid out on the playing table) as a means for creating story: both for eliciting player involvement, and also player coercion - pushing the players to play out consequences to their actions.

The game itself is an emulator for ensemble dramas: ER, Dawson’s Creek, Grey’s Anatomy, and Smallville.  Characters are defined by two sets of conflicts that they are involved in: a personal conflict and an arc conflict that all of the characters share.  For example, in the first season of Grey’s Anatomy, the characters are all trying to balance their careers and their personal lives.  These are placed onto the character’s play card, and the cards are laid on the table with their sides touching, like so:

Here are three characters, with Character 1 having relationships with Characters 2 & 3.  The basis for Character 1′s relationship is Aspect A – conversely, Character 2 uses Aspect D.  During the course of the game, the characters’ relationships will ebb and flow, affecting (and being affected by) the underlying aspects.  At some turning point, Player 1 decides to change the aspect used in the relationship, and turns the card, like so:

Character 1′s relationship with Character 2 becomes based on Aspect C, and Character 1′s relationship with Character 3 is now Aspect A.  Not only does this affect the current scene between Characters 1 & 2, but it also forces the player to have a scene with Character 3 to establish the new dynamic there as well.

These sorts of changes cause an ebb and flow – between relationships and aspects within a character, and between the characters (and players) as well.  This emulates the give and take between the characters and how they let other aspects of the show weave themselves into the story.

* * * 

Before you think that this is all sugar and light, I’m having real difficulties with articulating how the game plays.  I know, on an intellectual level, how I want the game to play out – but during the course of writing the playtest docs, I’ve had a really hard time codifying it.

This is a break from how I usually work – working from the top down is usually not this difficult.  So Strangers is pushing me to use playstorming to work out the kinks.  Playstorming is basically the same as playtesting, but instead of setting all the rules at the outset, you start with the basic idea-shape of play, then add rules as you go.  

So this is very nebulous, but the idea seems very … fertile.  I think that I can push it a long way uphill in a short period of time – hence my interest in putting it ahead of other ideas for the Big Day.

Old School is New Again

Thursday, February 12th, 2009

Via Dev @ forgreatjustice: this post, from Gabe of Peny Arcade, about running his first D&D game. There’s a definite sense of him harkening back to the bad-old-days when your books had red demons on the cover, the dice were colored in with crayons, and you played until your head hit the table.

It makes me want to run some 4e very badly.

State of the Kuma Union

Sunday, February 8th, 2009

I just realized it’s been about two months since I updated (and I dare hope that I’ll be back on the ball with that now), so I’ll start with a major status update. 

I’ve had (two) successful playtests of Terrible World, the story/board game that is based off my entry to Game Chef in 2007.  It’s a boardgame with some roleplaying elements, where the players are four elemental beings shaping the creation of a new world.  One of them has been corrupted by The Adversary, a sort of Cthulhu-esque being who needs a world to be born into the universe on.  The four Anima (as they’re known) are vying for control of the world, but at the same time they’re trying to figure out which one of them is the Adversary before the end of the last age of the world.

I’ve made a lot of refinements to the game: it’s shorter now than originally designed, the resources are much more coherently tied together.  The last big problem that I’m having is that the beginning of the game – the first couple of rounds of play – are very static.  I’m not 100% sure that I need to ‘fix’ it, but it’s still a concern.

I’ve also finished a rather short write-up on a party game called Expressionism, which comes from my own rubbery face.  There’s a deck of cards with things like ‘Eating a cabbage donut’, which each player flips over in turn around the table.  Every player also has a number of cards in their hand with my face emblazoned on them with different expressions.  Each player chooses one that they think is appropriate, including the person who flipped over the card.  The goal is to match the expression you think the currently active player (or ‘flipper’, if you will) is going to make.  Each player who matches gets a point, and the ‘flipper’ gets points for everyone who he matches with.

My next-door neighbor, Andrew, is a phenomenal photographer and hopefully we’ll be collaborating on taking about 300+ hi-res pictures of me making every shade of facial expression that I can manage.

So the two of these things together don’t provide the whole picture of why I haven’t posted.  Since I’m now a housedad, taking care of the little ones, I’ve been selling myself to just about anyone who will stand still long enough to listen.  I’ve landed some freelance graphic design and programming work, and hopefully I’ll also be doing a bunch of web work as well.  The end result is that I’ve been doing a lot more coding lately than writing, and less blogging than writing.  Of course, I’m also Facebooking more than writing as well, so you’d think that I’d have some time to jot down my thoughts for the day.  I’m making a resolution to change this decline, starting today.

But there’s another aspect to the blogslide: The decline of the blogosphere in relation to story-games and the other things that I’ve written about for so long.  There are still some people who are still going strong: Jason Morningstar and Jonathan Walton are two that spring immediately to mind.  But going through my own list of links, more than half are dead or dying.  Maybe people have better things to do – that’s certainly what happened with me.  But there’s a sort of deflationary spiral going on lately that’s not helpful.

So I’m going to re-focus and broaden my blogging here to include a lot more topics from around gaming in general: more boardgames, more video games … always tying it back to my own work and the AGE Model when appropriate.  And in the meantime, I am at T-185 and counting for GenCon Indy.  This means that I likely have T-95 days left before things need to reach printing establishments.  The time for thoughtful reflection on my designs is over, at least for Terrible World and AFTER, the two games I want to have at GenCon.

Cheerful Reading List

Sunday, October 26th, 2008

~

Nuclear Winter, by Owen Greene, Ian Percival & Irene Ridge (1985) – UK.

A delightful romp through firestorm modelling, environmental collapse and the likelihood of 82% mortality within the first year after a ‘measured’ exchange of nuclear weapons

The Medical Implications of Nuclear War, by the Institute of Medicine (1986).

Winds near blast sites at the temperature of boiling water, second-degree burns within line-of-sight for ten miles, and sterility for everyone!

The Effects of Nuclear War, by the Office of Technology Assessment (1979).

The long-term effects are incalculable.

And I start to wonder if maybe I should make a game based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

Ludolab Returns

Thursday, October 23rd, 2008

We’re at 290 days to GenCon, and let’s be honest with ourselves, progress has been made, but most of it is invisible.  I’m currently working on a re-implementation of Ludolab.  What’s Ludolab?  Glad you asked.  My original concept was a game design collaboration site in which shares of the final product were doled out for art, design, etc.  I’ve talked with a few financially-savvy people (Thierry!) and they seem to think that it’s not feasible, mostly because labor is not fungible – you can’t quantize labor on a project like a game in any easy way.  

So instead I’ve taken it underground – I’m creating a platform for prototyping my own games (DEAD and AFTER being the main projects at the beginning), using Ruby on Rails and some Javascript magic.  It’s been going swimmingly, at least until I’ve hit a wall with some of the logic.

So why waste time on this?  Three reasons: 1. Create a means of making cards and managing the economy of DEAD in a programmatic way – this seems necssary.  2.  Create a means of creating later games faster.  3.  I can always scale up the site to include other people’s projects for a nominal fee.  4. I can package up the entire platform for sale.

That’s 4 reasons.  Anyways.

So what I’m doing is putting out the word to people who either are Ruby (or Rails) wizards, or who want to learn alongside: If you’d like to pitch in with me, send me an e-mail at brian.hollenbeck#gmail.com.  Make substitutions as necessary.