Archive for the ‘Meta’ Category

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.

Ira Glass & Elsewhere

Sunday, February 8th, 2009

So the other day, I was talking to Ira Glass, from This American Life.  

That’s such a fun sentence for me to write, and that makes me such an NPR geek it hurts.

Last Wednesday, I attended WBEZ’s Audible Feast - a fundraiser where you got to rub elbows with various WBEZ personalities along with Ira Glass, Scott Simon (Weekend Edition) and Peter Sagal (Wait, Wait …)  I walked into the event out of the bitter cold and surveyed the landscape – lots of women in furs and long dresses (there was a $500 option for a sit-down dinner) getting out of BMWs, and then schlubs like me, walking through -15 degree windchills from the L.

Anyways, I went to the table to get myself registered and had a very peculiar moment: I heard a voice right next to me that’s usually emanating from a radio.  I had (almost literally) bumped into Ira Glass, who was mingling with the hoi polloi.  I screwed up my courage and was about to introduce myself when he was intercepted by one of the aforementioned ‘women in furs’.  I retreated a few steps and waited for my chance to strike.  All the time, my mind was racing: What in the world was I going to talk to Ira Glass about?

When the time came, I decided to go the eccentric route.  Everyone at this function knew about the radio show.  But how many of these people knew he’d made a comic about producing for the radio?  So when I stuck my hand out (and helped him get some schmutz off his jacket from dinner), I told him that I really enjoyed the comic and had read it over and over for inspiration.  

“Do you do radio?”

Not wanting to drop the thread, I said that I blogged about games and gaming, and that I’d been trying to screw up the courage to do a podcast for some time.  This is when he asked me to walk with him to find the bar.  Which I did.  In a fog.  Not only had I met Ira Glass, but now I was having drinks with Ira Glass.

We talked for some time about what was going on in games (boardgames are more than Candyland and Monopoly; the digital divide is growing wider).  He’d just been in Arkansas where the ice storms had gone through, talking to people.  He related a story about a girl who was fascinated to find out that you could play Solitaire without the computer. (!)  I related my story about Guild Wars players who didn’t know what Dungeons & Dragons was, or who E. Gary Gygax was.

I recommended playing Pandemic and Carcassonne.  He talked about being completely fascinated by Katamari Damancy – the last video game that he played extensively.

After two glasses each of really mediocre red wine, we shook hands and I relieved him of my company.  He clapped me on the shoulder and graciously told me this was probably the most interesting conversation he was going to have tonight.  

I wish I could say that he gave me his card, or told me to send him a story pitch.  Neither happened.  But something did happen, later on at the main event: Ira, Scott and Peter relating stories about ‘driveway moment’ stories they’d done recently.  Ira did his piece (a remix of the ‘Big Pile of Money’ show on the mortgage clusterfuck), then went on a semi-rant about how journalists are losing ground everywhere to entertainment because it’s become they’re not telling stories – they’re not talking like humans to humans.

And this brings me around to this podcast that I’ve been wrestling with for months.  

On the train home, I wrote the following note to myself:

Taking a page from tonight’s stories: a podcast not just about story-games. The stories behind games, the stories of games, the culture of games and playing. Games are a mode of human connection – a podcast about the connections between games and people’s lives, their lives inside games. Stories about people’s lives being spent elsewhere. 

Games tell several stories at once: the flow of the game itself, the larger narratives touched on through the game experience. What people are bringing to the table.

And that’s the idea.  There are lots of gaming podcasts out there, but most of them focus on reviews.  Sons of Kryos talks about play, but it’s also very focused on what they (the Sons) are doing.  So I’m re-thinking the Elsewhere podcast as ‘You Are Elsewhere,’ and casting it in the form of This American Life: talking about the human stories behind games and gaming – why people play, what drives them to make games, and what they’re bringing to the table.
More in my next post, but it’s a good start.  Also, you’ll be able to check out youareelsewhere.com in a couple of days for more information.
With this post, I’d also like to say hello to everyone in my Facebook feed – I’ve added my blog to my Wall, so these posts will be reaching all sorts of people now.  People I’ll have to stop saying such horrible things about.

Daily Twittering for 2008-12-07

Sunday, December 7th, 2008

Daily Twittering for 2008-11-20

Thursday, November 20th, 2008

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!

Chrome Safari

Monday, September 22nd, 2008

The site is now Chrome and Safari friendly, without the content column straying all over the map. The difference between ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’ – minor, but key in this case!

The Current Bucket List

Sunday, June 15th, 2008

Here, for my own benefit mainly, is a complete core dump of all the game ideas that I have either on the front burner, back burner, or in the percolator:

Front Burner:

Back Burner:

Percolating:

The new look of Elsewhere.

Saturday, June 14th, 2008

Here’s the new site – it’ll be all kinds of slick once I’m done. That is if I can actually code the CSS that I’ll need to do it. Woo!

On a side note: The temple here, while Egyptian, is located in what was Makuria.

Site done broke a bit.

Thursday, June 12th, 2008

For some reason, categories have come unhitched, and there are bugs showing up. I’ve reinstalled to no effect, so it must have to do with my ever-so-clever blog template that I’ve been messing with lately. Instead of re-doing it, I’m rebooting instead – I have some ideas for improving the site anyways. So there’ll be some dust floating around – I expect few will notice it, since most of my readers come from planetSG.

Viva coding!

Meta news break.

Saturday, February 2nd, 2008

I’ve re-installed WordPress to a new directory using Dreamhost’s one-click option, so now I can stay up-to-date without so much work involved.

The new URL is http://blog.kumapageworks.org/elsewhere/ – adjust any feedreaders accordingly.  Those of you already subscribed will have a few more posts to catch up before I kill the old install.  Both URLs are feeding off the same database, so no one will get cut off unexpectedly.

Tomorrow’s Posts

Friday, November 2nd, 2007

Tomorrow I have two posts almost completed:

1) How Guild Wars has led me to the Promised Land with Elsewhere.

2) An exhortation to game designers to embrace the secondary market and leverage your players for content.

Also, I have a webcomic idea kicking around that might see the light of day tomorrow, and I’m going SHOPPIN’!

A Bit of Meta

Friday, November 2nd, 2007

I just checked out the Google Analytics for the last couple of months, and here are a couple of interesting things I thought I’d share:

1) This site gets an average of 50 hits a day, with spikes just after I post of about 500+ on average.

2) A whopping 93% of you use Firefox, 84% of you doing so on a Windows box.

3) You are, overwhelmingly, from California, New York and my Euro-peeps in the UK, Ireland and Scandinavia representin’.  I also have a number of hits coming from Saudi Arabia, which I assume are servicemen/women.

If you haven’t gotten into Google Analytics (for whatever reason) – I cannot recommend it enough for website owners/bloggers.  The interface is new and slick and all AJAXy, and it breaks down traffic like you can’t freakin’ believe.

Site retouching going on.

Saturday, October 20th, 2007

Please excuse any dust.  I’m revamping a bit in preparation for re-injecting this here blog into the search engines.

We’re moved … I think.

Wednesday, January 31st, 2007

I won’t know for sure until I start removing my data from my last host – but I think that we’re alive and kicking on Dreamhost.

UPDATE: It’s a sure thing, now – the Pageworks is uploaded, repointed and otherwise now residing on Dreamhost.

Burn-Out & Rebirth

Thursday, January 18th, 2007

First: This blog is attracting amazing amounts of spam lately. I’ve switched over to moderating any and all comments until I stem the tide – so if (when) anyone comments on Elsewhere again, it’ll take a few hours for your comment to show up.

Second: Hey, it’s been a month and a fucking half since you last posted, you dickweed! What the hell is going on?!

I burned out.

I’ve come to accept that the social pecking order of the indie gaming scene is asymptotic – gaining any sort of status is relatively easy to do to a certain point, then gets much harder very quickly.  I can be the affable idea-tosser on Story Games or the occassional commenter/blogger, but the fact of the matter is, I tried to bite off more than I could chew, and got choked for my trouble.

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed (few have), but the Mix-O-Tronic Challenge is very much over before it started.  After a month of pushing it around and pitching it, very few people nibbled the bait, and only a couple of brave souls bit.  After watching it languish, I’ve shut the site down and I’ll be deleting it entirely soon enough.  There are two possible explanations for the horrible death (three, really) – all of which are my fault to a degree: 1) the idea itself sucked; 2) the execution sucked; and/or 3) I suck.

For a while now I’ve assumed that #3 was the reason – that I’d simply presumed too much about the cred that an announcement like this would carry from me, and found out to my horror that I’m not the belle of the ball.  This may be partially true – I don’t have any serious game design credit (except for Time Traitor).  I haven’t proved myself to the indie crowd at large, so why should they take me seriously?  I am, after all, not one born into the tribe – I am and will remain a relative outsider, since I don’t have a Forge affiliation.

You might be saying that it’s all sour grapes – it’s not.  I’ll simply point to this thread where Jason Morningstar pitches a relatively insane contest into the wind, and it receives more posts that all of my Mix-O-Tronic threads on Story Games combined.

The execution definitely needed help – I started too steep, I think.  I have a very different perspective on the Mix-O’s results, and I think that clouded my judgment on just how hard it would be for folks to accomplish the tasks I set out.

So, for the last couple of months I’ve just been catching up on the computer gaming that I haven’t been doing in forever because my machine sucked big wind.  Now that I can actually play the latest and greatest, I’ve been having a lot of fun.  I’ve also been buying and playing board and Euro games, and tinkering with those pieces.

So what you’re going to see from here on out is an exploration that I’ve started in a very handsome Moleskine notebook that I received for Christmas – an exploration of the bits and pieces that make up the games we already play, starting with dice, playing cards and chess.  Then looking for new ways to combine the pieces that are already out there to make new gameforms, and exploring the possible thematic matches that can be made.

Finally, I’m going to stick a pin in DEAD and start on GOD, a Black & White meets Primal Order meets constructibles idea that’s been rolling around in my head and given new life by playing Black & White 2 (which was moderately disappointing, I have to add).

So stick around if you want to talk about where RPGs and other gameforms intersect, or if you want to see what the hell happens next.  Many posts in the pipeline already.

Elsewhere 3.0 starts now.

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