E. Gary Gygax : 1938-2008

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

There are plenty of posts circulating out on the web about Mr.Gygax’s death and people’s moments with him. This post is a bit different than all of those, because my single (direct) interaction with the man was confrontational, if not negative.

I reviewed the World Builder, by Troll Lord Games, and I panned it. Severely. Probably more than it tuly deserved. Since his name was attached to the series, Mr. Gygax was pointed towards the review over on ENWorld (or as I like to call it, the House that d20 Built). What transpired was a relatively terse conversation of a few posts, followed by the general sentiment of ‘oh well, let’s get on with life’.

Sometime after that review, I moved to Wisconsin and spent an afternoon wandering around Lake Geneva looking for Gary’s house. I found it, and even though I could tell he was home, and even though he famously welcomed wandering geeks like myself to sit down for a few.

So here’s what I should have said to the man that day in Lake Geneva: Thank you.  Not only did the game you helped create change my life, it has guided it ever since.  It’s also not much of a stretch for me to say that your game saved my life.  The 7th and 8th grades were not kind to me.  Braces, acne and a curve-busting IQ marked me as an outsider in my small, rural town.  Without the diversion and the mental floss that D&D and its brethren provided me, I may not have made it to the 9th grade, when things got much better.  I was alone, and yet I wasn’t.  I felt a kinship with gamers all over the country (or the world) who I knew were delving into the same rich well of imagination that I lived in.

Thank you for my Fortress of Solitude.

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.

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.

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.

Nearly Ludolab: RPG Laboratory.

Friday, October 27th, 2006

I’m not exactly sure what to make of the new site from the folks at 1KM1KT (the good people who host the 24-Hour RPG and Game Chef repositories).  On the one hand, it may turn out to be a really nifty thing, so long as a lot more features are rolled out.  It may turn out to be kinda like Ludolab, even – only without the revenue sharing.

Right now, it just seems to be an Drupal-based (or possibly ELGG-based) blog site, along the lines of RPGTalk.  Everyone gets their own blog, all of the blogs publish to the main page.  You can make page and book nodes and designate them as openly editable.  But that’s about it.  The site says it has ‘tools for RPG design’ … but if that’s true, then this site is a tool for RPG design.

I’ve signed up, and I’m taking a wait-and-see attitude.  I encourage other folks to sign up as well, and wait and see.

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.

[DEAD] Ganking the map.

Wednesday, September 27th, 2006

I had a revelation last night, and I’m going to share it here so I can get a handle on it, and so folks who are in any way following this can get the poop scoop quick: I’m getting rid of the map in DEAD.

When it comes right down to it, the map was a holdover from an earlier iteration of the game called POX, in which one side was the CDC and the authorities, and the other played a rampaging (real) plague … bird flu, ebola … something of that nature. The map was necessary because the game was based in part on an implementation of graph theory, which was necessary to get a handle on the disease players’ side.

So it came over to DEAD willingly, but in the end I think it’s a level of concreteness that doesn’t belong in the current incarnation of the game. To replace the map, I’m going with the idea of a Storyline … a literal line of location and event cards that maps out the characters’ story. Doing this offers several advantages: fucking around with the diegesis (doing things like flashbacks, interspersed with physical locations in the story); there’s more claustrophobia in the game – you can go forward, or you can go back … you can’t just sneak around an obstacle. Condition cards can be played by the DEAD on a location (Legions of the Undead, for example), creating a blockage that the players must either find a way around, or fumble around until they have the resources to overcome it. It’s also easier to pin the group down, and it make being Beseiged much more dangerous, since you’re in a race against time to stop the DEAD from totally locking you down.

Final Goals will have a number of tokens that represent physical locations that the group must play before they can bring the goal into play – gameplay can be adjusted from a 1-hour beer game to a prolonged campaign just by adding tokens. The game is much more expansive, since you can just play an ‘on the road’ card, followed by a new town or city. The core game will focus on staying in a single metropolitan area, but by taking out the concreteness of the map, expansion is easier.

Not to mention that this eliminates the map itself, which will shrink the size of the box considerably.

So yeah – the rules are now on 1.b. after this change, and I’m making the necessary adjustments to the doc, which should be out soon.

DEAD rough draft is now at T -2 (?)

Thursday, September 21st, 2006

I’ve made all kinds of changes to my original vision DEAD being my attempt at zombie horror mixed with infighting and man’s inhumanity to man). The game is much more card-based now than before – it just works better with the rotating GM-ish role of the DEAD. I’m also clearing out a lot of the weird once-off mechanics and streamlining play.

With all of the crazy-ass hours I’ve been putting in, I should be done with a complete rough draft by Friday. Keep your pink-parts crossed for me.

Farewell Crazy Egor’s.

Tuesday, September 12th, 2006

I lived in Rochester, NY for some four years, and a monthly (at least) pilgrimage to Crazy Egor’s Discount Game Warehouse was always in order.  In my salad days, I’d drop $200 at a time to snap up everything I could get my hands on.  It’s where I found Aria and the uber-rare Primal Order by an obscure company called Wizards of the Coast.

Today I ran across a casual mention of Egor’s on a page somewhere and decided to check out the website to see what was going on.  I knew that Egor’s had moved out of Rochester and that the storefront was now ‘Millenium Games’, a name as boring as toast.  A glance at their front page mentions Yu-Gi-Oh, M:tG and WizKids.  D&D doesn’t even make the cut.

The URL for Egor’s, the first hit on Google, goes nowhere.

Egor’s was my first game store – it was where I cut my teeth and fought tooth and nail to become a discriminating consumer.  With so much choice, it was impossible to make a decision in less than an hour.  I was 12 or so at the time, so I had to have my grandmother (who lived near Rochster) take me.  The time pressure of having your silver-haired 60+ year-old grandmother waiting for you in the pit of geekhood was enormous.
It’s sad to see it so completely erased from the here-and-now of gaming.

Thanks, Egor, for all the games.

Another gaming dissertation … ubquitous gaming.

Friday, August 25th, 2006

Her name is Jane McGonigal, and she blogs at Avant Game.  She’s also just finished a 588 (!) page dissertation entitled This might be a game:Ubiquitous play and performance at the turn of the 21st century, which she’s releasing one section at a time online … here.

Jane is the lead designer of I Love Bees, an online (and offline) alternate reality game which won several awards.

What’s been posted so far is very interesting – I look forward to reading the rest.

It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

Monday, August 14th, 2006

Levi Kornelson’s Perfect 20 has won and Indie RPG Award for Best Free Game.  First of all, congratuations to Levi.  Secondly, in this post on his Livejournal, Levi mentions that it summarizes his position as online game-guru – straddling both the ‘mainstream’ and ‘indie’ scenes.

Levi’s quite right – absolutely no one has done more in the last few years to bring the fruits of the indie movement back to the mainstream and keep the indie movement from fluttering off to ivory-tower land.

Absolutely no one.

So congratulations, Levi.  Well deserved.

Still rockin’ the tundra in Finland.

Thursday, August 10th, 2006

According to a couple of weeks worth of Google Analytics on the site traffic, only half of the visitors and subscribers to this blog are from the US.  Fully 1/4 are from Finland, and the rest are a mixture of Israel (Guy!), Germany, the Netherlands and France, with an extensive list of ‘others’.

Y’all Suomi need to pipe up and let me know what’s so interesting about this place.

Ludolab is dead – long live Ludolab! (Ludolab 0.1)

Tuesday, July 18th, 2006

I still have the domain name registered, so I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with Ludolab.org. In order to skip the problems that I had last time, I think that we’re going to try something a little different.

The idea is, in theory, very simple: a social web app for playtest and game development. Project leaders will present their products and put out bounties on ‘assets’: words written, pictures drawn, playtest reports made. Each bounty will worth a number of ‘shares’ in the game’s eventual profits – so if someone does a lot of the heavy lifting with a project, they get a larger return. The project leader sets their own share – nominally 51%. Voting can be activated for direction on the project, weighted by earned bounties.

Taken to its logical conclusion, you could integrate some sort of CSS to PDF magic and pop out a PDF ready for sale on IPR and/or RPGNow – the entire game development process from soup to end-product.

Right now the idea is skeletal – it lives mostly in notes and diagrams scribbled while I was half-lit on Sam Adams Summer Ale, with the intense UV rays of the sun baking my pasty skull.

The platform for development appears (at the moment) to be CakePHP. Other ideas are deeply appreciated.

Hildy & Frank are done fucking around.

Wednesday, July 12th, 2006

The first of the radical changes is in – the Categories, Archives and Feeds can be found in neat little moo.fx menus above the posts. The rest will be done tonight. Plus, hopefully, the rest of the cosmetic makeover. Stay tuned.

Edit – 07/13: Hopefully I didn’t make anyone too seasick with all of that. The last of the meta posts for a while is over. On with the show. If anyone has a problem viewing the site (it’s important to me that the site be as standards-compliant as possible) – let me know.  All of the links for the site are under the Links menu-clicky-thing.  They’re arranged randomly and open a window like a gator’s mouth, so be warned.
P.S. The title is a Trading Spaces joke, for the uninitiated.

AGE Model 1.1.a released.

Tuesday, July 11th, 2006

The first major revision of the AGE Model is now out and about, and can be downloaded here.

The changes:

• The role of Emulation in the model has changed significantly, and this affects its relationships with the other principles – primarily in things like the Forces.

• Added the Six Forces to the model, which represent the various attitudes that influence the style of play and the design of games.

• ‘Narrative’ has changed meaning – diegesis and exegesis are now the Two Times.

• Added the space diagram that I created here on the blog along with supporting text.

The next revision will have a number of more complex gamic structures and a rundown of examples and exemplar games.