Au contraire.

I’ve had more pants-crapping, adrenaline-fueled moments in L4D2 than I can admit to.  The additional of melee weapons makes the game exceptional visceral.  There’s something to be said for sniping your way carefully to safety – there’s something else entirely, AMAZINGLY FUN to be said about carving your way out of a rampaging horde of rabid zombies with a machete, or the satisfying *crunk* of head colliding with cricket bat, then detaching and flying into the distance.

L4D2 is so good, in fact, that its the first game I’ve played where cowardice seemed like the most viable option.  Recently, I was playing online with some friends (including Story Games guru Andy Kitkowski), going through the Swamp Fever campaign.  The climax of this campaign is a showdown at a gothic Antebellum mansion – and it’s easily the hardest of the endgame scenarios in both versions of Left 4 Dead.  The infected pour in from every direction at long range, and even with a well-knit group chances are that you’ll get overwhelmed.

We managed to make it through (barely) and absconded from the upper balcony to the gates where a boat is due to arrive and holed up there for the last couple of waves of infected, waiting for the real killers – two (!) Tanks – big, beefy ‘roid-raging zombies that can knock you into next week.  This is the only place I’ve ever seen such a thing, and the first time I realized there were two Tanks, I almost gave up the idea of finishing the campaign.  But again, we soldiered through and (barely) survived intact.  The gate blew, and I ran along with the Rochelle-player out into the water.  It was then that I noticed Coach went down.

I was almost on the boat, but I stopped, knelt and pointed my sniper rifle back to see what was going on.  Nick was still there as well, and the two of them were being swarmed.  I had the sniper rifle (so much fun!) and started cutting through the swarm by shooting just over Coach’s head.  It looked like Nick was going to be able to get him up, but then a big rock came out from nowhere and knocked him to the ground as well – the calling card of another Tank attack.  So I had a choice – try to wade in and save them both (possible, but unlikely) or save my own virtual ass and get on the boat.

Normally, I play with a chip on my shoulder.  I aim to win – not just survive.  But this was the first time I’d gotten to the damn boat, and that elusive Achievement called to me.  Then I watched another wave of infected burst through the gates, past the now-dead Coach and nearly-dead Nick.  I turned and ran like the coward I was.  The feeling as the credits rolled wasn’t mixed – I was elated.  And not because I’d actually survived – but because a game had given me such a visceral shock, caused me such trouble, given me such pause that at the very end, when I had the chance to play the hero I turned tail and ran from the sheer horror of it.

Oh, the beauty.

There’s precious few of you around to notice, I gather.  According to my Google Analytics statistics, there are 100% less of you visiting the site than there were a year ago.  100% less might seem daunting.  It might seem like there’s NO ONE AT ALL actually paying any attention.  And with good reason, mind you – with my burgeoning programming work, my blogging time has fallen from ‘the thing I do on a nigh-daily basis’ to nil.  The time I used to spend carefully crafting my posts now goes into creating data models.

And yet, blog I must!  My creative side has been engaged, but in a completely different way than I’m used to.  I have to constantly be creative to overcome the hurdles that web apps keep throwing up in my path: figuring out how to do X when all I definitively know how to do is Y.  (Answer: Split the bottom of the Y with a hatchet to make the X.)  But that’s not writing, and it’s even different from game design, which has also lagged behind as Phase I of Being My Own Boss has come to fruition.  I don’t want to get my writing brain so rusty I need a crowbar to pry it open.

Steps need to be taken.

So back to blogging it is – it’s right under my nose every day, and I am paying for this website after all.

Assuming that there’s anyone still reading, let’s explore my latest epiphany: the Model-View-Controller paradigm of programming, and why it’s so freakin’ amazing – and how the Rails community is blowing it with helping other folks become better programmers.

MVC, if you’re not familiar, is just a way of thinking about dealing with a web application (or any application, really).  If you really want to get into the nitty-gritty, read this.  If you don’t really care, then just accept this notion: using MVC divorces all of the look-pretty stuff that goes into a web page (all the images and styling) from the actual engine of the site, which is also separate from all of the back-end mucking about with databases.

And I get it now.  I didn’t for a long time, but I get it now.  I understand why this is such a smashing good idea.  I’ve recently been working on some projects with long legacy histories, where the code was all cobbled together and strung out in one long chain of if-else statements.  And now I see MVC for the good that it can do.

I’ve known about MVC for a while, having been poking at Rails and trying to fire up various Rails projects.  But I’ll be damned – damned straight into the ground – if Rails isn’t the biggest pain in the ass to get working.  A large part of the problem is the Mac-centricity of the Rails community.  Rails screencasts are on Macs.  The best editor for Rails is Textmate – which is inexplicably Mac-only.  The very few attempts at Rails tools on Windows are either outdated or clumsy – even InstantRails, about the only Windows Rails development package worth mentioning, is nominally dead.

Now, I should mention that as I speak, I have a Mac Mini sitting on my desk for iPhone development, I own Textmate, and I have two VMWare Linux servers running.  I’m OS-agnostic to a very high degree.  But until Apple makes a laptop of similar power that retails for Dell-ish prices, my development core is in Windows.  That’s just how I have to roll.  (And don’t even get me started about the fact that you can’t roll OS X into a virtual machine – I’ll be here all day yelling.)

Surely the Rails community at large knows about this imbalance – and neglects it.  Maybe it’s even benign.  But I don’t think so.  I have a stack of books that talk about the Ruby Way, and by extension the Rails Way.  Rails discussion is replete with the ‘right’ way to do things.  Mind you – it’s all good advice.  Great advice, even.  But it certainly points up the one-wayism of the Ruby community, and I think that the Windows bias is part-and-parcel of that attitude.  And it’s a shame, really.

But luckily for the rest of us, there’s PHP frameworks like Zend, CakePHP and CodeIgniter (my personal favorite) – that I’m using in all sorts of projects (including an open-source project called Hermitage that will be up on Github soon).  CI implements (but doesn’t enforce like Rails does) an MVC architecture, and my coding is better for it.  As far as I can tell, the only real deficit to the PHP frameworks from Rails that I haven’t been able to overcome (yet) is the lack of ORM (object relation mapping) – having my objects in CI know, for example, that a user’s Cart has Items in it, and if I call for the Cart, I want the Items in it as well.  In Rails, you set it up when you create the object – in PHP, you need to explicitly write out this code, which takes time.

So get your head out of your buttocks, Rails.  I’m sure I’m not the only developer out here who wishes that Rails was easier to develop on Windows, and to deploy … period.  But my deployment woes will have to wait for some other rant.

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.

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

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?

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

More from me soon.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dollhouse is solid, through and through.  But it still has issues, the first of which is that Eliza Dushku, while very easy on the eyes and apparently passionate enough to help bankroll the show (she has producer credit), is really … not … that .. good … of an actress.  The first few minutes of the show I just kept thinking ‘what is Faith doing here?’ – her presentation of the in-over-her-head Echo was the same performance as her in-over-her-head evil Faith, and her negotiator persona was completely unbelieveable.  She played it like someone acting like they’re acting like they’re acting.  Which is either brilliant, or bad acting with too much analysis on my part.

The premise is intriguing (and Alias with a sci-fi twist, but never mind that), and of course I’ll follow Joss to the grave.  It was fun to see Commander Lock, Faith the Rogue Slayer, Helo from BSG and Mirage from The Incredibles (the resemblance of Dichan Lachman is UNCANNY) all in the same show.

* * *

And now to the inevitable (at least for me) game idea:

The players are all Actors (are they not?) who work together as a team.  No one has a character sheet to start with – they all get the stock characters for their assigned roles: negotiator from Quantico (I mean, come on …), bad-ass commando, &c., which are in themselves amalgams of other personalities (think of the Personas as LEGOs that get put together instead of single entities).  As they rotate through these personas, they leave a trace behind – those traces start to add up into the true personality of the Actor who’s been wiped.  All of the echos start to become the true voice of the character.  Think of the entire campaign as a character creation.  The echoes (when triggered by another character in the role with the echo), causes first an echo for that character, but also causes a stronger echo in the first character – a sort of positive-feedback loop.

So Character A has the negotiator persona (Persona A) and has a small echo of the wiping process caused by a stressful situation.  That echo (and its cause) stay with the persona.  Character B gets a persona that includes the echo’d bit.  Player B activates the echo (for some positive benefit), and gets their own echo that attaches to Persona A, and meanwhile Player A gets a stronger echo in Persona B; a chain reaction.

1. DEAD
2. AFTER
3. Terrible World
4. Strangers
5. OORT
6. Expressionism
7. Bluebeard
8. Decathalon
9.  Merchant
10. Elsewhere
11. Elseworld
12. Cold War
13. Makuria
14. Get It On
15.  On the Air
16. Big Kahuna

So let’s play with this a bit to get priorities straight.  If I rank them in order of “words on paper” or “work done”, the list looks like this:

1. Elsewhere
2. DEAD
3. Merchant
4. Terrible World
5. Elseworld
6. Strangers
7. Decathalon
8. OORT
9. Expressionism
10. AFTER
11. Cold War
12. Makuria
13. On the Air
14. Get It On
15. Big Kahuna

Really, Big Kahuna is just an idea – but I included it for sake of completeness.  So now if I take this list and put it in order of “games I would want to have done”, it looks like this:

1. DEAD
2. Elsewhere
3. AFTER
4. Merchant
5. Terrible World
6. Strangers
7. OORT
8. Elseworld
9. Expressionism
10. Decathalon
11. Cold War
12. Makuria
13. Get It On
14. On the Air
15. Big Kahuna

So if we add the ranks from the two lists together, we get:

1. DEAD
2. Elsewhere
3. Merchant
4. Terrible World
5. Strangers

The interesting part of this exercise is that Merchant made it to the top five – the things that I really want to get done.  I think this is a sort of wake-up call that my pursuits are out of whack.  That I have so much done on things like Elsewhere and Merchant, but they’re sitting there on the shelf.  Mind you, they’re definitely not in a place where I could exploit them for the GenCon Year – not by a long shot.  But I think I need to take a long look at myself and my process – and figure out how these sorts of things happen.

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.

• My story of gaming in 8th grade – more than one episode?

This is one idea that’s in the ‘definitely’ column – talking about the rather dark days I had in middle school, and the way that games and the escape that they provided kept me from far more destructive activities.  Talking about the characters, the storylines, and reflect on how they were a part of my life.

• My struggles with Elsewhere.

Talk about the process of designing of the omega to my alpha, Elsewhere, and about how very hard it is to design a game.  Talk with others about struggles in designing, and biting off more than you can chew.

• Bren & Antony.

These are two Vampire characters, one mine and the other belonging to my friend, Marcy.  We played them, on and off, for about four years.  It’s the only time that I’ve delved that deeply into a role-playing character (hell, any character), and perhaps getting Marcy on the phone for an interview wouldn’t be out of the question, he said knowing that she might read this on Facebook.  Perhaps it could be part of a larger arc on people’s characters and what they meant to them at the time and later.

• Immersion?

The weakest of the ideas so far, because it’s very nebulous: getting people to talk about their experiences with immersion in games – computer or otherwise.  My 60+ hour marathon with SimCity 2000, for example.

• Metanarrative of Total War – audio diary?

This is something that I definitely want to explore – the corollary to the stories about people and their games – the story of the games themselves.  More than once, playing the Total War series, I’ve had the impulse to just write a journal of everything that was happening, to get caught up in the sweep of the story.  This merges with the last idea: take someone who’s never played, say, SimCity, and have them talk their way through a session.  Or the Sims.

• The Horseheads Crew.

This is a long-shot.  Finding and interviewing the people in my D&D group in high school.

• How to Lose WWII.

The story of how, at my first convention, I played a game of Third Reich as the British and basically lost the game for the Allies.  Still my most crushing loss to this day, if you don’t count the hammering I took recently in Paths to Glory, a WWI game that I played (and lost terribly) to my friend Mike in Minnesota.  Maybe a whole podcast on loss and losing.

That’s what I have, so far.  Other than that, I’ve mostly been trying to figure out what sort of equipment I’m going to need to get to have a decent-sounding podcast.  Suggestions are welcome.

And message me, MJ.

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

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.