| Stories from the Sichuan earthquake |
[May. 17th, 2008|07:33 pm] |
A lot of the coverage of the Sichuan earthquake in the English press has been negative: not terribly surprising, given the general state of China in the English language press.
A group of Chinese-speaking internetters have taken it upon themselves to translate a bunch of Chinese stories about the earthquake, culling them from blogs and newspapers. These are not stories about the government. These are mostly stories about individual people and their struggles to help others.
I'm not saying that these are necessarily all there is to the story. I'm just saying: reading couldn't hurt. |
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| Angst mope emo |
[May. 16th, 2008|01:50 pm] |
To my fellow publishers:
If you don't want people to love your work, please kindly do not publish it.
Do not publish it and then handwring thereafter about how much you hate having fans. It's arrogant and pretentious. Be grateful to each person who loves your work.
Obligatory Cat and Girl reference |
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| Attention Atheists |
[May. 2nd, 2008|05:45 pm] |
Attention atheists who say "atheists don't do horrible things in the name of their religion."
Please go read a book about the cultural revolution. |
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| Happiness |
[Apr. 30th, 2008|11:06 pm] |
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Is a clean inbox. |
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| Keeping the positive |
[Apr. 3rd, 2008|02:25 pm] |
Instead of some angry ranting, a quote:
"To learn and at due times to repeat what one has learnt, is that not a pleasure? That friends should come from afar, is this not delightful? To remain unsoured even though one's merits are unrecognized by others, is that not after all what is expected of an upright man?"
--Confucious, trans. Arthur Waley
(Waley's translation is so very very stilted, but you work with what you have.) |
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| Random game idea: The Backpacker's Apothesis |
[Mar. 23rd, 2008|03:55 pm] |
The player characters are late teenage or early twenty something backpackers travelling in China. They left home, looking for something that was missing, and now they're looking for it at the far end of the world. They don't have words to describe the feelings that drew them to China, but we do. They are drawn by their karma. All of the characters are reincarnations of Chinese people who died traumatically during the events of the last 150 years, returning by instinct to the places that they lived to try to resolve their karma.
Play fluctuates between recovered memories of their previous life and their actions in the present day. In the end, they might reconcile their karma, become dominated by it, reject it, or surpress it.
The GM must be knowlegable about modern Chinese history. |
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| Thoughts: Game Publishing Octathalon |
[Mar. 23rd, 2008|03:48 pm] |
Running Game Chef is making me think about game design contests. Here's one:
Design
Write
Playtest
Revise
Illustrate
Layout
Print
and Distribute (sell or otherwise spread)
a role-playing game within, say, a week.
That'd be fun. |
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| Game Chef: Artists First! |
[Mar. 22nd, 2008|11:35 am] |
It gives me a frankly-should-be-illegal-amount of pleasure to announce that the Game Chef Artists First! art and game design contest is seeking art submissions until April 5th.
We are looking for illustrations for a roleplaying game that does not exist, created in styles both far and near the RPG mainstream. The illustrations will then be used by a large pool of designers to create those very games.
The Skinny
To enter, artists must draw a series of illustrations for a role-playing game text that doesn't exist!
1. There must be 3-5 original (created for the contest) black and white illustrations, suitable for the interior of a book
2. B&W only, size should be from 1/4 to a full 8.5x11 page, although strange form factors are A-OK (everything doesn't need to be contained in a rectangular bounding box)
3. Each illustration should showcase a place, mood, person, idea or event. The illustrations shoud be thematically connected in some way.
4. Submissions must be posted in the Game Chef forum as a unique thread in the Art Submissions category, or as an e-mail to gamechef08@gmail.com by 12:01am April 6th, 2008
For complete contest information please visit our forum
Artists First is part of the Game Chef contest. Game Chef has run annually since 2002, and has become a center for small press and independent role-playing game development. Last year more than 120 people participated, and several games from that contest are in active playtest with plans for publication.
If you're a designer and not an artist, we don't need you for a couple of weeks, but feel free to register and sound off. Also, please repost this announcement anywhere you think it'll catch some eyeballs. |
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| New Blog |
[Mar. 21st, 2008|01:05 am] |
I have a new blog. It's called like a snowflake in the sun because I'm pretentious and name my blog with a quote from my own game (Polaris, not Bliss Stage. If it was with a quote from Bliss Stage it would be called something like "at the end of a mission terror drops to zero" which is slightly too dada for me. Maybe if I ever start a dream diary.)
It's about design and being a self-publisher. Mostly about being a self-publisher. Maybe it will be a tiny bit about writing, and play, and community experience. If you're not interested in that, I heartily recommend not clicking through.
It has some peculiar rules. |
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| De-geeking role-playing games |
[Mar. 12th, 2008|04:12 pm] |
This comes up, maybe, every month or so in the online conversations I follow. "role-playing games need to be less geeky!"
I just wanted to record here that I think that the entire idea is ridiculous for the following reasons:
1) Perceptions of role-playing games by our culture at large are generally positive: that they are fun, but very time-consuming and potentially obsession forming. Which is about accurate.
2) Since, oh, 1996, geeky things have been hella cool. Hello gamers? I know that you live under a rock, unexposed to the culture at large. But srsly.
I'm posting here because I don't want to have to write this same post, like, 80 times only to have it fall (again) on totally deaf ears. |
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| No innovation in games |
[Feb. 26th, 2008|11:09 am] |
"There's no innovation in indie games."
"It's all just rewrites of PTA these days."
"We've had a drop in quality since the 'indie boom.'"
"Some of these games drop the ball in things as simple as conflict resolution."
Dear naysayers: Get your head out of the Story Games ghetto and take a look around. There's more to games than the hot new thing that there's 16 posts about on the front page. You know why there's 16 posts about it on the front page? Because it's non-innovative. People don't like innovation, as a general rule: they gravitate to the familiar. That's why In A Wicked Age is wildly popular and Sign in Stranger has generated one post ever.
Games already published:
How about a game with no conflict resolution system whatsoever, that plays smooth as butter, has a rotating cast of characters, and whose system is so simple it can be taught by children? Is that innovative?
How about a game where the unit of resolution length is a generation, which presents vast historical epic in the context of the deeply human characters at the center? Is that innovative?
How about a game where the process of play is exactly the process of assimilating into a new society, which starts with mad libs and becomes a matter of the fate of nations? Is that innovative?
How about a game which begins by players imagining their own deaths as a starting off point, and choreographs action around familiar environments, creating new special spaces in your day-to-day world? Is that innovative?
Games in public progress:
How about a game that uses as its base creative act your doubts about your capacity to love? Is that innovative?
How about a game where the basic reward mechanic is the players' (not the characters, the players) morality and the benefit of their community? Is that innovative?
How about a game which expansively occupies all available communication media, which is played on a global scale, and you never stop playing? Is that innovative?
How about a game which is played with one player, in an hour, and is consistently fun? Is that innovative?
I've got zero against Wicked, and zero against Shock: They're fun games to play and I love them and play them a lot. But they're not representative of the level of innovation presently going on in role-playing game design except as baselines. |
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[Feb. 23rd, 2008|08:54 am] |
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It upsets me so much that I could be playing How to Host a Dungeon right now but I'm not. |
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| Holy crap |
[Feb. 21st, 2008|11:00 am] |
More reading old Forge posts.
I was interested in what I now call "drop-in, drop-out gaming" five years ago, with specificifactions of exactly how the social contracts would have to work, etc, etc. I forgot all that, and then reinvented it in the last year or so.
Huh. The comparison between 忍 and The Tactics Project is ridiculous, really. They're basically the same game, except one works. |
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| Resolved |
[Feb. 21st, 2008|10:21 am] |
I made this resolution, jeez, four years ago? I need to renew it. I think it's an excellent resolution, and I'd recommend it to any friends.
I resolve to not know very much about media that I don't like. The bar for this is that if I can win an argument about something I don't like, I know too much about it.
Time spend studying stuff I don't like could be spent with things I love. |
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| Digging through old Forge Posts |
[Feb. 20th, 2008|02:12 pm] |
I found this little gem, from the Evilhat Productions forum in 2003:
"The difference between a good RPG setting and a poor one is not the stuff that people usually talk about-- Style, Color, Signature NPCs, Genre, etc. It is the ability of the setting to provoke interesting, relevant, and meaningful (in game) conflict that makes it a good setting."
Hah. I guess I wasn't a total moron back then. |
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| Deeper in the LiveJournal |
[Feb. 19th, 2008|03:13 pm] |
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Is there an LJ feed for Deeper in the Game, Chris Chinn's new block? |
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| Wow |
[Feb. 14th, 2008|05:47 pm] |
Watch Jared Diamond embarass himself. Albeit, this is 12 years old. Nonetheless, wow.
To clue in those playing along at home: China has considerably more linguistic diversity than Europe. Or, indeed, most other places on earth.
Note also how he taps into the "OMG China is a monolith that will eat us" fears of modern Americans.
Nice. Nice. |
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| Album Cover |
[Jan. 6th, 2008|12:14 pm] |
First random article title on wikipeda = band name
Last few words of last random quote on quotationspage.com = album name
Third image on flicker random images = album art
The girl in the picture is Allie Bawx. I'm hoping she doesn't mind my use for this stupid meme.
The group "les XX" is a belgian art group from the belle epoch. I imagine that they do mind me using their logo for this stupid meme, but they're all dead. HAHAHA!
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