Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 1:39 pm on 1/26/2012
I want to expand the definition of “story game” I settled on in our last episode. (For those just joining us, my definition of “story game” underpins a definition of “role-playing game,” one of which has been missing for 35 years and would be culturally advantageo– oh, just go read the post.) I’m rather pleased with the new one; it’s weaselly in all the right ways. Here goes:
- A story game is a game which sanctions players to make things up, impactfully with respect to the point of play, about fictional characters and events, usually not for theatrical purposes.
Why the change? Well: when Scott McCloud put forth his definition of the medium of comics in Understanding Comics, he went to considerable trouble to, as he put it, “not be so broad as to include anything which is clearly not comics.” It may be that we’re always going to have a lot of trouble doing this with story games, because they’re simply a lot more complex than comics are. In a medium made as much (or more) out of people’s minds and interpretations than out of the artifact that’s been put down on paper, maybe there’s no such thing as “clearly” or “clearly not.” On top of that, the various ways that RPG culture has built fractiousness right in from the beginning have made it even harder to choose where to draw the line. Everyone goes with their own gut, based on their own gaming experience, when choosing what needs to be included in the definition; gamer guts tend to diverge (write your own medieval-combat joke); and taking the sum of people’s guts is as unproductive as it is unfeasible.
That said, my own gut is giving me some trouble with so-called “parlor narration games.” I’ve never been happy with the term (is there any usage left of the word “parlor” that isn’t pejorative?), but it refers to games wherein rules can insert things into made-up stuff, but not so much the other way around. The common belief amongst role-playing theorists is that a game with too many parlor-narration mechanics is not a role-playing game (or a story game, by my definitions). I find myself wondering whether this distinction is productive. It feels a bit like including a piece of historical accident into what’s supposed to be a picture of the essence; like it’s a failure to fully separate form from content.
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Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 12:49 pm on 1/25/2012
There are Facebook people, there are Twitter people, there are even some Google+ people. I’m a Twitter person. I use the others, mostly G+, but Twitter is where I go by default for social chattering and output. It’s home.
How can I possibly defend this choice? What about all the senseless noise, the limited interface, the awkward fumbling monetization attempts, the constant obsessions with retweets and status, Justin Bieber and Trending fucking Topics?
Here’s the thing: Twitter has one feature. Facebook has at least, like, nine or ten, just at a glance on the front page. I know this isn’t really true; Twitter has larded a bunch of features on to its famous basic 140-character core. But looking at the page, you can pretend that one core feature is the only one there is. You can’t do that with Facebook, or any of the others.
I used to say that the brilliance, and the fatal flaw, of wikis was that you could do anything with them. The fatal-flaw part is that, while you can indeed do anything with a wiki, you’ll be doing it your damn self: the software isn’t there to have your back. All it has for you is the capacity to edit the page easily. The rest is up to you. If a wiki does try to assist you in any specific way, it usually fucks it up, because that approach is at odds with a wiki’s raw, elemental core.
Twitter’s the same way: you can, with some effort, maybe some third-party tools, and some settling for less, build any social-software interactions you want, just out of tweets. The whole thing is comical and faulty, but it also has a kind of elegance that speaks to my soul.
There’s a lesson here for RPGs too, if you squint.
link here
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 6:01 pm on 1/14/2012
A funny thing happened in 1974, and I’m not talking about me being conceived. (That was very, very serious.) What happened is a new category of entertainment product was created: interactive entertainment. A couple of guys from Wisconsin broke games – literally broke what they are – and changed history.
Nearly all games, up until Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson published Dungeons and Dragons, are closed loops. You follow rules, and those rules produce new conditions and states of the game that feed back into the rules. They look like this:
Now, somebody might make stuff up about conditions or states of the game, that’s fine. It might look like this:
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link here
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 2:19 pm on 1/8/2012
So there are these guys calling themselves the Verne & Wells Society who are setting up a “country club for geeks” in the Seattle area, as an alternative to mere hacker spaces or gamer pubs. They seem a little obsessed with their own story; they’ve been posting a lot on G+ about the evolution of their brand and their frankly very simple concept (I already told you the whole thing) instead of showing much of what they’re actually going to build, be, or do. It may be that I have them wrong, and they were never planning to actually build a physical club, although the occasional event seems like a lot to ask $300 a quarter for. But the whole deal is at least potentially interesting.
While I was reading about these guys, my girlfriend was over in the living room watching classic Trek on Netflix, specifically “Amok Time,” the first episode that was ever performed by Portland’s Atomic Arts “Trek in the Park” troupe. So I’m listening to Spock, Kirk and Bones while I read the Verne & Wells brand philosophy of “science, technology, escapism and play”… and then I think not just of Trek in the Park, but of the old Star Trek Experience in Vegas and how it dumped you into perfect Enterprise hallways that seemed to just keep going… and I think, is a swanky LEGO night the best we can do for escapism? Is the throwback to Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and the fakey steampunk aesthetic that will inevitably follow, the best way to honor science or encourage play?
The problem with the “geek country club” concept is “country.” If you want wealthy geeks to pay $1200 every year for someplace nice to eat and drink, build them the fucking Enterprise.
Think about it: you check in at the front desk, step into the “airlock” to get into uniform, then step into that corridor (or a near enough facsimile that avoids infringing copyrights) and head for Ten Forward, or perhaps you report to a mission on the bridge, or a shuttlecraft – one of several spaces devised for a relatively simple digital game along the lines of Artemis. After all, a country club needs something to do. We ought to be able to beat golf pretty easily.
You wouldn’t need the $70 million in starting capital that it took to build the Vegas attraction. It wouldn’t need to be substantially nicer than what LARPers have been known to build themselves, especially since members will feel more pride of ownership than a tourist would. You could start small – the above is fairly unambitious – and grow slowly. San Francisco would be the perfect location, not least for its fictional connections to Starfleet.
If I were a bigger Trekkie, I’d be on this already. As it is, I’m waiting on the upper-class marketers of the world to expand their vision.
link here
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 12:16 pm on 7/3/2011
Another do-stuff-for-a-month project, this time in short fiction-y bursts. K and I made up some characters last year for a webcomic we may yet do, set on a space station; I decided to spend some time with them. They’re shitty first drafts, but they’re a bit fun. I put them over on Tumblr, just to test the platform out. You might enjoy them.
The Outer Belt Diaries
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