Game Design
After sweeping the ENnies, you’d think Paizo’s Jason Bulmahn would be ready to relax and celebrate. Not entirely: he’s currently running a contest challenging Pathfinder fans to push his Facebook page up to having 1,000 people “like” it before the end of Gen Con on Sunday. If the goal is reached, all of his Facebook fans will 12,000 words of free Pathfinder material. Even if his page doesn’t reach the 1k mark, Bulmahn plans to offer up some material to those who helped the effort. As of this post, 853 people “like” his page – head on over, click the “like” button, and help the Pathfinder community.
As Day 3 of the “Best Four Days in Gaming” winds down, we’ve got your show notes for the Saturday 5 pm TJI show. Guests Adam Jury and E Foley (aka @geeksdreamgirl) join hosts Ryan and Kevin for the Saturday evening show.
One show left, midday Sunday – pardon me, “Day 4”. Check back tomorrow!
Catching up after the one-two punch of delayed-then-released shows – here’s show notes for the Friday 5 pm show. Guests Steve Kenson and Ken Hite sit in on the Friday evening show.
The crew ends the show thinking forward to the evening’s ENnie Awards ceremony, which has happened by now – click here to see the 2010 winners list.
It seems the technical difficulties have been resolved, and shows are flowing again, so now we have show notes for the Friday 11 am show. Guests Darren Watts and Jennifer Brozek lend a hand for the Friday morning show.
I’ll have the next batch of notes up in a bit.
It’s that time of year again: Gen Con draws ever closer, heralding the announcement of the Diana Jones Award and its shortlist for 2010. Each year, this independent award is bestowed on prime examples of “excellence in gaming” by the Diana Jones Committee (made up of past winners and other luminaries). The nominees are an interesting group, and are described thusly:
Follow this link for more details on what brought these four nominees to the committee’s attention. As always, the winner of the 2010 Diana Jones Award will be announced on the evening before Gen Con Indy gets started at the Diana Jones Award and Freelancer Party in downtown Indianapolis.
[Update: The votes are in, and the winner has been announced!]
Mike tweeted about this earlier, but it deserves a main page mention: Betrayal at House on the Hill: Second Edition is on final approach for release October 5th. Co-designer Bruce Glassco announced the new edition back in November 2009, and has recently hinted at new features of the updated game. The new game will feature eight new Haunts, a new “hidden traitor” mechanic, five new items, redesigned die-cut tokens, and new artwork. In all, great news for fans of the original edition (which we reviewed here), especially those who waited too long to pick up a copy.
We’ve all marveled at the elegant way certain games work, and the cooperative masterpiece Pandemic has impressed more than its fair share of gamers. In our latest Gaming News Update interview, I caught up with Matt Leacock, the man behind Pandemic, as he celebrated his new cooperative game, Forbidden Island. The new release was all the rage at last month’s KublaCon, and gamers came out to Dr Comics & Mr Games in Piedmont, CA to play GameWright‘s foray into cooperative games with the man himself. Have a listen for Matt’s thoughts on game design, giving “life” to games that defeat players, being nominated for this year’s Spiel des Jahres award (for Roll Through the Ages), and more.
As per the usual pattern, as the GAMA Trade Show ends, this year’s contenders for Origins Awards get sorted out and announced. As per the selections made by the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design, the nominees for 2010 are listed below. In Card Games, The Stars are Right is up against Thunderstone and Martian Fluxx for the award; in Board Games, Castle Panic is fighting to beat Small World and the Space Hulk rerelease; and the Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space RPG is hoping to snatch the RPG award away before Eclipse Phase or A Song of Ice And Fire can grab it. But we won’t know the results until the Origins Game Fair this summer, where the attendees will vote to decide the winners. (By the way, more than a few of the nominees were part of our OgreCave Christmas Gift Guide 2009. I’m just saying.)
In case you missed out on the first two years, the third annual Windhammer Prize is posting its rules and schedule early to allow plenty of time for writing and judging original gamebooks. While this hasn’t quite reached the scale of the computer-based Interactive Fiction Competition, it’s a similar opportunity to be creative in a medium with a lot of potential, and I hope it keeps growing. Do your part and check it out! Oh, and did I mention the cash prize?
It’s Sunday, and Gen Con 2009 is in its final stretch. This Just In… From GenCon! has posted its Sunday 11am show, with co-host Derek Rex from Pulp Gamer, and guests John Wick and Robin Laws. Until host Ryan Macklin gets back home, OgreCave will be providing the show notes, so here’s the latest write-up:
Check back after the 3 pm Sunday show for more notes, or just hang out at OgreCave for a while, ‘cuz we like you and appreciate your business.
We’ve known the nominees for a while now, and resisted judging too harshly for having a t-shirt in the “Game Accessory” category. This year’s winners were awarded in a ceremony overseen by James Ernest last night at Origins. A notable winner was the Mouseguard RPG for Best RPG, despite being up against the Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition Player’s Handbook and Trail of Cthulhu. (I could say it “eeked” out a win, but then I’d feel ashamed.) Serenity Adventures won for Best RPG Supplement, and Magic: The Gathering – Shards of Alara was named Best CCG Supplement. As many expected, Dominion took the title as Best Card Game, while Pandemic got he nod as Best Board Game. Click below for the full list of nominees and winners.
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Avid roleplaying gamers, prospective game publishers, and anyone even mildly interested in how the wacky tabletop game industry functions should take note of a new column launching today over at RPGnet. Michael Fiegel, creator of the Ninja Burger phenomenon and co-author of Hellas, has begun HELLAS: From Alpha to Omega, a four-episode column detailing the trials and tribulations of publishing the impressive 300-in-space RPG. Fiegel starts his tale in Theogonia, wherein the disastrous Games Expo helps cement a new project. RPGnet will reveal new episodes of the Greek sci-fi game’s story over the next three months. Whether you like the concept of Hellas or not, you owe it to yourself to have a read. (And if you haven’t heard our PAX ’08 Audio Report episode with its Hellas interview, you’d be doing yourself a favor by listening to it now.)
Now and again, and it seems like lately it’s a little more often, I stumble across some neat little bit of info, and it may have been known to others already or by some much more obvious means, but it still makes me go “holy crap” and get all bouncy with anticipation of what could result. Take yesterday: I was reading James Wallis’ blog (Mr. Wallis, former Hogshead guy and doughty game designer, will not be unfamiliar to longtime Cave readers), specifically a post about a neat thing I’d seen a few days prior but hadn’t gotten off my ass to post for some reason, and… hey. Wait a minute. “My colleague, Adrian Hon”??? At a firm called Six to Start, that comes right out with “we make alternate reality games”? Well, damn if that’s not a glimmer of hope for a genre I was starting to lose faith in. Very interesting news for Wallis’ career as well.
So I’m all into that, but I shouldn’t keep burying the equally-interesting news that Hon and Wallis are trumpeting to begin with: Let’s Change The Game, a design contest to create a fundraising ARG for Cancer Research UK. Stories are the best motivating force on the planet as far as I’m concerned, and they seem particularly potent when juiced up with the particular energy of alternate-reality gaming – this is a smart and heartening project.
If you’re like me and have a spot of Magic: the Gathering in your past, but have more or less lost interest in all the little furniture-rearrangements and wacky new kitchen appliances they’ve added to that house over the years… well, it looks like as of the next big block of cards, they’ve added a whole new room. The Planeswalker cards have an entirely new currency (Loyalty points), don’t interact with all the other cards in conventional ways, and (like a lot of other recent new stuff in MtG) seem crazy-powerful. It really feels like they’ve added a chunk of new game, rather than sub-games. And the above-linked article is surprisingly readable if you have only primary-school-level Magic knowledge (again, like me). Will this become a thriving part of the game, or is it the new phasing? Discuss.
Because “discussion” is not as cool. Discussion is never as cool. Come on, people, I shouldn’t have to tell you that. The industry gathering Protospiel brings us an engaging virtual panel discussion of game design with industry luminaries James Ernest, Reiner Knizia, Tom Jolly, Bruno Faidutti, Alan Moon and more.
Many of you likely know all about I Love Bees, the mysterious site the URL for which was flashed briefly at the end of an online trailer for Microsoft’s upcoming first-person shooter Halo 2. You may also remember the promotional online puzzle games that tied in with Steven Spielberg’s A.I., which games came to be known collectively as “The Beast” and whose community of players called themselves the Cloudmakers. Rich with game-world detail, convincing characters and sometimes-fiendish puzzles, these alternate reality games, or ARGs, are… well… basically just LARPs. I Love Bees recently took another step closer to LARPhood when it not only challenged players to find and answer pay phones being called by an in-game AI, but anointed the answerers of certain calls with membership in the “crew” of the AI’s lost spaceship.
One player is not happy. Eric Burns laments that the collaboration with strangers in real time that made his experience in the Cloudmakers so compelling will be weakened and eventually destroyed by this singling out of a few lucky players. But collective-detection to unlock a story is basically How to Host a Murder – you can keep fiddling with the puzzles and the means of revelation, but you can’t disguise the fact that, after all the fire and motion, you are still just waiting for the next piece of story to consume. A story is not a game. ARGs are now making the leap from that model to the model of Mind’s Eye Theater – by adding actual gameplay. So far, it’s just the game of Prisoner’s Dilemma; do you, the individual, stick with the group, or do you defect? Other games are possible in ARGs, and we will no doubt see more than a few of those possibilities soon. The question is whether going from the How to Host a Murder model to the model of today’s LARPs will come with the same loss of accessibility – and popularity.
Why you should bookmark the new Gamethink weblog immediately, despite the Orwell-esque title: “I’m shooting here for perspectives anchored in practical understanding of the possible, for rolegaming as a commercial pursuit as well as a social one.” Word up to that.
Steve Jackson Games has some new job openings for the aspiring game designer. They are looking for an expert on India to fact-check their manuscript for GURPS India. If you have ever lived there, or have studied the region extensively, send your qualifications to Mr. Andrew Hackard. Also, you ace RPG cartographers should dig out your portfolios and send a sample of your best work to Ms. Mia Sherman.
I just learned on the gamebook mailing list that the wonderful Time Machine series of interactive books has been re-released in eBook format. Although aimed at children, these are among the most effectively-written and interesting of the many “Choose Your Own Adventure”-type books released in the eighties. At $3.99 each, the new electronic editions cost twice as much as the original paperbacks did, but it’s still a pretty good deal if you want to relive your childhood adventures or learn about history in a game-like manner. The series can be purchased at Amazon.com and several other sellers of eBooks.
I’m not a big RPG guy, but that news about adding “mystical gateways” to the Forgotten Realms canon is interesting. Yes, it will unbalance campaigns that get crazy with them, but for some campaigns it may be the balance they want. But that’s not what I’m thinking about.
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For those who have lives and therefore don’t pay any attention to Slashdot, they had an intriguing discussion on zero-sum games today.
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