PAX East obliterated Jared Sorensen’s voice but he still had an event left to run. Players were counting on him. The convention schedule had the game session locked in. Sorensen, his voice already spent on conversations and events in the noisy convention venues, seemed fucked. But Jared Sorensen didn’t quit.

Sorensen was on the hook to run one of his new Parsely games on Sunday afternoon. Parsely games, if you don’t know, evoke classic text adventures through live, face-to-face play. One or more players (sometimes many more than one) issue commands to a person who parses (get it?) the players’ instructions in the fashion of an old text adventure, thereby navigating intriguing, frightening, exciting adventure environments like in days of yore. The players take on the role of explorers and collectors and the parser takes on the role of computer emulator, taking in the player inputs and doling out brief descriptions of the environment and the action.

“You’re in a dank cellar. The water here is ankle-deep. You smell gasoline,” the parser might say, then: “Exits are North, East, West.”

“Go East,” says a player on her turn.

(more…)

Friend of Gameplaywright Jason Pitre recorded our GenCon roundtable “Things You Think About Games,” and has posted it online at his website. Check out his other recordings from the convention as well.

• Things You Think About Games Roundtable Recording

We’re back from Gen Con. Until I (Will) get caught up on email on deliverables, I’ll just leave this here for you to see, if you haven’t seen it already. The exclamation point at the end of any convention is, of late, Jason Morningstar’s “One Cool Thing” video project.

Here’s the newest video in the series: One Cool Thing I Saw At Gen Con 2011.

What was one cool thing that you saw at (or from!) Gen Con, even if you saw it via blog, Twitter, or podcast because you couldn’t make it out to Indy this year?

We hope you’ll join us for two Gameplaywright events at GenCon this week:

Robin Laws will be talking about Hamlet’s Hit Points, presenting the system of analysis behind his ENnie-nominated book and taking questions about its theory and application. (Friday, 10:00 am, Marriott Santa Fe)

What do Dr. No, Casablanca, and Shakespeare have to teach us about making the stories in our RPGs awesome? Roleplaying design authority and virtuoso Robin D. Laws (Gumshoe, Feng Shui) has written all about it in Gameplaywright book Hamlet’s Hit Points. In this seminar, he presents the nuts and bolts of his approach for analyzing stories in order to improve your RPG narrative. Bring your questions!

Will and I will be hosting Things You Think About Games, a laid-back thinking gamer’s roundtable. (Thursday, 10:00 am, Marriott Indiana Ballroom F)

The Gameplaywright book Things We Think About Games makes more than 100 assertions about games from the obvious-but-overlooked (‘In an RPG, all the characters are wearing pants’) to the deeply zen (‘Be aware that the other players are not necessarily playing for the same reasons you are’). Bring your own cunning, brilliant, or mad assertions to discuss and defend at this thinking gamer’s roundtable, back for its second year.