Last Sunday night, I was the guest on Geekerati Radio. We talked about games and narrative, topics lodged firmly within the Gameplaywright wheelhouse if not also sown broadly about its idea farm. You can listen to the roughly hour-long discussion at blogtalkradio.com.

One of the interesting things that the show’s host, frequent GPW commenter Christian Lindke, asked me was to what extent the dice mechanics of Feng Shui contribute to its ability to express a satisfying story. Feng Shui‘s central mechanic, in case you’re not familiar with it, is to roll two six-sided dice, one of which generates a positive number between 1 and 6, the other a negative number between –1 and –6. The two results are summed, and the sum added to a skill total that varies in a range from 5 to 15 or so (for player characters, anyway). Obviously, much of the time, the dice effectively cancel each other out and the skill number stands as the overall test result.

Christian’s question, as we explored the idea, was whether I thought predictability enhances narrative.

// And do I? Read on…

It’s my experience that, whether I download them or get them off a disc, video game demos come in one of two types, for every demo answers a question with two possible outcomes: “Yes, you are something I want to play,” and “No, you are not.”

I acknowledge degrees within each type — breeds of the species — but just even with Corgis being so different from Huskies, neither are exactly wolves. This is where the metaphor goes off the rails, though, as I’m forced to make a decision: which species is the affirmative and which the declination? Because while the greater game demo should probably be the wolf, fierce and rare and noble in its canine severity, the greater demo should also be something which I want very badly to have in my house. I am not all that eager to find a wolf waiting for me in my kitchen, or dropped off by UPS on my doorstep.

(more…)

Much of fan culture comes with a casual sense of superiority. Those of us who aren’t furries have at least some group of geeks to look down on, as Lore Sjöberg’s classic Geek Hierarchy illustrates.

While working the Adventure Retail booth at Comic-Con, it was my not-all-that-carefully considered opportunity each morning to look down on the people who ran, upon the opening of the exhibit hall and in defiance of Comic-Con’s Great Voice in the Sky, to stand in line to receive a free bag. The joke I repeated went something like this: “I don’t know where these people live, but the Target where I shop gives me all the free bags I want, without running or anything.” It’s clearly uncharitable japery; legitimate points of comparison between Comic-Con bags and Target bags more or less end with “free” and “can contain objects.”

What that line of thinking led me to wonder was this: What—if anything—given away for free or presented for free viewing would make me run across an exhibit hall?

Read more and find out…

It is done. Gen Con Indy 2009 has come and gone and, with just one missed Gen Con between this one and my previous visit, the whole thing still managed to take on an odd foreign feel. I spent a large part of the show being introduced to people it turns out I knew already but did not recognize, or pestering people I know and like with the two most boring questions of the show:

1. “How’s the show going for you so far?”
2. “Seen anything good in the exhibitor’s hall?”

The answers to these questions can be interesting, provocative conversation starters, but I asked these questions so frequently — often of the same people, especially for certain values of “the same people” that equal “Robin Laws” — that even I got tired of hearing me ask them. So it goes; I was out of practice.

Over the course of this week, though, I’ll write a bit about games I saw or played (not enough of either, by far), starting with a quick rundown, right now, of a few things that jumped out at me, but which may not get posts of their own this week:

1. (more…)

I was working on a writing project recently that touched a relatively wide span of game types. While trying to make sense of this taxonomy in the context of the project at hand, I came to this idea:

The difference between a game and a sport is whether the player is a part of the world where the gameplay takes place.

In football, the player is absolutely a part of the game’s world. In D&D and Power Grid, not so much. It’s more dicey when you try to categorize abstract games like bridge and Go this way, but even there, I think you can make an argument that those games have a “world”—the surface of the board—of which the player himself is not a part.

// Read more to find out how Matt Forback fouled up a perfectly fine generalization…