by Will Hindmarch | May 28, 2009 | Design, Musing, Question, RPGs
A thought came to me fully formed, like a dictum, as I was doing the dishes. Help me find the ore inside the dross here: RPG rules should be designed to work smoothly even when no one is actually roleplaying. Is this true? Discuss.
by Will Hindmarch | May 25, 2009 | Board Games, Design, Fantasy, MMOs, Musing, RPGs
Steven Soderbergh talking to Roger Ebert about The Girlfriend Experience: “I’d give them a basic goal for the scene, like ‘don’t let him sell you a package of workout sessions,’ and turn them loose. I’d say 95 percent of the film is...
by Will Hindmarch | May 8, 2009 | Design, Horror, Musing, RPGs
For quite a while I tried to cultivate V:TR as an espionage game — sometimes set in posh parlors, sometimes in lavish state houses, sometimes in awful bloody gutters formed in the spaces where de facto nations (like the police, the media, and the living) simply...
by Will Hindmarch | Apr 23, 2009 | Design, Fantasy, MMOs, Promotion, RPGs, Video Games, Websites
Jeff reminds me that I never mentioned, here, an article of mine that The Escapist published an issue or so ago: Bow Before the Worm-Slayer. The issue’s about achievements in games — or more accurately, achievement systems. For me, it was largely an academic...
by Jeff Tidball | Feb 26, 2009 | Design, Musing, Video Games
A Twitter link a week or four ago sent me to Creativity magazine’s list “The Creative 50.” (The content has since disappeared behind a subscriber login.) Creativity—the magazine—is apparently focused on marketing-related creativity, and their list of...
by Jeff Tidball | Feb 13, 2009 | Design, Movies, Props
I got a mass e-mail the other day putting out the word that nominations are open for the annual Humanitas prizes, which are awarded to screenwriters working in both film and television, to “encourage, stimulate and sustain the nation’s screenwriters in...
