Monthly Archives: March 2018

March 2018 Wrapup

Hey, here’s the end of March – and now how’d that go?

As before, we had a daily blog post. In this month I’m particularly proud . This is while meeting the three regular segments, Game Pile, MTG, and Story Pile.

I’m really happy with the t-shirt design for this month too. It’s called ALL DOGS ARE COMMUNISTS, and you can get it on Redbubble and Teepublic. Redbubble stickers are pretty cheap if you like the design but don’t want to ship, like, a shirt.

I did this design in a day, and it’s my first really proud-of-it-proper piece of art done entirely with my tablet, rather than using vectors to define a clear outline. I hope you like this comrade doggo and they brighten your day.

Game launched? Burning Daylight, here at Invincible Ink and DriveThruCards! It’s a hand management game where you get to control your own little gang of grungy solarpunk heroes, against a fascist city that seeks to assert its way on a world that doesn’t want them any more!

Burning Daylight marks three milestones. One, it’s a game I consider substantial. Several of our games are designed to be lightweight and fun, like Foxtail or C-QNS or even Winston’s Archive. Burning Daylight is a game with some lore and a multi-turn system for playing and advanced rules. I wanted to make sure that we weren’t just releasing the easier types of games to make, but instead releasing a good mix. Basically, I want to make sure we release a few Fabricators and Sector 86 along with our simpler games.

Secondary to that, it’s just a game I’ve been working on a while and iterated on a lot. I’m going to do a history of the design for Patreon (which will be posted here, for free), because it seems to me an interesting project.

And third, it’s one of the first games I’ve made where I could afford to pay both for the game’s art (which is Stock) but also for consultancy fees, and send promotional copies out! This was enabled in part by you, on Patreon, so thank you so much.

Making video was another one, which I fulfilled early in the month; another episode about Magic: The Gathering.

MTG: Five Commanders That Deserve Better

As always, this work is being financed, in part by my Patreon! Over there, we did our first Bundle Sale and I floated the idea of making a simple ‘game a month’ tier, where for, like, $15 or $20, depending on how shipping costs work out, I just send you a game each month. We’re still feeling it out, but please, feel free to become part of the conversation.

On a personal life front, well, I had some medical woes, and some payment woes, but I’ve also now got some work at the Uni that seems to fit with my like, life schedule really well, and kind of uniquely needs my skillset of ‘check this thing out, can you make it work, and then tell us how we can make it work.’ That’s pretty neat. I’ve also been teaching, and I love doing that.

I did get some news about my diet, which is more embarassing than anything else (ie, ‘don’t eat all the pasta’, and other stuff I should know already), and I hung out with my family some more. I’m taking care of myself.

Also this is the first month I’ve had lately where I haven’t been itching for the next month’s game release. We might have a simpler game up next, or maybe we’ll have a surprise that comes out of nowhere. I don’t know. We’ll see!

MTG: The Pack Rat Problem

Wizards employees, please do not read any further. This will discuss custom card designs and while it should only feature some abstract examples, I understand you are not allowed to look at unsolicited card designs.

Custom card designs feature a host of oddball problems, weird habits that we get into and things we don’t consider because well, mostly, custom designers are lone creators without the force of design and development behind us. Hey, we’re only human and all. But we have these problems and sometimes I think it’s worthwhile considering them.

Here then, let’s consider: Does your card create a Pack Rat Problem?

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Stop Being An Asshole About Fidget Spinners

Last year was the year of the Fidget Spinner, which is to say, it was the year people noticed the existence of dedicated stim toys and started to make a thing about it. During this time, teachers began the eternal gripe about whether or not they’re entitled to the attention of students, something that philosophically, I’m sort of resistant to. It’s not so much a resistance to the idea as much as it is surrender to its impossibility. If you’re a teacher, and you’re dealing with students who aren’t paying attention to you, that’s on you. Your job is to communicate ideas to the student in a way that they can remember. If they’re not engaging – if they’re not even trying – and you can’t find a way to make them that works for you too, then the two of you aren’t compatible.

The thing that blows me out about it was that the whole regime was just assholery all the way down. It wasn’t some sort of brilliant incisive conversation, not even slightly. You’d see people ostensibly employed in the task of scientific research or pedagogy or parenting or anything, people who you’d think have some degree of appreciation for nuance and maybe a recognition of how kids behave, acting like fidget spinners were the ding-danging apocalypse.

I mean, consider that adults do a ton of annoying stuff that other people put up with but they never realise how much people are ignoring it, because it’s not normal to call out strangers for being weird. If I stand at the bus stop clicking a pen nobody at the bus stop is going to tell me off for it, not because it doesn’t bug them, but because you respect other people’s boundaries.

The main thing I took out of the whole lesson was that the people you saw complaining the most about trying to distract people from fidget spinners were that they were people obviously uncomfortable with being shown that they’re not good at holding an audience’s attention. If people are going to zone out during your class, the fidget spinner’s not going to help them do it faster.

Literally every reason to ban fidget spinners is a reason to ban pens and paper.

Story Pile: The Good Place, Season 1

Let’s not talk about spoilers.

The premise of The Good Place is a pretty good one, a robust hook they serve at you in the first episode. We’re introduced to the character of Eleanor Shellstrop, as she comes to consciousness in an afterlife, which the story then underscores is not ‘Heaven.’ It is, to simplify, ‘The Good Place.’ The drama of the narrative comes then from her revealing, in private, to her first potential friend, that she isn’t the person they think she is, and that she doesn’t belong there.

That’s our basic premise, and it’s a strong hook. Rather than a whacky situation comedy, where there’s this good scenario and the story repeatedly dumps into this status quo a new strange setup, and the story refreshes around it, you get a really interesting story that’s also very funny that builds on the premise of the story established in this opening. It’s strongly continuity-driven, and that means that you aren’t really tuning in for an episode as much as you are tuning in for a few at a time.

It’s a good show to watch all of over the course of a weekend, that kinda thing. Good quality Netflix Content.

And I don’t want to talk about what happens in it. I want to talk about a joke.Continue Reading →

Term: Dice Pool

A dice pool refers to a resolution mechanic where rather than rolling a dice or a number of dice and summing the results, the number of dice themselves is some part of the mechanics. The simplest version of a dicepool is one where you roll a large group of dice, and then select which results apply to which part of the resolution.

A single dice (or number of dice plus a modifier) is a resolution mechanic that follows a very simple experience: You roll the dice, you do the math, and then you have your result. This makes a dice roll, singular, as a very simple ‘switch’ experience, comparable to pushing a button in a videogame. You press a button, the system responds to the math, you get a result. That’s a really good, robust mechanic I like using for any game where you want some variance in a reliable, regular action – like in D&D, for example.

A dicepool, by comparison, is more of a system for making resolution itself a game. This isn’t all it’s used for! But it’s a simple way to use dice that isn’t just adding or subtracting on top of them.

Utility

So one of the most basic things you can do with dicepool systems is you can make players make decisions. Let’s say you have a system where players are setting up a car for a race. You roll a fistful of dice at the start of the game, and select, of those dice, some to be the engine, some to be the tires, and some to be the seating. Then, as you play the game, you prioritise how you drive your car based on those earlier decisions.

One way that Exalted uses a dice pool is that you roll your d10s, and all dice that are 7s or higher are ‘successes,’ and you need a certain number of successes to win. This is a weird bit of terminology that maybe a designer who cared about language might fix but whatever, like in Blades in the Dark the point is that you can use a dicepool to handle a resolution in a system where you want players to succeed, on average, but don’t want the degrees of success to be as varied as the numbers on each dice face.

A dice pool doesn’t even need to be rolled: You can use a dicepool system to have a number of counters that are kept at a particular number, or incremented as appropriate, based on the players’ choices. And even then you can use that these counters are dice as part of the play: Make it so it’s calibrating a computer, and sometimes a virus rolls some of the dice randomly!

Limitations

Dice pool systems can get pretty weird when you make them success-or-fail. It’s also got a mechanical limit – rolling 1d20+30 is not the same physical question as asking someone to roll 30d6 and count the successes.

Another thing with dicepool systems is that when you add components per player, they get out of hand fast – so if you want a game where each player needs to roll 5 dice, then one player needs 5, and 2 needs 10 but if you wanted 4 players you need 20, and you need to store those dice.

One final thing with dice pool systems is that while rolling big fistfuls of dice is exciting, doing fiddly book-keeping or rules changing or changes to each dice in the pool multiplies irritation. So it doesn’t always work with every type of dice mechanic.

Examples

Exalted, Scion, and the other of White Wolf’s other various roleplaying games.

Blades in the Dark.

MTG: Pet Cards II: Mirrodin Block

Boy this era of Magic sucked.

The problem of Onslaught era magic was to look back upon a set full of forgettable okay cards that I learned to love, little roleplayers, niche friends – I can’t believe I forgot Wirewood Savage, for example! – but nothing that was so powerful it shook the world between Odyssey Block and Mirrodin Block. Oh sure, Goblins came from Onslaught but I didn’t really feel love for those little blighters the way I did for the cards I consider my pets.

On the other hand, Mirrodin Block is so tediously powerful. Every other card is basically an archetype, or gave rise to an archetype, or blatantly holds itself up as a design mistake. Going back and looking over Mirrodin block, I was genuinely worried that I might not be able to find a pet card from each set on the way to the good stuff in Kamigawa and later Ravnica.

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The Hyperlink Is The Message

What do you think it means of a culture where every idea we have can be expressed on a page, with a direct link from everything we have to say to another thing that explains that thing? Do you think it’d make us more appreciative of context? Do you think we’d like things more if we could always be comfortable knowing a cite was backing us up? Or do you think that we’d start to replicate that same expression with other peoplewith the idea that every piece of text was obligated to provide its own citations and depth? Do you think it’s a coincidence that the current generation of toxic masculinity takes the form of nerds being confident that they are The Rightest each time?

The Rural Purge

In Understanding Media (1964), Marshall McLuahn refers to America as a culture where

the death of all the salesmen at one stroke of the TV axe has turned the hot American culture into a cool one that is quite unacquainted with itself.

Now, I think that he’s wrong, because hey. Disagreeing with McLuahn in general is kind of how you get started in media studies, even as you recognise the dude was right about a lot of stuff. Still I think he’s wrong in the idea that TV, in the 1960s, represented the death of salesmen (because sales and advertising are very different creatures).

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Sodom Me, So Do You

The story of the city of Sodom is barely worth recapping, but in case you’ve never heard it, basically there was this place that God didn’t like that was basically named Doomedsville, and the only good people who lived there were shown in one incident how they were too good to live there, before God told them the town was hecked and they left. I’m glossing over some plot points, but it’s honestly not important, because what’s really remarkable about this story is what it’s about.

See, right now, if you ask people, it’s about the sexual immorality of the city, the way that the people of Sodom used to stick their hoo-hahs into butt-holes and that’s why it was a sign of what a problem things could be. That’s why God hates gay marriage.

Except those people, these days, are also opposed by people, equally certain of their familiarity with the religious texts of the now, who want to assert to you that, in fact, the sin of Sodom was their failure to show the messengers proper comfort: That the story of Sodom was a place that failed to respect people enough, and right, and therefore, God loves gay marriage.

This is not, in any way new.

Back during the 1930s, the city of Sodom was a story about a failure of the people to care for their travellers and interlopers, brought up as an example of people who weren’t in the proper spirit of Christian Charity. In the 1940s and 1920s, Sodom and Gomorrah were known to be about the vile practice of race-mixing. In the 1890s, Kelogg was certain that Sodom and Gomorrah were a story about the foulness of indulgent humanity who ate fancy food.

Now this is no secret to anyone familiar with Christian movements: Everything in the story is just a justification for today’s latest problem, and nobody wants to read any further than the destruction of the city for their metaphor.

Notes: TTC – Rivals of Ixalan Nicknames

TTC 205 - Rivals of Ixalan Nicknames

Here’s a thing I like!

The nicknames podcasts from TTC, a casual magic podcast that seems mostly to not actually be about casual magic so much but is still a good bit of Magic Content that rarely (Iconic Masters aside) spends its time making people feel bad. This episode – and the other ones like it are really cool to me because the Nickname podcasts are sort of an unintentional deep-dive into the details of what cards are doing in their art and mechanics to construct the nicknames. Sometimes it’s making references that don’t connect – like the Metal Gear Solid jokes? But often it’s otherwise examining the art in depth, or examining mechanics in the greater context of MTG history.

This is cool stuff and I like it.

MTG: Pet Cards I: Onslaught Block

Everyone deserves a pet card. It’s one of the things I like about high-variance older formats, like budget Modern or 1v1 Commander – the formats are different and odd enough you get a chance to see some card you really like shine. Plus, Magic The Gathering is a game made up of lists – deck lists and tier lists and card set lists – so I thought it’d be fun to go back and check out some older sets, and pick whichever single card from each set was, to me, my pet card, the one I want to show you and share with you. And rather than start at the start – because that’s boring – we’re going back to my beginning: Onslaught Block.

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Games Journalist’s Bin Box

An idea I’ve been brewing on more and more these going weeks is just how nice it’d be to have for each esteemed games journalist, a list not of their favourite games, but games that were offered to them to review, and they either bailed on early or chose not to review for other reasons.

I think one of the things I want as context for creatives is the kind of things they don’t care about, because I think that’s a useful and meaningful metric for when you’re dealing with what a person can bring to the table for journalistic context.

Of course, we can’t have this, because Gamers are Scum.

Game Pile: Gex

Videogames exist in a sort of weird plateau in the modern era. Speaking broadly, games these days aren’t that different from games five years ago, and it’s mostly just an evolution of user interface and following different trends. Sure, if you’re really into them you can appreciate the differences between Assassins Creeds 3 and 4, but a casual observer can be forgiven for thinking they’re basically the same game. It’s even easier to look at games in terms of their attempts to cash in on styles of games – the military shooters, the racers, the sporters, etcetera – rather than on their actual gaps in time.

Let’s look back then to a period when a style of game was a thing. We’re not going to look at the leader of a trend, we’re going to look at one of the most blatant followers.

Let’s talk about Gex.
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Print and Play: Adventure Town, Pt 3

For this latest update on Adventure Town, let’s talk about the actual things you’re trying to roll. Unicode is nice and includes a set of die faces (⚀ ⚁ ⚂ ⚃ ⚄ ⚅) so we can use an ordinary text editor to sort out an example of our play boards.

You’re rolling dice to make your businesses and investments in the town do things which will give you money, which will in turn let you buy things to upgrade the town. Ownership of things in town gives way to complex rules, so the personal tableau should be as simple as I can make it.

Any given die roll in a d6 set is as likely as any other, so while we can construct a number of die roll setups, no matter how outlandish they look, they’re as probablistically likely as one another provided they want the same number of dice. Plus, it’s a drafting game – you roll 6 dice, you pick the ones you want, you use them.

Here’s an example, based on what I have in mind.

Let’s do a quick mechanical rundown of the ideas represented here:

Seal

This is where the player draws a symbol or signs a letter or makes a drawing that represents ‘their property.’ When they advance on the town board, they get to sign this symbol onto the properties they built, which also shows which buildings trigger at particular events.

I like this being something the player draws, it gives you some feeling of ownership on the space. We’ll have to decide what kind of space we want it drawn in later – like its shape and dimension.

Opportunities

These are simple cash ins: You can trade two dice of the sets type, and get a payout. Every time you get that payout, you put a cross in the box next to it, and that means some of them can run out. This feelsl ike things where the player is only so able to make money off things a certain time before the demand dries up.

Plans

Plans let you spend one (or more, depending on how many) dice you drafted to cross off die in the Plan list. Plans are more restrictive, in that:

  • You can only work on one Plan at a time
  • Every time you advance a plan, you have to do it with the exact numbers you need to advance it.

This means that a player might roll a 3, decide they want to start on the third plan, and then can’t advance any more plans until they cash in a 4, then a 3 again to finish that plan. Plans make your other payouts better, though – both payouts for opportunities and triggered things from businesses. Consider these a way to earn XP when you want to do something with a die roll other than throw it away to the Old Crank in town (who will buy any die for 1 coin).

You can advance plans with as many or as few die at a time as you want, but it’s your whole turn; so if you draft a 5 and a 6, and only the 5 is useful to your active plan, you don’t get to cash in the 6 for money.

Quests

These are different, because quests are big cash payments. They might not even be cash – it might be that they give you another currency, like Quest Points, you can use to cash in for some specific buildings (like, say, a Wizards’ Tower or a Cathedral). Quests, like Plans can only be advanced one at a time, and need the exact next roll to advance.

Also, some adventurers will finish quests for people, based on what they’ve got.

Other Features

I know one feature I want on this is a corruption row – a line of tickboxes that just give you 2 coins every time you hit them. You can use this to make money when you don’t like your die rolls, but excessive corruption can lead to bad effects, and some player boards might secretly punish you (or reward you) for excess corruption.

Story Pile: Sonic Boom

What right did this series, this series of all things, did this series, have to kick ass?

Sonic Boom is a tv series made up of ten minute shorts based around the adventures of a hedgehog named Sonic, his enemy Dr Eggman and his friends, Knuckles, Tails, Amy, and Sticks, and a host of other characters. And from there… what is it?

Let’s talk, real quick, and by that I mean the bulk of this article is going to be about it, about intertextuality.

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Meaningless Conclusions

Recently the world has been in the grip of continuity fever, as movies and books and TV and radio have been building big, sprawling, endless continuities, whether in the very low-key work of things like Homestuck or the megabudget billionaire spaces of the Avengers franchise. Particularly important in this generation of media are the seemingly endless twin leviathans of The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones. Now, my scorn for these series isn’t any kind of secret, and if you happen to find some enjoyment or tension in the relentless whirring of a pointless murder tombola, so be it for you, but these stories are staring down the barrel of running out of stuff to tell you.

That is, they’re approaching their ends.

As we’re also near the end of an anime season we’re faced with the unpleasant conversation about how many anime that were well liked drew to a conclusion that was, well, probably bad. I mean I’m not thinking of any specific example, it’s just anime is full of bad endings. It’s absolutely crammed to the gills with unsatisfying conclusions that are ill-thought out or badly connected to their premise and while I have my thoughts on why that happens, what I find more interesting right now is talking about why having a bad ending matters.

Now, there’s a time and a space for a conversation that’s about how these works don’t actually serve as a conventionally structured narrative, but not now, not here. The question we’re asking is why does it matter if a story ends badly. If there are 13 episodes of a series, and 11 of them are good, does the bad ending mean anything at all? What does it mean to define where a story ends, in the first place?

It feels a bit strange to have to explain this, but let’s talk about the most fundamental element of resolution. I mean there are some people who when you tap out half of Shave and a Haircut are going to give you a look until you tap out the two bits, and to those people we don’t need to explain why resolution is satisfying.

What I care about though is how conclusion determines text. That is to say, your conclusion is how you answer the question of any given story which is why am I reading this? The premise of a series like Game of Thrones tends to be sold where the anguish and distress of the sympathy of the experience is that it has some meaning. That, when viewed from the perspective of the whole of the story, you’ll be able to see that the death had some impact, that the losses were worth it.

It won’t be, by the way.

Yes, I know this is me basically picking on Game of Thrones, but I hate it, I’m being open about that. But the thing I hate the most about it is the way that once it ends unsatisfyingly, having shed viewership on the way, we’re going to be treated to part of the Throne-Critical Complex of people talking about how it was okay that the end was bad, that the bad ending was someone else’s fault, or maybe it doesn’t matter how endings are bad. And that makes me very angry because I’m one of those writers and creators who believes in the idea that your audience’s attention is worth something, it’s a gift.

You don’t start a story with the end. You don’t start a story by saying ‘this dude punched a dragon, the end. But now I’ll tell you who the dragon was and who the dude was.’ That’s the conclusion. That’s the point you’re building up to. The story is a frame to make that moment mean something. The introduction gets us into the story, the development shapes that story to set up the conclusion, and the conclusion shows us how that event comes to a head, how all of that means something. And that meaning is derived from being able to put that conclusion in a meaningful context in the whole of the sequence of events that lead up to it. If the ending of a story introduces aliens or teleporting Nazis or reveals the whole thing is just a conversation between ad executives, none of that relates to the previous story – and it ruins it. Ending a story well is the way you show what that story was about.

I mean in a way I’m really just railing against this post-structural view of storytelling, the idea that everything is a franchise and that being able to tell a story well, cleanly, quickly is less of a skill than teasing out people’s attention over months with an incomplete story where you yourself don’t know where you’re going. Basically, we’re at a point where multimillion dollar movie franchises are being constructed with roughly the same structural worldview as Webcomics, and webcomics were able to grow up and out of it.

Maybe if I call this ‘narrative lootboxing’ I can get people to pay attention to it as if it’s worth being as unhappy with as I am.

Some work cheekily tells you it doesn’t matter, you enjoyed the ride, and some of them even go so far as to not bother trying for conclusions. Sure, that’s fine. We can talk about those works some other time. There is definitely a place for work that’s more about the experience than the point – but you’ll notice the best of those works don’t tend to really bother with endings. There’s a reason a soap opera is twenty plotlines, no waiting, beginning and ending all over the place together.

In the end, media and stories are ways we practice, in our own emotionality, what matters to us. They let us practice our love and our hate and our youth and our age and our competence and our naivete. They let us practice being ourselves and being other people. They let us craft memories of nothing that is or was but that we wish would be.

And in that space, it is worthwhile learning how to end, and how to end well.

Because, in the end, what does it matter the way a man falls down?

When there’s nothing left but the fall, it matters a great deal.

Emoji Rebuses: FPS!

Hey, here’s a bunch of Emoji arranged to suggest the names of various classic First-Person shooter videogames. Can you guess what they are? I bet you can’t! Oh yeah? Says you! Well I never!

⤵️⤵️🏰🐺🍺

Return To Castle Wolfenstein

☝️🔺
Rise of the Triad

💉
Blood

🤴☢
Duke Nukem

💰
Legal Tender

((🌎))
Quake

👨‍🌾🐏📄
Redneck Rampage

🥇👁
Goldeneye

🇺🇳🎣
Unreal

🇺🇳🎣🏆
Unreal Tournament

🐈🅰️💇🇩🇩🇩
Catacomb 3D

👽🆚🦁
Alien Vs Predator

🖥⚡🖥⚡🖥
System Shock

🛤😭🛤😭🛤😭💉🐉
Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon

🔫
🔫
🔫
🔫
🔫
🔫
🔫
🔫
🔫
🔫
🔫
🔫
🔫
🔫
Tower of Guns

🥋🐉✊ 🌽
Ken’s Labyrinth

🍝

Dishonored

💏🔪🎪
KISS Psycho Circus

🕕6️⃣🎲
Hexen

🤘🤘
Turok


Mirror’s Edge

Game Pile: Beyond Good And Evil

Regarded largely as a modern classic, Beyond Good And Evil is one of those games along with Psychonauts that it launched on the overwhelmingly busy Gamecube and PS2 marketplaces, didn’t stand out in that attention economy because at the time, games journalism was still really difficult, and only a few years later, after its window for impact was past, people picked it up, noticed that it was phenomenal, and we ended up with a modern classic. Still, classic games get to be exulted the same way classic literature and classic medicine does, with an understanding that maybe being good for its time is not the same thing as always going to be good.

There’s a certain risk of rhapsodic enshrinement with games like this, where a game transitions from unknown to classic and we miss a chance to talk about what in the game is interesting or cool. And what with a trailer for Beyond Good And Evil 2 launched last year (again), I figured the time was ripe (several months ago) to replay and talk about Beyond Good And Evil.
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Story Pile: Shadow The Hedgehog is Queerness

In music theory there’s this understood idea that brasses sound heroic and powerful, and strings sound gentle and feminine, a theory reinforced by years of musicology in theatre. What happened is when movies were new, and attaching music to characters in a particular way moved out of the Musical and into just telling stories, a sort of language of music got started.

We already had it that brass music sounded powerful and forceful and heroic – something that John Phillip Sousa sort of ran into the ground as a theme. By comparison, strings sounded delicate and Not Like Brass, so the formed an obvious counterpart for the fragile and the frail. Then over several thousand movies and repeated use of these two ideas in movies where boys were strong and girls were objects, we wound up where we are now, where despite never actually being true, horns ‘sound masculine’ and strings ‘sound feminine.’

I mean, think about this: What’s the Superman theme sound like?

Anyway, this means that when we reach back into earlier, pre-movie theatrics, though, we still now see that same coding. The association with the music extends beyond the media it’s in. Now, marches that predate movies are seen as ‘masculine’ because the movie comes with them. This is the power of the archetype, where when you’re seen as relating to a thing, it doesn’t really matter what you are doing, because it’ll all be seen in relationship to the archetype.

What does this have to do with Sonic The Hedgehog?

Shut up I’m getting there.

The point is, movies wound up this way because they were being slowly but steadily built for bigger and bigger markets. The more people you want to get involved, the more you lean on those archetypes, on a frame of reference. Brassy heroic music is, archetypally, masculine, and so, when you want to signal a masculine dude, you use brassy heroic music. This means that lots of this media is full of signals that are more about telling you A Thing Is A Way It Is Because It Is The Way It Is. An archetype is, basically, lots of reinforcing, circular story stuff. It doesn’t have meaning of itself – it’s just a way of signalling a thing should be sort of like these other things.

And now we get to Sonic The Hedgehog, the media franchise. We’re not talking about the game character – Sonic doesn’t really belong to games any more. When you’re talking about cultural impact, Sonic’s been in twenty five years of comics, three manga series, six books, and five television series, with a live-action CGI movie in the works being financed by a man who’s also repsonsible for the XXX and Fast and the Furious franchise. Sonic is a transmedia property, and matters more as being Sonic than he matters as a game entity. And despite all of this, this enormous spread of media representation, when you go looking for an answer to the question who is Sonic the Hedgehog you don’t find anything, really.

You get an archetype.

But that archetype gives us structure – and that gives us a place to look at the Sonic the Hedgeverse.

What then, is Sonic? What archetypally remains around this character? Well, he’s a Cool Hero. He’s edgy, in a very generic, mid-90s kind of way, in that he thumbs his nose at authority, he likes speed and going fast and doens’t like rules, man, but at the same time you know he’ll never blow off something that matters because that plays against being a hero, so what you’re left with is this character who is simultaneously unreliable but also very reliable. This is reflected in Sonic’s writeup on Wikipedia, composed of multiple sources, saying that Sonic is

…”like the wind”: a drifter who lives as he wants, and makes life a series of events and adventures. Sonic hates oppression and staunchly defends freedom. Although he is mostly quick-witted and easygoing, he has a short temper and is often impatient with slower things. Sonic is a habitual daredevil hedgehog who is honest, loyal to friends, keeps his promises, and dislikes tears. In times of crisis, he focuses intensely on the challenge as if his personality had undergone an astonishing change.

If you sit down and cross out those sentences that mean nothing like ‘makes life a series of events,’ you’re left with a loose drifter without any fixed goal who is a staunch defender of freedom who always stands by his friends, easygoing until he doesn’t have to be, patient unless he’s not and is like the wind except he also always keeps his promises. In essence, there’s nothing there, but despite that you can still say you know something of who Sonic is. It’s even there in his visual coding – red, white and blue. Sonic is a Bold Hero Guy.

Once he’s the Bold Hero guy, everything else kinda falls around him. Tails becomes the Sidekick Boy, who has to be smaller and worse at everything than Protagonist Guy by default, so he can be rescued but also so he has some reason to aspire to being like Protagonist Guy. He can be sweet and kind (which aren’t edgy and cool), and he’s probably a tiny bit more femme than Protagonist Guy, in the vein of the nerdy friend. Tails fits this archetype pretty easily – he’s better than Sonic at machines, which builds in that ‘nerdy friend’ slot.

You can play this outwards; Knuckles is the voice of authority, with his stable position and opposition to Sonic because Sonic isn’t following the rules. There’s Amy Rose, the Good Girl who hangs around him and has an interest in him (which shows he’s desireable), but for some reason he never has to commit or dismiss this – Amy will want him regardless of what a doofus he is and she will usually be at fault for any discomfort he experiences. Rouge introduces a sexy other to Amy, again, a reflection of an image of Sonic, and then, finally… we get Shadow.

Note that up until now, none of the other major characters (Sorry, Big) introduced have been like Sonic. They’ve been explicitly unlike him – Shadow is the first opposite to Sonic (unless you count 1994’s Anti-Sonic The Hedgehog, which we don’t, and he didn’t come back as Scourge the hedgehog until 2011, well after Shadow’s appearance so don’t @ me). And when you’re dealing with archetypes, there is an identity that exists for the characters in movies and TV series like this. The place for a character who is the same type but not the same way. He is coded cool, but 00s edgy to 90s edgy, making him seem slicker, more fashionable, more aware, compared to Sonic’s suddenly oblivious-seeming 90s sort-of-surfer coolness. Shadow is angry, he is resentful, and that casts Sonic, for all of his quick temper, as almost a beach bum. What’s more, Sonic is surrounded by friends and is a celebrated hero – he’s the Protagonist Guy.

In a template where the Cool Guy is opposed by someone Equally Cool But More Distressed, we enter the cinematic tradition of The Other. He’s bad, but not that bad, he’s an opponent, but not a villain. That makes him a humanised Other, a character who stands to contrast with the hero (in a way that once, Knuckles did). The thing with The Other is, they take on a LOT of forms in different media, but if you’re queer, chances are your favourite character is a The Other. Camp LOVES them to bits.

In the greater narrative space of Sonic the Hedgehog, these characters are still mostly empty. They’re a description of a handful of traits in relationship to one another. In that space, Shadow the Hedgehog is a camp antagonist, an example of The Other, who can be – and sorta IS – All Queerness. What you see there is what you can pour into him.

Notes: Toy Galaxy (In General)

Dan in the Photobooth #14 - Flea Market Finds (Boba Fett, Gygor, Dragonzord)

I’ve been watching these videos mostly as I do other work, something where if I miss a detail I’m not missing much, but the main thing they show me is interesting ways people applied small, interesting ideas of how toys work, or of what people thought were worth making into toys.

These videos are weirdly comforting to me because so far the philosophy of the channel as I see it, tends to regard these toys as toys. There’s a note about when the toys are played with, when they are appreciated, when they are loved, and a noncompetitive spirit talking about other collectors. Dan is willing to use his own personal preferences, his tastes as a guide, and his talk about these are things he regards as cool rather than things he regards as expensive.

This is something that makes me happy.

Also, weirdly, looking at the silly things we used to make toys out of? Gives me ideas for games. Like that Mighty Max playset shark!

Story Pile: Black Panther

There a lot of words being spilled about Black Panther. I do not believe that spoilers are particularly important to the enjoyment of a product, but I know that people dislike spoilers. So no talk of spoilers. I know that a specificity of information is part of spoilers – by avoiding spoilers I can sweep along without providing detailed examples, which has a nice side effect where I can talk about more stuff without having to bog down in reference points.

Still, everything else aside, everything else aside: Black Panther is a great hecking movie. It’s a fun ride, it’s kinda like a spy movie and a kung fu movie and it’s a really good hero movie, and really, you should just check the heck out of it, it’s great. Believe the hype. I am a nitpicky motherhubbard and I think that every complaint I’ve heard about this movie so far comes from a place of digging deep in an attempt to find something to complain about, or ‘I wish there was more of this movie.’

Oh, and racism.

On that note, I’m going to try and minimise whatever I have to say that’s basically about racism. This is  great movie and it’s very heavily anticolonial and it does a lot with African cultures and there’s language and clothing and worldview and a lot of stuff and straight up, I am neither qualified to talk about it nor do I have anything interesting to say. Colonialism is bad, slavery is bad, and anything I have to say on that topic is mostly only useful in light of how some white people talk to themselves about it. Don’t expect anything there.

Okay, enough preamble! Go!

Continue Reading →

Print and Play: Adventure Town, Pt 2

Time for more thinking on our print-and-play game tenatively titled Adventure Town. What I know I have is a game loop. I know what I want the play experience to be for the players.

One player rolls a handful of dice, and the dice are drafted; players convert those dice into currency, either by a direct conversion or using a detail on their board, showing which dice they took and what they used them for. Then, players can spend coin on their turn to build things in the town.

With this simple game loop, we define some boundaries of the game. Let’s go over them in terms of wants:


I want a key player to roll some dice, then I want the dice drafted; the player who rolled them gets the biggest share, then the next player gets fewer, then hopefully the next player gets fewer and fewer and so on. I want this number of dice to be large enough that it’s hard to ‘hate’ draft – if you’re passing five dice, you can’t really rely on taking away the one die someone two seats away might want.

I want players to care about what happens when the dice are rolled, but not stress too much about what other players are doing except in a general sense. I want people to care less about individual short-term actions, and more about what they see their opponents trying to do.

I want players to feel like they’re in charge of something. I see them as representing a group, but also making changes to the town as the game goes on. This could make them big and wealthy landowners, but if they were, why would they be hanging around in podunk nowhere? Seems better to have players represent groups – maybe family businesses, investors, workers, cults and guilds.

I want players to have their own play space, and I want them to have a common board space. I can use the common space to track things that people do to affect everyone – in this case, I want them to play and deal with the idea of the town space to see players marking territory and claiming ground. I don’t want the town board to lock options off from players, though – so I don’t want buildings to be only usable by the people who build on them.

I want the building of a building to be a little bit of an event. I want players to recognise that they’re doing something that’s kind of cool, and maybe get to mark it, or sign it.

I want the game board to change. I don’t want to remove buildings that are already in place, though, because that seems to represent a traumatic destruction of the board. Also, players are mostly interacting with the board with pens or pencils, which don’t show destruction as easily as they do creation. Even a big ole x through a square can be missed by comparison.

I want there to be some feeling of procession through time. So with the desire for board change as well, I think I want to create the feeling people are moving through the town.


With these wants in mind, here’s an example of the ‘town’ board I have in mind.

This design means that each turn, from the deck of adventurers, three adventurers arrive, and they trigger things in town. This means each turn cycle has players doing things, building an investment in the town, and then adventurers turn up, and the town does things based on those investments. This could, if I do it right, play out a bit like Machi Koro, except instead of rolled dice, it’s a sequence of adventurers.

Problems with this board off the top of my head:

This might wind up being too tight! I might decide to make the town squares bigger, and not include a space on this board for those cards. I may not need 3 slots, or I may need more than 3 slots. After all, they don’t need to be on the board, and the deck won’t have room to live on the board.

  • The town squares might be too small at a glance.
  • The town squares don’t have to be squares. They could be rectangles, fill out this space in
  • I might have too many town squares. I might want to make it a 9×9 or 4×4 grid, or maybe get a little odder, with some buildings occupying multiple squares, perhaps signifying their importance.
  • I might not want there to be a tree relation between spaces. As it is, I put in the lines to give myself a vague idea of what I was doing, but it’s by no means essential.

Here’s another example while I’m at it:

 

MTG: Chainer

[mtg_card]Chainer’s Edict[/mtg_card] defined a standard environment.

It was the tool of a bloated mono-black control deck, a simple removal spell you could use as early game disruption and ate a creature early, then ate another one later when the game was drawn out. Moreso than most other spells of its type, it funnelled the game towards its flashback costs – a two mana indiscriminate removal spell that provoked players to overextend as a countermeasure, in the same space as [mtg_card]Mutilate[/mtg_card], Chainers’ was the elbow-drop that you structured the rest of your removal around. Two mana was just right, and tricks like [mtg_card]Goblin Sledder[/mtg_card] didn’t help against it – you were going to lose a creature, no matter how you cut it. Even the Savage Bastard [mtg_card]Wild Mongrel[/mtg_card] wasn’t going to get around that removal spell, unless you got the hopeful [mtg_card]Basking Rootwalla[/mtg_card] draw.

Chainer’s Edict was power.

Despite living through that period of Magic: The Gathering and watching as every non-[mtg_card]Astral Slide[/mtg_card] deck I played in the period crumpling like paper in the face of a good Chainers’ draw, it never occurred to me to really check back and examine Chainer himself, the man whose orders so bent the world.

Let’s look at Chainer.Continue Reading →

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