Monthly Archives: July 2018

July 2018 Wrapup!

I blogged every day, so that’s that goal met. The most notable blog posts of July included the four Kamen Rider essays, which I really enjoyed writing. They were originally going to be a video, but I realised the scope of the editing was just beyond me without source material, and I’d have to go hunting on Youtube for video I could use. I also liked my post showing the day-long process of creating the engine for a boat card game, and the surprisingly positive hindsight view I have of Rise of the Eldrazi.

Deus Ex: Mankind Divided - The Meaningless Heterotopia

Next up, the video! This month’s video was Meaningless Heterotopia, a 20 minute long video essay about Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, a game that has nothing to say despite being convinced it has absolutely got something to say. This video was quite a bit of work, but I did it almost a month before it got released. Notably, this video got made because I already had made video of the gameplay experience, which has taught me about when to record video footage, and how ‘play experience’ cuts together into an interesting video.

I think in hindsight, with a few mistakes notwithstanding (there’s a point where some animations are out of sync), I learned a lot making this. The biggest problem is that in my efforts to keep the video moving, to avoid still images, I shot through a lot of things way too fast. It’d have been better to space out my speech more, if I’d given the text on screen more room to breath.

That said, it hit almost 400 views in a few days and is at 600 views as I write this, which is a huge improvement over Ziggurat. Thank you so much!

This month’s game release was Domains of Meh, which went up on DriveThruCards. It’s a little trick-taking army game, and had to get made between a bunch of other stuff, so I’m pretty happy with how it worked out. The Nyarr is almost good to launch too, I’m just waiting on the last of the artists to get back to me. Working with other people has a time frame all of its own!

Here’s this month’s t-shirt: BAD BEETS.

I also had to get back on unemployment benefits in anticipation of work not coming through, which meant I got into that bureaucracy for just long enough to be reminded of how much it sucked.

Also, my grandmother died.

Clever Bastards

I think about this song a lot.

Ian Dury/There ain't half been some clever bastards

Ian Dury was a dude who was born when Polio existed, and it wrecked his body. The dude lived a life of singing and shouting and stomping, and was regarded by his passing as one of the great British lyricists. Some of his songs spoke plainly of sadness and helplessness in the face of the need to create, some of them about the nature of British society, and some of them, like this, showed a round-bottomed positivity. He died in the year 2000, at only 57 years of age.

I think the thing about this song that gets me, every time, is the refrain – probably had help from their mum, who had help from her mum.

Back in the seventies, a one-legged street tough who knew how to steal, how to fight and how to cry was recognising that we are all part of long chains of effort, that even the best and brightest were aided by the people who shaped them. Bear it in mind, the connectivity between ourselves and the past, and remember that we didn’t make ourselves, not even those we consider great.

Kamen Rider W Week 4: Sincere

When regarding any production made for Japan by the Japanese without an explicit eye towards translation and distribution – so, you know, lots of stuff – there’s a temptation towards an orientalist lens. The typical weeb view that Anime and Manga and such things are so much deeper than the tawdry production of the west, that these shows aren’t for kids, when they very much are for actual kids.

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MTG: Pet Cards XI, Rise of the Eldrazi

After the discomfort of Zendikar, a set I never realised I disliked, I figured Rise of the Eldrazi would be suitably bothersome. After all, it had one of the worst creature combat mechanics of all time in Annihilator, it wanted to clog up the board, it filled the world with little 0/1 tokens and was hard to approach. Not to mention that it introduced us to The Eldrazi, or MTG’s response to Cthulhu, Just Please Without The Racist Baggage.

That the Eldrazi were imprisoned on a plane populated by humanoids who were chalk white is kind of funny in hindsight.

Yet despite this, when I went to get a list of pet cards from Rise I was shocked, shocked to see how many cards there were in this set that I loved. So much so that I felt like I could do a pet card from this set for each major mechanic in the set.

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The Most Casual Autoethnography

I’ve thrown around this term a fair bit recently, in non-academic circles. Part of that is because I want to get familiar with it, and I want to know how to best explain it to other people. As with many concepts, it’s best if you can explain it with a concept.

So let’s talk about one of the most common ways you engage with Autoethnography: Reviews.

You don’t normally get it for things like soup or shoes or teacups but if you’re – like me – the kind of person who engages with the output of Video Essay Youtube or Board Game Review people, you’re dealing with autoethnography. Every games reviewer is an autoethnographer – they play a game, they examine what they played, then they examine that experience, usually, and tell you what they derive from that.

Some models of reviewership want to be dispassionate, remove the reviewer from the review. This is obviously contentious, because some people seem to think they can have a pure, objective, non-biased perception of a game, and also nonsense, because it’s almost always the byproduct of trying to be ‘right’ about a game. Part of why autoethnography wants to ensure the reviewer is a component of the review is because that way, if you understand the reviewer – even generally – you can use that to inform your reviews.

Now, this isn’t strictly speaking true: The model for what they do is autoethnographic, but because they’re not doing it with academic structures and rigor, it’s not really reasonable to call it autoethnography. It’s much more about making this work approachable, converting academic stuff into stuff that you can handle. If I can’t explain it usefully, it’s a sign I either don’t understand how to talk to you, or don’t understand what the thing I’m talking about is.

Transformers and Film Studies | The Whole Plate: Episode 1

This was all brought on by doing some old readings and finding responses to Lindsay Ellis’ rather excellent critical series, The Whole Plate. This series uses Transformers, a type of generally shallow trash media, as a base grounding to examine a whole host of film theory concepts, and it’s really good.

One of the ChannelAwesome people, that Doug Walker guy who, apparently, sucks a lot? Put out a video in which he forwarded that there was no point, at all, to ever critically exmaine trash media.

This is, I feel, a good opportunity to put these two positions in contrast. One of these two reviewers uses the experience of watching Transformers as a venue to explain and explore a whole host of film theory, and one of them thinks there’s no value to critical theory at all. And right there, you can use that as a platform to decide which of these two people you should consider when it comes tim to examine media critically.

Game Pile: Hey, That’s My Fish!

One of the funny things about reviewing board games versus computer games is that computer game reviews tend to be about describing what a game lets you act like you do, and board games tend to be about explaining how the game works. It’s an interesting conundrum, where the process of trying to explain why you should play a board game, you’re often taught, in a general way how to play it if you already own it.

I’m personally a fan of a model Tom Francis proposed in How To Explain Your Games To An Asshole, a model that includes one of my favourite ways to start talking about a game: Tell us about the fantasy of the game.

Hey, That’s My Fish is a game about playing a team of penguins trying to stave off starvation and maroon other penguins on ice floes where they’re probably doomed. It’s also a really neat little state machine that duplicates a bunch of computer game tropes with some really simple, elegant rules.

Also, since the game is a board game, most of the pictures for it have been taken by other board game sites, and I’d feel a bit crap taking pictures from them for the write-up. I can’t take my own pictures right now, so rather than scoop up other people’s pictures of their counter tops, instead, I’m just going to use some public domain pictures of penguins.Continue Reading →

Project: Voiceless

The Pitch: It’s a hidden identity game where all the players are merfolk princesses, who have surrendered their voices to the Sea Witch. Except one of you is the Sea Witch, and in the midst of the group is a powerful charm that binds all your hexes. If it’s laid upon the Sea Witch, all the curses will be broken and everyone is free, and you each know a little about the women around you.

Except none of you can talk.

Details

Voiceless is made up of cards:

  • Identity cards, of which you get dealt one at the start of the game
  • The Hex card

The identity cards have an identical back. One of them represents the Sea Witch, and the remaining cards represent roles.

The most basic kind of role is just a mermaid princess. These win if the curse is broken. There’s also a Sea Witch, who wins if any of the princesses gets cursed.

Setup: Choose the princesses you want to include in each game. There should be some proportion of princesses to Sea Witch, and some princesses that complicate the game. Shuffle these princesses, deal one to each player face-down. Players can look at their card at the start of the game. Put the Hex card where everyone can reach it.

Play Loop: Players cannot talk throughout the play.

Starting with a first player, a player looks at another card on the table. They can then take the Hex card and either hand it to the next player (showing they are done), or hand it to another player face up. Players can then vote on whether or not they trust that with a thumbs-up or thumbs-down vote.

If the players all vote thumbs-up on one player, that player is Hexed, and the game ends. Cards are revealed and then players determine who won based on their role cards.

Needs

I mostly need art for this. The game at its core just needs a handful of pictures of mermaids, including at least one that can be The Sea Witch, so with a clearly different palette and style of the others. The aim would be to have the mermaids, as princesses, represent extremely different styles of personality, such as ‘mean girl’ or ‘innocent’ and I would want to make sure these mermaids didn’t represent just one vision of cool mermaidness. They wouldn’t need action shots or physical prowess or detailed weapons or whatever, just pictures of cool, Disney-Princess style mermaids.

Do you think you have the skills for this? Are you interested in the idea? Feel free to contact me, either via the Twitter DMs or by emailing me!

Kamen Rider W Week 3: Rubber

There’s a physicality to the Kamen Rider W universe that you don’t get even in big-budget superhero stories. That’s because a lot of the time when Robert Downey Jr is waving his hand at a table, he’s acting the heck out of interacting with an empty space. Thor talks to a head on a stick. Ian McKellan sits in an empty room made up of 100% greenscreen and cries to himself about the technical emptiness of a craft that started on a stage. These are the restraints on the implementation of computer effects as the foundation of a scene.

In Kamen Rider W, as with other Kamen Rider shows, the baddies are made outta rubber.

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Work Process – Boat Game!

Today I started work on a prototype for a little boat game idea I’ve had kicking around since basically Friday. I thought I’d share some pictures of how it progressed from nothing to something.

Here’s where we started. There’s the basic idea of a boat made up out of cards, and you can slot cargo onto the cards in the middle. Here’s the very first version of the graphic I made. obviously it looks a little sparse so I wanted to make it a little clearer. It’s a little ugly and boxy – back of the boat and front of the boat don’t match up.

One of the things that makes this less clear is the way the two blues look similar. Highlighting blue sky as differs from blue water. So here’s a second draft – adding shadows and waves to the water, clouds to the background, and trying to make the cabin of the ship look a little more shaped.

This will be our boat, the basic structure of it. We also want to make some container cards, for the cards that will be stacked on top. Jumping ahead a little, but they look like this:

Okay, so that’s the basics. A card will have two containers on it, and you can slot one of them into each of your ship slots.

Next up, we have a handful of iterations on the cabin – adding an antenna and a flag, making sure it’s got some personality to it. And hey, maybe add a line to the boat, to give the whole thing a bit more dimension.

Okay, so how’s it look with that, and some containers:

Whoah holy snoot! If that cabin is two storeys (at least), then those containers are something like four storeys tall each! We gotta make them seem smaller, but we can’t shrink them in any way physically. That means we have to adjust the things you’re using as your frame of reference, which means changing those windows and doors.

That’s a way nicerlook and it also makes the boat seem smaller, more kiddy, less of a ridiculous tower.

Okay, so now we have a tidied up boat:

The next step is that we need a currency for this game. Now, I’m a giant currency nerd, so this is easy enough for me to belt out – something that looks currency-ish:

This is basically made up of two parts. The base is a green colour, and over that there’s a white layer of Soft Light. If you put all the white shapes in a folder, then make that folder soft light, you can keep those white objects from being affected by the lines.

Then we jam onto it some basic ‘money details and a symbol. Because this is a card, we don’t want the card to be asymmetrical in any way. When someone shuffles up the cards, we want to make sure it’s easy for them to get them all oriented in the ‘right’ way, and to avoid giving away information when people shuffle. It’s a good principle to ensure that card backs give away as little information as possible and are as easy as possible to interact with.

And now we have a money card, a card back for the container.

Here’s the revised containers, which I didn’t save as many in-pgoress shots of, but it’s the same thing. Start with a basic shape, adjust it, adjust it, adjust it.

Now here’s all the cards I made today, more or less, arranged together. This is a day’s work, and yes, the aesthetic is simple, but this simple look still took a LOT of iteration.

You can do this. You can make stuff that looks like this. Heck, you can make stuff better than this!

I want you to know that these things get made bit by bit, and looked at and reconsidered. Don’t be afraid of having incomplete, or not-as-good stuff. This all changes step by step.

MTG: Why We Cut

You ever spoken to an actual card sharp?

These days you’ll mostly only know that kind of operator as a person who does tricks. Not the people at a bar who knows a trick or two. I mean an honest to god magician, someone who actually knows how to do actual card tricks, the kind of things that you keep well and clear away from card games, because if anyone knows you can do something like that, you destroy the ability of people around you to trust what you’re doing.

I’m serious.

There is a lot of playing a game with cards that rely on a sort of shared fiction of randomness, and most of the time you’re dealing with random enough. There’s a reason people are prone to blaming ‘the shuffler’ on MTGO – quite a lot of people aren’t used to actual randomness, stochastic patterns of what can actually happen when you let a machine run the math that your wobbly human hands of meat and bone can’t quite get done elegantly.

And what damages that even more is learning just how much control someone else can have over a shuffle.

Thanks to my odd backgrounds, there’s a part of my life where I did learn The Olde School of Magicke And Illusion. Not cool stuff with pendants, witches and fishnet tights. I mean the stuff with top hats and coloured wands and fishnet tights. Part of this skill set was a lot of is thiiiis your card nonsense. I was not great at it, and having my cards confiscated multiple times for potential demonic summoning was kind of a damper on practicing. Also, nobody cared to watch as I learned and practiced. But you know one skill that’s really important to that skillset that never goes away once you learn it?

Trick shuffles.

This here is a Double Undercut. It looks like a reasonably natural shuffle. The top card of that deck is the Jack of Hearts, the card cut into the centre. This is not only doable, but this is doable with other shuffling forms. You can make more loops, put the card from the middle to the bottom to the top to the bottom to the top again, over and over again, with a great deal of confidence. You can do this with a riffle shuffle if you know how to reverse a deck. It’s really not hard once you know the techniques, the rest is just practice.

I make a big show of how I shuffle. People tend to be impressed with how I do it, because I riffle shuffle, and I do it faster than they do. I don’t tend to lecture people or show off how to do trick shuffles, because I don’t want people thinking I’m going to do it. It’s important to me to play fair, and to always play fair, and even if I’m not cheating, knowing that I can cheat – in a way other people can’t – is really distressing.

And that’s legitimtae! That’s a really real concern!

There’s another type of player who don’t like seeing you know how to cheat, and that is cheaters.

I chatted with a card sharp this weekend, at a convention. I appreciated their skill, and we talked a little. I was selling card games, he was getting paid to show off his card skills, and it was a fun little conversation. One thing we both agreed on, though, was how many people who play cards leave themselves wide open to be cheated.

You probably already know some basic tricks to protect yourself from cheating in Magic: The Gathering. Cut your opponents’ deck, every time. When you shuffle, offer your deck to be cut, every time. When they shuffle, and don’t offer to cut, interrupt them, explain what you want to do, and do it, every time, even if it annoys them.

The important thing is you make this a rule. You always do it.

If you always do it, even this very modest anti-cheating measure, you remove the ability for anyone to feel singled out. People can’t complain that you’re showing them a lack of distrust.

You set up these gates, and you make it a rule, not because everyone cheats. Barely anyone cheats. Almost nobody cheats. But when you do this, you make it clear to the players who do cheat, who can cheat, that you’re not going to give them the easy ones. You’re going to discourage them from trying.

Are you going to catch everyone with this mindset? No, not at all. Should you do it anyway? Yes. You should do it, and you should do it with your friends for the same reason you should get vaccines. It’s there to protect you and your friends, it’s about the people who make it necessary. And if you’re a streamer or playing in public with your friends? You should do it then, too – because you’re trying to spread the idea that this is a thing you should always do.

Project: All Of the Clams

The Pitch: It’s a small deck auction game with currency cards and a failure state. It’s a bunch of pirates or merfolk haggling over who gets what cool junk they found while trying to offload a cursed coin they’re all stuck with.

Details

All of the Clams is made up of two sets of cards:

  • Treasure cards, that you bid for
  • Currency cards, that you bid with

The Treasure cards are all stuff that matters to the players, so the framing device requires them to be people who want something, or have some reason to want things. I don’t want these things to have a grim tone so it probably can’t be something like post-apocalyptic medicine, or evidence for important criminal cases, so I vastly prefer for this to be motivated by greed or self-importance.

The Treasure cards come in three basic forms:

  • Value cards. These just give you points for the end game.
  • Negative Value cards. These take points from you for the end game, and you have to bid in reverse to avoid them.
  • Box Cards. These cards come with other cards from the Treasure deck, and have some inherent value. Players can choose to leave the box closed or not, but opening the box makes the contents public.

The currency cards come in the following forms:

  • 3 Coin cards
  • 2 Coin cards
  • 1 Coin cards
  • Cursed Coin Cards

Setup: Players get identical sets of currency and it always includes 1 cursed coin. They have fewer 3-coin cards than 1-value cards. Probably a sort of 3-2-1 distribution, but make it so that it’s possible to overwhelm 3-value cards with 1-value cards (so 3:1 ratio). Then, remove a treasure card (or more) from the top of the deck, hidden.

Play Loop: Each round, the top card of the treasure deck is revealed. If it’s a box card, put the proper number of cards in that box. Then, players bid in a round on the treasure, not a value but a number of coins. Players can withdraw their bids and drop out of the bidding at any time, reclaiming all their coins. When all players are done putting cards into the centre, all the cards are flipped over, and the bids are compared.

The player who bid the highest value gets the item and the other players get their cards back. Note: Any player who revealed a cursed coin in this phase has to leave it revealed for any future bids. These coins are then taken from the player and lost.

If there’s a Negative value card, the same thing happens in reverse: Players coins in hope of not getting the coin. If one player withdraws or passes, they can keep their money, but have to take the Negative value card.

If one player has run out of coins, the other player can then claim a number of face-down treasures from the top of the deck equal to their remaining coins. These face-down treasures are worth only 1 scoring unit.

The winner of the game is:

  • The player with the most victory points who has no cursed coin, or
  • If all players have their cursed coins, the player with the most victory points

Needs

I mostly need art for this. There are three major concepts for the game at the moment – mermaids vying for human junk, pirates distributing treasure from a raid, or cyberpunks swapping chunks of code and virus-infected bitcoins.

Do you think you have the skills for this? Are you interested in the idea? Feel free to contact me, either via the Twitter DMs or by emailing me!

“Not Endorsing Colonialism”

Recently I bashed Colonialism on twitter as a board game theme. This isn’t referencing a specific event but the odds are really good I said it lately because colonialism sucks and we’re really too okay with it. Anyway, one time I did this someone well-intentionedly pointed out that because the game includes colonialism doesn’t mean it’s endorsing it. After all, games include killing and that’s not to say killing is good.

I looked at the comment, rolled my eyes and moved on with my life, but because I know this stuff is important enough to address I came back to it and made it an article well after the fact because I am both petty and want to avoid directly confronting this person.

Point the first: Killing and colonialism aren’t really all that similar because I can absolutely comfortably say there are times when it’s okay to kill someone and I can’t imagine a time it’s right to do a colonialism on someone. Heck, it’s kinder to kill them.

Point the second: Games can include colonialism without endorsing colonialism, and they have, such as Dog Eat Dog or Spirit Island or my own Middleware. It’s entirely possible to represent a colonised space in a way that doesn’t treat the people being colonised as non-agents, and without treating the colonisers as actors approaching empty spaces.

Point the third: Killing in games is used in games as a metaphor for killing. It’s used to represent that particular action (usually, it’s rarely anything else), and we don’t live in a society where ‘killing’ has had its meaning obliterated by a deliberate campaign to pretend killing is actually almost always a net positive (though you know, some people might say).

Point the FOURTH: Colonialism as a theme is super fucking boring.

I’m so sick and tired of games that say go to a new land and do exactly the same old thing. Even these games with interesting, good mechanics like Archipelago or San Juan are all doing it by taking the player and transporting them into the fictive space of the awfullest humans that existed, the player being put in the shoes where they can only console themselves with ‘well I’m probably not sexually assaulting the slaves, so maybe I’m a good one?’

The role of colonialism in board games is pretty simply one of two extremely basic-ass ideas. First, to make the game ‘historyish’ so you get a pre-established aesthetic and a sort of permissive pass on being boring and legitimisation in the eyes of people who don’t want their hobby of playing with cardboard to be seen as childish. Second, to create a space for a reasonably level playing field for economic games of discovery, so when players all arrive in the new place with nothing to their names but an enormous pile of money, people willing to do murder and the uncontested governmental right to commit acts of fgenocide, it’s pre-explained as to where all the resources are coming for.

And this is boring!

There are a lot of other ways to organise ‘people starting at roughly the same time with roughly the same options,’ lots of different fictions. Maybe everyone is related and a relative died and now you all have the same money to start with! Maybe you’re trying to appease investors who have defrayed their options amongst you all! Maybe you all died at the same time and your options are all the same right there.

Colonialism: Bad, evil, deliberately erased, and super fucking boring.

Cities & Towns Revision!

In May, I launched the game The Road to Springdell, which was known in development for a while as Cities And Towns. C&T was one of the slowest projects I worked on considering how quickly I iterated the mechanics. The type of art it needed wasn’t something I could do, nor anyone I knew – and the free art in the vein wasn’t quite right either.

I’ll probably return to the central mechanic of The Road to Springdell, by the way – it’s a robust little game engine and it can be used for more complicated games with more cards and more variance.

The main thing I want to talk about here is the biggest change in the cards – the way I shifted the mechanics wholesale.

In the final printing of The Road to Springdell, each type of building you can build in your town makes each other kind of building in your town better, a bit. Farms make mills more valuable, mills make wells more valuable, wells make farms more valuable – but you’re also balancing the value of each town component against the buildings in the city of Springdell.

Originally, only four buildings had rules on them, and the other four didn’t. Here they are:

The Woodcutter’s Lodge remained as is – but the other cards went through some big changes.

The Tower was just bad – I thought that mechanic might make towers more ‘disposable’ so you’d be more likely to turn them into forests, while also making towers likely to show up in the city. The farm created awkward play moments where players would wind up getting a forest into Springdell, which isn’t supposed to happen. And the Market wound up being super way too good.

The new design is smoother, and less complex to play, but it makes the play more complicated. Every card that’s played is of a different value to you and each other player, even though it has some value. A card may be worth three points in your town, but five points in someone else’s. You have to decide if you’re going to offer that up or try and block it.

These are dials you can choose to turn. Sometimes, giving players more difficult choices yields better gameplay than giving them faster choices. Players spend the most time thinking over the trick portion of the game as it is – might as well make the time spent thinking more interesting!

Kamen Rider W Week 2: Hardboiled

In Kamen Rider W, they use the term hardboiled a lot, and they directly, by name, invoke the idea of hardboiled detective fiction. The books are shown in shots, around the home and office that Sokichi made, and Hidari later inherited. Sokichi names Phillip after after Phillip Marlowe, the character central to Raymond Chandler’s series of novels. It’s repeatedly invoked in the case of secret catboy Hidari Shotaro, where he explains why he does something as being the essence of hardboiled. The series’ theme –

which is awesome

is called WBX for DOUBLE-BOILED EXTREME.

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Winners and Losers

In game design, you can think of your game as about getting to a winner, or discarding all the losers.

Simplest example, Snakes and Ladders. Snakes and Ladders, one player is trying to be separated from the group by being the winner. Their entire plan is advancing themselves.  That winner has nothing to do with the losers – they’re just trying to take more steps ahead on their own.

You can look at a game like Jungle Speed, which is a sorting engine to find the loser – the winner finishes the game (and can step out) and then the next player to win, and so on, the game intact until the players decide to stop playing or until a loser is chosen by the process of the game.

Red Dragon Inn is a game about knocking out as many players as possible, by as many means possible – you can impoverish them, you can inebriate them, you can beat them up, you can even do some stuff outside the rules. In this way, players are trying to make everyone else lose, and resist losing as long as possible.

In Cockroach Poker, a rare example, all the players together pick one of them to lose. It starts out as a test of wits, then slowly becomes a game of trying to find a hole in each others’ defenses, trying to find the player who’s most convenient to get rid of… and making sure, as sure as you can that it’s not yours.

When you’re dealing with a cooperative game it’s the same basic thing: You want to advance the plan of the winners, which is everyone. And deathmatch games, where everyone is trying to survive the longest, are games where you want to lose the least.

Think about this when you design your game. Think about if your game is trying to push people to advance their own plan, primarily, or if they want to inhibit the plans of others.

MTG: Pet Cards X, Zendikar And Worldwake

Zendikar block! One of the ‘great’ periods of Magic history, a ‘beloved’ set that featured ‘classic’ cards with a ‘challenging’ draft environment, with ‘interesting’ mechanics!

What struck me going back to Zendikar was the general antipathy I had towards it. Perhaps it’s because I didn’t draft it, or maybe it was because this was the era I saw an actual in-the-flesh Magic deck that was worth as much as a car, but maybe it’s also the period of Magic’s history where the wheels came off the Planeswalker experiment in the first big way.

I thought for a while there that Zendikar was a really great set I was misremembering, and I kind of do still like some of the things it did, with the quest mechanic and the small creatures that became bigger threats late in the game. Yet when I go back to look the set over I’m reminded by how much of the set was built around fetchlands and mistakes, and it just kills my enthusiasm for it.

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The Mermay Concept List

This May, I partook in Mermay. I didn’t draw mermaids – I’m not very good at drawing, so who am I kidding – but I was inspired by the variety and lovely artwork to think in terms of the kinds of things I can do, and what I would want to do in the context of just the art produced. I make card games, I make tabletop games – they’re things that exist in a space where still images, often with the game as context, convey game information.

Every day, I wrote a game concept for a tabletop game involving art of mermaids.

Now, I intend to go through some of these game ideas and work on them individually – why, depending on when this goes out, one of them may have already been made – but I wanted to put up some thoughts about examining the thoughts of all the mermaid games at once.

One trend that goes throughout the mermaid games is water – I mean, obviously. Some games care about sinking, about depth, about framing ‘down’ as being dangerous, which is perhaps a view I inherited from Narnia books, of all things. This water theme plays into some of the other ideas; there are games about merfolk views on human trash, how they can cook without fire, the types of currencies they recognise, and also in the time you can hold your breath in some of the games about communication.

Another recurrent theme was royalty and monarchy. There’s perhaps something primitive about the idea of royalty in the context of the merfolk – I don’t like royalty as its own thing, I think it’s pish, but I still was making sympathetic games about mermaid princesses and important noble weddings, and noble houses. That’s possibly just something I like as a setting element, even though I think they’re jerks in reality. Of particular interest was how in Atlantean Guard, the challenge was to cooperatively raise a prince who wasn’t a jerk, as if the assumption was reasonable that they would be otherwise.

I had a bunch of games about theft. Merfolk were often showing up as playful or trickster characters, stealing or hiding treasure. Many of the games were puzzles about locating treasure, treasure that – reasonably speaking – there’s no reason to believe the explorers seeking it are more entitled to than the merfolk.

I didn’t do many games about combat. Of the concepts, Temple, Flooded London, The Dredge, and Conch Of Glory had some kind of combat to them. Of those, Temple, Flooded London and The Dredge were all framed as being against an unjust opponent – imperial London, or polluting capitalists, or invading adventurers, for example.

Finally, most of my ‘merfolk media’ that framed these games were either Aquaman or The Little Mermaid.

The Vegans Of Youtube

When you hang out on youtube looking at short-form recipes as a way to stave off your anxiety, you notice something. You notice trends and patterns in the comments, because oh god, you started to read the comments.

It’s not uncommon for channels to do some vegan videos. Especially Buzzfeed’s Tasty brand, which is basically Listicle Recipes (and honestly, a really, really good format for it). Vegan recipes get hits, they get comments, they get likes. There’s even a channel that makes a point of collecting ‘accidentally vegan’ meals, where someone makes a vegan recipe video and doesn’t realise they’re recommending vegan food.

Here’s the thing.

On vegan videos, I mostly notice vegans talking about how nice it is, suggesting extra things to do for the video’s recipe, suggesting solutions for particular food allergies, and loudly non-vegan people making fun of it, or complaining about it. Like, you get that very clean split of ‘well wouldn’t this be better with tons of bacon‘ or ‘ugh, why you making these vegan videos?’

On non-vegan videos, I mostly notice vegans showing up in the comments to suggest to one another, ways they can make these dishes they’re watching vegan. They aren’t saying this recipe should be different.

Now I know part of this is moderation! Moderators are more likely, I suspect, to let go a huffing and puffing non-vegan comment than their equivalent, which might be a vegan talking pointedly about how you’re ruining this food with all that meat.

Whatever the reason, it’s pretty weird.

Lovecraft’s Failure

Not the racism.

Lovecraft, if you’re not aware, died poor. He died of cancer in his 40s, mostly destitute, and his work was forgotten until a significant period after he died. Even then he was sort of an academic interest that fed into the interests of other writers rather than the force of cultural nature he is now that he’s part of the public domain. One of the things he attributed this to, in his later days, was that he didn’t have the confidence or courage to promote his own work, and when he did, he didn’t do enough. His obscurity, he felt, was not tied to the quality of his work, but his ability to advertise it.

More things change, eh, Howard.

 Lovecraft was born in 1890. Three years before he was born there was the first performance of Ruddigore. Ruddigore is an operetta I like a lot, and one of the two best songs in it is this one:

John Reed - My Boy You May Take It From Me (Ruddigore).avi

The lyrics, in case you aren’t versed, as I, feature this chorus:

If you wish in the world to advance,
Your merits you’re bound to enhance,
You must stir it and stump it,
And blow your own trumpet,
Or, trust me, you haven’t a chance!

These words echo to me a lot, in my more horrified moments. One of the problems is that I already feel like I promote myself too much. I feel like I never shut up about my stuff, that I presume I can reference my games to people, and when I’m put on the spot and shown that I can’t, it reminds me that for all I feel I talk about this, I either don’t talk about them enough, or, more damningly…

I do, and nobody cares.

Is it that I’m bad at self promoting, or is it that my promotion isn’t going to endure because what I do isn’t good enough? I worry about this a lot. I wonder about it when I learn that there’s something I have in common with Lovecraft… staring down the barrel of an irrelevant life because I wasn’t able to make myself memorable in the minds of the people around me.

Shame about the racism, though.

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Kamen Rider W Week 1: Patterns

Kamen Rider W is my first Kamen Rider Series and it owns bones. It is a high-energy series about loving a place, about wanting to live up to your potential, about found family, about the stories we tell one another, about legacies and respect and love and fear and about kicking baddies in the face and refusing to give up and there’s a motorbike which changes parts and there’s a truck that drives the motorbike around and –

I really like this show.

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Cooping!

You know how I’m that tiresome dork who cares about voting systems? Let me tell you about a time when voting in the United States was even worse.

Right now most countries – mostly! – recognise the value of casting secret ballots. That is, you need to make it so everyone who wants to vote can put their decision down, commit to it, and put it somewhere nobody else can see it, anonymised from who they are. You control the ballot carefully and make sure people can only vote once.

That’s not how it used to work, though. Used to be back in the day, the idea was that you should be able to convince people, change their minds at the polls. There’s the echoes of this system as it remains now, in state Caucuses, where people just holler at one another and the judge kinda guesstimates how many people are in each section of the room. This system is really silly and best represents a population where maybe twenty people can caucus, rather than the hundreds of thousands of people modern caucuses are meant to represent.

Anyway, the history of New York is a gosh-dang mess, and one of the things that used to happen, back during the heavily nativist times of the Know-Nothings, was a process called cooping. There are a lot of things going on here – like, the gangs of fixers known as the Plug-Uglies, and the flag with a shoemaker’s awl on it, and the racist American Native Party – but that’s not so important. The important thing is there were vulnerable people who could vote (Irish and Chinese immigrants), who weren’t going to get listened to by the cops, and unscrupulous people who would abuse them.

Cooping, the technique, starts when you kidnap someone and stuff them in a chicken coop!

Really!

Groups – known as Coop Gangs or Election Gangs – hung around polling places, looking for people who they could abuse, who they would grab, stuff in coops, then get them drunk and torture them, by beating or kicking the coop, or setting their hair on fire. The point is, you got them scared and you got them drunk. Then you sent them in to the electoral place to vote, as you demanded, and you could watch how they voted, and beat them up if they voted wrong.

And then, you could dress them up, put them in a wig, and send them to vote again.

And then you could put them in a different outfit, and send them to vote again.

Now, the thing that’s really sad about this is what solved Cooping wasn’t anyone going ‘hey, abusing poor people is bad,’ but rather, ‘hey, these are impacting elections based on which rich person can hire the biggest gang.’ And the solution was secret ballots.

Lovecraft, Exploration, and Motivation

The classical Lovecraftian story is set around the time of Lovecraft’s life. Very few of them occur in the deep history, even as they are about the deep history, told through the voice of a person in Lovecraft’s now.

Lovecraft wasn’t a man who saw politics too clearly. I mean, he was a racist, and an anglophile, and he thought World War I was really important because America owed it to England, America’s homeland, but when he looked to the future and around him he was not horrified by the closing entanglements of European politics and the industrialisation of war, nor was he particularly horrified at the coming nuclear age. I mean, from the perspective of a dude born in the 1890s, nuclear power seems pretty out-of-context.

If you look through Lovecraft’s work there’s a strong view towards discovery. There’s the deep sea, there’s the stars, there’s ancient archaeology and there’s the organised cataloguing of unread tomes in old libraries. The protagonists are explorers – they are people who, without needing further motivation, want to learn and discover.

Interestingly, most Lovecraftian stories are kind of one-and-done affairs; someone discovers the edge of the darkness, and then is either consumed and destroyed by it, or they run and escape it, forever scarred by the experience. They are people who start out exploring for the sake of information. Their motivation is intrinsic.

Thing is, that’s not – usually – how Lovecraft stuff works in games. One of the challenges in these play spaces is motivation. Most Lovecraft games want to have multiple encounters, multiple excursions dealing with the unnatural. It’s hard to build a game – especially one about change over time – around singular experiences and that leaves you with a problem of representing a character who has some reason to want to repeatedly expose themselves to this problem.

I think this is a cool idea to work with in character creation. I know Delta Green requires you to build a set of connections that will get worse and fail over the course of the game.  I think that’s a good start because it shows you a think worth losing – but I wonder if there’s also room to build into character building a space for a fatal, consuming drive. A reason to go back.

Repeatedly.

The JGS

John Galt’s speech is the famously overindulgent chapter of the book Atlas Shrugged. It’s known, generally speaking, as a long speech, but I don’t know if you appreciate how long it really is unless you’ve read the book all the way through, or at least, read to that section. It’s not an easy read – I haven’t managed it, just select chunks.

Let’s put this in perspective for you, though.

There are a number of printings of Atlas Shrugged, in a variety of sizes, so it’s not really feasible to put the whole thing into a single page count. We don’t have to do that, though, because some kind and well-intentioned soul put the whole thing up on the internet, allowing me to just dump that text into a document and crunch that data.

The total word count of the John Galt Speech, more or less, between revisions, is about 32,000 words.

First things first, let’s put it into perspective as part of the book. Atlas Shrugged is literally one of the longest published English-language novels that exists, and the John Galt speech represents only a fraction of the overall work. It’s about 5.69% of the book (nice). But how many words is that? 32,000 words is a number, it’s not a particularly meaningful number. You can consider the text in terms of the time spent speaking, for a start – and it is meant to be spoken. It’s John Galt, The Ubermensch, churning through his philosophy, on the radio, as a way to transform the minds of the populace of leeches siphoning his perfect grace from the world.

You can read the entire speech in about three and a half hours – and yes, on youtube, people have – but that’s powering through the whole thing, without the pause or rhetorical flourish or pacing of a proper speech delivery. I’m comfortable saying that to do that, you’d wind up at around four hours, which is generous and implies that John Galt is a good speaker. Since the speech is a continous perfect stream of dialogue, without stuttering, double-talk, or any of the naturalistic hallmarks of people actually talking, it’s clearly prepared, too.

Four hours of talking is not a small amount of talking. Filibusters are regarded as feats of political will and endurance, and they’re almost always meant to not be anything in the way of actually meaningful information. Politicians read card rules or recipes or history books. People pee about six times a day, which is about every two and a half hours, so there’s a not insignificant chance that Johnny G had to take a leak during. I’m sure he planned ahead, and delivered the speech from the bathroom.

But what if you consider that text as text? As a word count? Well, it’s comparable to another, smaller book. Quite a few, in fact.

Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is about 33,000 words. That entire story is only slightly longer than the speech. The Great Gatsby – a snappy novel that nonetheless rockets along its pace – is 50,000 or so, so one and a half the length of the speech. In fact, you can find quite a few works of classic fiction young adult fiction that are shorter than the entire John Galt Speech:

  • The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, by CS Lewis
  • Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roald Dahl
  • Old Yeller, by Fred Gipson
  • Animorphs 01 The Invasion, by KA Applegate
  • Night of the Living Dummy, by RL Stine
  • Eric, by Terry Pratchett

This comparison to other classic fiction works is pretty robust – you can treat these 32,000 words as a unit of measurement, which we’ll now define as the JGS. If we cast our net wider to see other books that are considered classic, the JGS stops being larger than the whole text but still is quite a large proportion of the work:

  • Genesis, The Bible — 1 JGS
  • Slaughterhouse Five — 1.5 JGS
  • Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone — 2 JGS
  • Brave New World — 2 JGS
  • As I Lay Dying — 2 JGS
  • The Sun Also Rises — 2 JGS
  • Lord of the Flies — 2 JGS
  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer — 2 JGS
  • The Gospels — 2 JGS
  • The Hunger Games — 3 JGS
  • The Handmaiden’s Tale — 3 JGS
  • Aspects of the Divinity, Book 1: Glory In The Thunder— 3.5 JGS
  • The Fellowship Of The Ring — 5 JGS

And perhaps as a footnote

  • Atlas Shrugged — 18 JGS

What’s important to consider is that these stories that are comparable to the JGS on its own, or one or two times it, are stories that convey a philosophy and a worldview, that speak of ideology and principle and are even full of clear, well-regarded quotable lines. I mean, the Gospels! They’re entire stories.

In its own text, though, the JGS doesn’t do anything of the sort. The John Galt Speech represents a lengthy, explanatory detour from one character, in one sitting, to stand and simply tell the audience (and the reader) what he thinks and how he thinks it. It’s not actually anything happening in the plot, nothing that needs to be shown. It’s a narrative cul-de-sac, a jerking halt where a character monologues at you.

That time could have dragons and fistfights and a philosophy shown through action rather than harangued at a reader.

Cis, Explained

I’m seeing this one needing some explanation, and I’m also seeing some goofy people talking nonsense about it so let’s give you a nice, easy place to check on this one without TERFs getting all up and angry about it.

The complaints about cis are that it’s a slur, that it’s a made-up word, and that it’s unnecessary.

First things first, slur. Cis is not and cannot be a slur. Slurs are words designed to direct structural power against individuals and other people with the same group characteristics. It’s a threat. Non-cis people do not have systemic power, and the closest they can get is being mean. You’re not going to lose a job or be refused housing because you’re cis. You’re not going to have crimes against you ignored because you’re cis – crimes, not ‘people were mean to me’.

Cis is not a new word. Cis a term from chemistry, where it’s the opposite term to Trans. It’s been used for a century like this, because back in the day, chemists all used Latin terms to refer to technical objects, because that way everyone could use the same language and grammar to talk about them. And since we use the word trans in discussions of gender, cis is a handy opposite.

And cis is totally a necessary word. When you’re talking about relationship to gender, transgender or cisgender if you say ‘transgender’ and ‘normal’ then you’re explicitly calling ‘transgender’ ‘not normal.’ Notice the people who are mad about being called ‘cisgender’ are often people who feel like it’s calling them ‘not normal,’ so imagine how it feels to the trans folk being told they’re not normal.

Cis is not a hard concept to explain. It’s like on and off. Something is cis or it’s not. Open or not-open.

If, at birth, you were assigned a gender, and you decided that gender works for you, you’re cis. If you’re not cis, you’re – linguistically – trans.

Now that’s not to say everyone who isn’t cis wants to be called trans. There are plenty of nonbinary or agender people who don’t call themselves trans, and in that case, saying THE TECHNICAL MEANING IS- isn’t helpful.

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