March 2022 Wrapup!
The seasons turn, the days end, and we come once more to another full month of articles over here on Press Dot EXE. March is gone, and with it I want to take a moment to talk about what I’ve done this month; what writing is here, what you can check back on a whole month of content and see if there’s anything that stands out to me that you’d like to check out.
One of the strangest things about these posts is that they feel to me like a ‘cheat’ – like I’m doing a bunch of work on these posts, when I’m working hard to present the best writing I can on an interesting variety of topics, and then every month you get one fewer post, because there’s here, a menu.
Except then I find out how even the most obsessively interested people looking at my content tend to miss stuff, because the internet is hard and I realise it’s important to take a moment and reflect like this.
Anyway. Hey, here’s a summary!
Prototype 22.03 — Sky Islands
Every month of 2022, I am trying, as part of both my PhD project and my all-purpose general game development, develop if not a whole game for game development, a project start, such that I can make playtest prototypes. This is a sort of report of the process throughout the month.
In January, I started late and didn’t get it done. In February, I had four game ideas. One of them became focal, and I spent some time this month actually making a physical prototype. My plan this month is to have something that at the end of the month can be treated as a thorough plan for not just a prototype, but a game that’s ready to go.
That proved very stressful, with the whole design write-up being week to week, and publishing just before the end of the month. Instead, I’m going to talk to you about what the idea is and focus on the core ideas, rather than on every step of the process.
Let me know if you prefer the week-to-week explanation or this style of simplified version.
Continue Reading →CoX: The Wild Hare
This is an explanatory writeup of one of my Original Characters (OCs). Nothing here is necessarily related to a meaningful fiction you should recognise and is shared because I think my OCs are cool and it’s cool to talk about OCs you make.
Juniper Jacks thought she was pretty boring. She thought she wasn’t special. She thought that if the time came to step up, she wouldn’t, not really. Oh, sure, she had a drive to try – but… like, everyone had that, right? Everyone could see things they’d do, and just lacked the power to do them, right?
Then she became the host for the BOUND symbiote, from a mysterious Praetorian-Primal science project. and found, to her surprise, that when she had power, she absolutely wanted to do something with it. Stepping up, acting, fighting and finding evil and battering it unconscious: She was here to spring into action.
Oh, sure, she’s a rabbit girl – but she’s a loud, brash, brawling, rabbit girl who gives 10,000%.
Continue Reading →Story Pile: Martian Successor Nadesico
Martian Successor Nadesico is a comedy-drama science-fiction space opera story with an enormous cast of characters that introduces a spaceship, recruits its screwball crew, goes to mars, then to the moon, engages in multiple sorties, defies the UN, deals with shadowy secret research, uncovers a conspiracy, grapples with questions of culture and media, wins a war, creates a peace, has a talent contest, multiple music videos, love triangles that go through the full typical mathematical configurations, is funny as hell and serious as a heart attack.
This popcorn anime of the late 90s is now a vintage classic.
The world was a different one, where anime were not being wholly produced on computers (yet), nor the natural end point for a churning industry of marketable light novels (yet), nor an endless filler spiral trying to maintain the presence of one of the big three shounen anime in the minds and charts of the viewing public (yet). It was a time when anime series were seriously grappling with just being too big to reasonably buy, where a 13 episode anime would still cost you $140 to buy, because you’d get two episodes per VHS tape, and each tape would cost you $20 AUD.
You had to pick dubbed or subbed when you bought the tape, and it was entirely possible that the track you wanted wouldn’t be available when you went to the store. An anime might sell out of like, volume 6 in sub or dub, and you had to wait literal years for the next reprinting.
It was a time when the medium was the message in a truly astounding way: when anime was competing for a small number of slots, for a small audience, and as a result, it was even more self-referential, trope-codifying and quietly impenetrable than you’d imagine. Right now, the main anime people know from this time, and I say ‘know’ in that they ‘kinda remember’ or ‘have watched some of,’ or think about it as a thing that’s important to ‘anime,’ is Evangelion or Pokemon, which you can definitely look at as two forking paths: one of mass-market popularity, and one of deliberately reflective genre awareness.
It’s one thing to be a leader. It’s another thing to be one of the first followers.
And it’s even more impressive to somehow follow both.
SPOILER WARNING: Uh, spoilers? Some? For stuff in the series that is why you should want to check this anime out?
Continue Reading →How To Be: Zelgadis (in 4e D&D)
In How To Be we’re going to look at a variety of characters from Not D&D and conceptualise how you might go about making a version of that character in the form of D&D that matters on this blog, D&D 4th Edition. Our guidelines are as follows:
- This is going to be a brief rundown of ways to make a character that ‘feels’ like the source character
- This isn’t meant to be comprehensive or authoritative but as a creative exercise
- While not every character can work immediately out of the box, the aim is to make sure they have a character ‘feel’ as soon as possible
- The character has to have the ‘feeling’ of the character by at least midway through Heroic
When building characters in 4th Edition it’s worth remembering that there are a lot of different ways to do the same basic thing. This isn’t going to be comprehensive, or even particularly fleshed out, and instead give you some places to start when you want to make something.
Another thing to remember is that 4e characters tend to be more about collected interactions of groups of things – it’s not that you get a build with specific rules about what you have to take, and when, and why, like you’re lockpicking your way through a design in the hopes of getting an overlap eventually. Character building is about packages, not programs, and we’ll talk about some packages and reference them going forwards.
There’s always going to be a challenge when you translate a character from a game into a different medium. These How To Be articles are about the process of taking a character represented in a fictional form and move them across into the game so that you can connect with their concept in a mechanical space. What, though, if the character started as a mechanical expression and then became part of a fiction?
What is it like to make a D&D character out of a character who is, in a lot of ways, just someone else’s D&D character?
Let’s talk about Zelgadis, from Slayers.
Shirt: Somy Pacestation
I’m fond of these things, these deliberately wonky brands you see in anime and TV that can’t or won’t pay other brands to advertise their bullshit. How am I going to explain this one. It’s just the text. It’s literally just the text!
Here’s the design:
And here’s how it looks on a mask:
Here are links for if you want it in white text or black text.
Game Pile: Prole
I looked at a game from itch this month, Prole. You will be able to finish reading all of the rules for Prole before you’re done listening to half of this video about it. I think the game is a launching point for talking about the idea of granularity, and for exploring what would I do differently?
MTG: Neon Nights
I had what I thought was a complex relationship with the Kamigawa block. It was the first block to come out when I had a job, at a point where I literally didn’t have enough basic lands to make multiple decks, and so, Fox and I bought a box of sealed decks, to build a land collection of beautiful, beautiful lands. We broke those boxes open and played some sealed with our friends and had a great time making terrible decks and losing immensely and it was fun and it was exciting and since then I became a person who, for some inexplicable reason once I fell unemployed, read all the Kamigawa novels and became Very Versed on the setting.
I have said a lot about Kamigawa over time, and if you’d asked me say, six years ago, when I was on Twitter talking about it, you’d find me saying something that summarises as ‘Kamigawa was a great idea, failed by development,’ all said with the comforting certaint that I would never come back to Kamigawa, and never have to grapple with the issues of how that dead end would ever be addressed.
I would never have expected Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty.
Continue Reading →Asset Brainstorm #4 — Floating Islands
As a matter of practice, it’s important to me that I keep demonstrating different ways to engage with games. Making games is a practice, and when you can look at game assets and consider ways to apply them, you’ll begin to see how much of game design is stuff you can do. Therefore, on this blog I’m making it a project to regularly grab some game assets I couldn’t make myself, that are made for game designers to work with, and see what ideas they inspire.
This month the asset I want to look at is Moon Tribe’s 2d floating island asset pack.
Being An Expert On The Blacklist
I have not watched Season 8 of the Blacklist. I mean, did you see how Season 7 of the Blacklist ended? I may, by the time this article goes up, have done so, but if that happens you should view it as a failure of Netflix, a moment where clearly nothing better seized me to do, an attack of boredom so distinct that I exhausted other, better options like Goosebumps 2 or watching Venom again. I mean I did write about it, back in 2018 and 2019. That’s where I had were the article about how the story had seemed to be setting up a twist where Raymond Reddington was secretly a trans dude.
Then they revealed that uh, no, they weren’t going to do that.
At that point, I lost all faith in the storytelling and the ability of these storytellers to plan anything and I thought ‘what a bunch of idiots’ and left it. I did not write a word about Blacklist in all of 2021, because I had simply given up on the show and not watched it. I was done. It was ‘gamer’ to me.
But then I started getting hits.
I started getting a lot of hits.
Like the year I wrote that article, it got a total of 25 views.
In 2020, it got 300 views, which is weird.
In 2021, it got over 1500 views.
And that 25 views, that’s what I think of as, you know, normal. That’s a totally okay number of views on an ordinary article, and this absolutely blew the doors off it. And that meant that eventually, even as someone who tries not to pay too much attention to his stats, I finally noticed that Is Blacklist Queer? was getting attention.
And that led to me looking into why.
See, it seems that this is a thing that Blacklist teased might be the case in Season 8. And I guess, in the interest of protecting people from the ‘twists’ of this ‘story’, I’m going to put down a sigh spoiler warning.
Story Pile: Flight of the Phoenix
What’s your favourite movie?
That’s one of those questions that we ask from time to time, a conversation starter. For me, I don’t have a good answer – like, I struggle to give a meaningful response that doesn’t involve explaining ‘I’m bad at favourites,’ which means that the conversation stops being about an interesting common shared media thing and starts, instead, being about my personal anxieties. They’re not fun to talk about. I mean I assume they’re not, I haven’t found anyone interested yet.
I do like asking the question, though, even if I can’t answer it for squat.
One time I asked it, and I got told amongst others, that my friend’s favourite movie was Flight of the Phoenix.
Hammers & Sandwiches
Time to time I will say to my students that media studies is ‘merely the study of how every human interacts with everything that does or doesn’t exist, everywhere, forever,’ which is a deliberately vast statement to stop them thinking of the discipline as just complaining about a TV show. It has the added benefit of being completely true, in a way that requires you to understand and unpack the greater concepts at work in it, some of which take a literal University course to explain. I’m not about to be able to step you through Latour’s Actor Network Theory (which isn’t about actors or networks, and isn’t a theory) on my blog very easily.
There are, however, some ideas, ideas about basic assumptions that help to illuminate your world.
The Complicated Semiotics Of The Word C&NT
Content Warning: This post is mostly about a swear word, the word ‘cunt.’ I don’t intend to use it in this article after this point, but it’s still going to show up in censored form and I know not anyone wants to see that.
Continue Reading →Game Pile: The Mysterious Forest
How little game does your game need to be a game?
3e: ‘The Exotic’ Weapon
Dungeons & Dragons is a game about creating a shared, temporary, fictional, consensus reality with your friends and ceding authority to manage the apersonal elements of that reality with one of your friends who can be trusted to use that trust in order to direct a narrative that provides satisfying engagement for the whole of the group, as I’ve always said. Part of that consensus reality is therefore the idea of managing what is and what constitutes normal, which is, overwhelmingly often, done with literal no rules or insight into how reality functions on an intrinsic level. You do not need rules for gravity (check flying rules, p56), you do not need rules for what dying means (check the head-in-a-bucket rager, p114), you do not need rules for why a culture wants a rightful king in power (check bend-at-the-knee p1312). The fictional reality does not have a different set of mathematic rules underpinning their reality (though you can make a case that that’s what a D20 is if you’re very meta and boring), light and vision do not behave differently, planets whirl and matter can be touched.
Rather, the reality of D&D is a collection of signifiers of the very small set of differences between our reality and theirs, and that is, in part, established with rules that recognise the conventional vision of what is or is not normal, most often represented by the tools that are of interest to adventurer player characters. It is in this regard that the weapon proficiency system tells you what is normal and what is other.
Continue Reading →Keyboard Utility
Hey, you know, back in November, when I mentioned ‘oh yeah, my keyboard broke?’
Turns out yeah, that sucks!
It’s been a weird time, when a single major tech disruption can just knock everything I would normally do in a day out. I can’t sit down and play board or card games without a computer right now, because nobody’s prepared for it. That meant when my keyboard broke – my one button failed – I then went to clean it, and try to get it to work, only to find that the nest of hair and fur inside my keyboard was now making interactions I didn’t want to see happen happen.
I pulled off the buttons, I cleaned them, I put them back, and then it started to spray out twenty character chains every time I opened a text field, which suggested that it was not just that a button stopped working but that perhaps my keyboard was broken.
That led to me considering: Do I want to fix this keyboard?
Announcing: The Disney Animated Canonball, Season Five!
It’s another odd-numbered month and that means we drop another full season of the Disney Animated Canonball! If you’re not familiar, this is a podcast where I, he/him, and Fox, she/her, watch all of the Disney Animated Canon, a project that seemed interesting forty five movies ago, before I realised how many of these movies are culturally-omnipresent dull slush.
After the Disney Rennaisance, we had a time of things at Disney. There’s an attempt to explore new technologies in the 3d Space, and attempts to present themselves as the greatest in traditional animation, and then don’t manage to stick the landing. There’s new ideas, new identity, and so many people getting nearly-fired, or definitely fired.
It also is a season that approaches even closer to our now, so a lot of the weird behaviour or awful ideas presented are being presented now, when people we think of as adults who grew up in a sensible time are getting to set the rules… and that’s not working out the way it should. The yikes takes on a different tenor as we have to accept that oh no, these people who are meant to be The Culture have awful ideas, like The Culture Itself does.
This season starts in 2000 with Fantasia 2000 and concludes in January 2009, with Bolt, covering 11 movies, which range from the best traditionally animated movie Disney ever made to three of the worst movies they’ve ever made, in a row. It’s ten and a half hours of hot hot podcast content, with kazoo themes and background dog sounds, all! For! You!
You can get the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts, and any other good podcasting service that’s checking the standard RSS feeds? And failing that, you can head to the website.
Story Pile: The Gentlemen
Look, I don’t know Guy Ritchie. I don’t know the man, I don’t know his life. I can look up details in his backstory or read interviews or find out whether he’s a hash-tag-cancelled style dude, or whatever. I understand he was married to Madonna at some point, he’s made a bunch of movies, and people like some of them and make fun of others. If you want you can point to films you like that he’s made like Sherlock Holmes and The Man From UNCLE, or maybe if you want you can point to films that he’s made that you don’t like Aladdin or Swept Away.
I am never ever dealing with the whole of a man, and movies aren’t made, they escape. With that in mind, there is a prudent recognition that when I say ‘Guy Ritchie has done,’ with a movie, that what I really mean is that Guy Ritchie’s name is being filled in as the default answer to a host of questions about decisions for the crafting of a movie that has been released by a company that is itself composed of a small army of worker ants that then subsequently dismantle the company itself upon the completion of their task. It is always an inadequate term personalising an enormous communal task as if one guy did it, because hypothetically we can treat a movie as if a singular vision guided the millions of decisions that brought it into being.
Anyway, Guy Ritchie sure turned fifty, didn’t he?
Content Warning: This movie includes implied bestiality and sexual battery pending an assault. Basically, someone gets pinned to something and then it’s interrupted.You don’t see it, and it is brief, but it’s still feels pretty unnecessary to me.
Continue Reading →Thresholds and Habits
Turns out I’m an adult?
I don’t like that. It seems in appropriate, and honestly, I think it was a bad idea. At some point civilisation decided that I was responsible for killing Applebees, and having a functional awareness of the different characters in MASK and how their toys weren’t the same scale as GI Joe, which were the same scale as C.O.R.P.S toys wasn’t actually a disqualifying criteria for that full-time adulting thing. But I don’t have any spaces where I can be fourteen years old, eat fuit gummi and play videogames, so instead, I make do with trying to manage my day to day with as reasonable a facsimile of being an adult as I can.
There’s stuff I’m not good at.
Continue Reading →Google Slides Is Actually Just Good?
This is super weird for me, I’m used to the google version of something being kinda crap.
Game Pile: Overwhelm (Video)
This is a video form version of an article I wrote in January 2020. You can read the full text of that article here.
Continue Reading →Too Much Fun: Reconcepting Dwarves
I wrote earlier this year about how I don’t like the ‘dwarf’ as conventionally presented by 4e D&D. I don’t like the implication it has in the world, I don’t like the space for human culture it eats, I don’t like the baggage from Tolkein and World of Warcraft and I really don’t like the way dwarves are so bloody good if what you want is the mechanical portfolio to build a tough hard to move character in 4th edition D&D.
The Dio Baragh, Baragh for short, are the Cobrin’Seil replacement for the Dwarf. Mechanically, they are exactly the same, but they’re not the same fortress-building, ancient-artifact-having, Jewish-stereotyping squat Scottish humanoids. Instead, the Dio Baragh (from a Scots term meaning ‘The Outcasts’) stand apart from the dwarf, on their magnificent goaty legs.
Let me tell you about a culture that was born in magic, and made itself real.
Let me tell you about people who were kicked out of the Feywild for partying too hard.
Let me tell you about people of hammer and oak and axe and thorn.
Let me tell you about the Baragh.
Continue Reading →The Worst People In The Universe
The universe of Star Control is and I say this with a sort of modified care, sizeable. It’s a space travelling adventure game and space, if you weren’t aware, is bloody huge, like, it’s so big it’s where we keep everything else (except some stuff we don’t keep there, don’t ask me, ask a scientist, they’re still not sure where it all is), but almost all videogames that have ever been set there have avoided depicting that, because, uh, being that big is really boring.
Your typical space videogame is not very varied or complicated. Doom is technically, a shooter set in space, but you might notice that the vast majority of it is set in ‘hell,’ and ‘base that is becoming hell.’ Videogame space tends to be small, to make it manageable, and videogame space cultures tend to be A Guy. Like, any given alien culture is not likely to give you multiple representatives with wildly competing personal tastes on things, you’ll instead be dealing with The Collective Will Of The Culture, as if cultures are these big unified stomping things. The result then, is that for all that you may have a relationship with The Pkunk, the Pkunk are really one guy, and he’s just a little guy.
The Star Control cultures are therefore, just some guys. The best of these characters are guys who you can sympathise with (the Supox, the Ur-Quan, the Androsynth), guys you can make a joke with (the Umgah, the Orz), guys who are just trying to do their job, man (the Humans), Scared Weird Little Guys (The Spathi, the Zoq-Fot-Pik) and The Guy Who Spent Too Much Time Studying The Blade (the Shofixiti, the Yehat).
But one thing that let the setting hold together reasonably well is that some of the guys in its space sucked (the Druuge, the Thraddash, the Ilwrath, the Chmmr), meaning that their interactions and behaviour were in some cases fantastically unhelpful. Yet, even then, there was another: One culture that didn’t even get a spaceship to their name, let alone planets.
The culture that was, at the point you deal with them, reduced to just one guy.
And that guy is probably one of the Worst People in the Universe.
The Embarrassing Impact Of A Fridge
You know that mental image you have of yourself as like, independent and not subject to your surroundings? Like, how we all have it in our heads that yeah, sure, I know my experiences and memories shape me a bit, but that’s not all of it. That’s not the whole thing, right?
Anyway, last year I changed my life because we bought a new fridge.
I am at the point in my life where I am no longer living with a second hand thing that was bought from a store that specialised in refurbishing whitegoods and that worked pretty well for the space we had. I wrote about this fridge once, about how the light didn’t work, and that never landed in my brain as the default.
This fridge lived in an alcove in our kitchen, and it was, as far as I could tell, pretty much the right size for it. But Fox, sick of a variety of problems with it, and wanting something to improve its efficiency, dedicated some of our money to buying it.
It’s wild that I feel ashamed for admitting that. That we bought a fridge. That somehow in this time of our lives, when remote work is something I can do and she can do well that we were able to save money and now, when I talk about things like labor and valuing people’s work and joining a union and being poor as a kid, I’m going to have someone go yeah but you bought a fridge.
Anyway, this fridge has changed a lot of my day.
The fridge has room for a large tank of water, and two bottles. It also has a water dispenser in the door, meaning at any given time the most convenient thing to do, if I want a drink, is to have a bit of water. Not a lot, because completely filling a glass is annoying. Result? I’m drinking more water. Also, the schedule of refilling the water each night before I go to bed means that I’m keeping the sink clear, and that means more dishes put in the washer before bed, rather than ‘ah, I’ll do it in the morning.
The crisper drawer is bigger and higher and closer to my eye level. I no longer have to tilt down to look into it. I no longer have to worry about if I already have too much of a head of lettuce, and therefore, I can’t buy another one, meaning that there are times when I may want lettuce and I can’t have any, just because of the modest logistics of a small crisper drawer.
The freezer is large, but has drawers. This means that it’s very effective got a large purchase of food that can then be frozen for long durations and thawed at meal times. This is making me plan ahead for meals more, because it’s not wasted effort.
This single piece of household infrastructure has made a bunch of stuff in my life tangibly easier and therefore, as a result, better for the way I want to live my life and it’s because we did the tremendously middle-class thing of getting a good appliance.
It feels weird to stare at it and think about the impact. Like surely this wasn’t the barrier to doing these things.
Right?
Surely.
Story Pile: Knives Out
Is this going to be the next version of The Raid?
Man I hope this isn’t the next version of The Raid.
Blind Nuzlockes Are Boring
Okay, context!
Nuzlocke runs refer to playing one of the Pokemon games with self-imposed rules to make the game harder and to change the context and tenor of the game. Typically speaking they are built around an attempt to make the game more edgy and meanspirited, to take a game that is made to be unbrickable for four year olds with numerous difficulty adjusters even more difficult.
And like, that’s good. That’s not a bad principle, in and of itself. Pokemon is a game designed to be very easy and to always have a route towards something like success no matter what the current state of the game, which can mean that if you’re outside the bottom end of player competence, which I want to again remind you is four year olds, you might find the default play experience a bit easy.
Now, ostensibly the game has a place to graduate to if you hit the limits of difficulty in the game and like pokemon battling, which is, you might want to try battling other people, but that is obviously very intimidating. People want the game to be harder, but not in a way that might involve that and all. If you want to stay within the difficulty of a game made for children by deliberately not taking the best strategic options presented to you, you start to get creative.
4e: Harmonising Mount Rules
When you ask people about the tropes of the fantasy adventure narrative, there’s a genre of those tropes that 4th edition D&D — which is the best D&D, by the way — handles badly. Well, not badly. Well, badly. Well, some of it is bad. Well, some of it is unreliable. Well, look, it’s complicated.
I refer to the idea of a character on a mount.
Game Pile: Operation Tango
Operation Tango is an asymmetric two-player cooperative game about a pair of cool spies through minigames. You’re going after an evil wealthy hacker-terrorist, I won’t bother expositing the plot, don’t worry about spoilers. I really did, in that first sentence summarise the entire game. If you want to play about thirty games with a friend, recreating a narrative of again, two cool spies, then that’s what this game is.
There are plenty of articles about Operation Tango out there, no doubt, who want to show you all the ways this game is clever. A number of them also want to encourage you to think of it as good. I’m going to be a bit simpler. I enjoyed Operation Tango.
Up front, here is an obligatory admission: Operation Tango is a game I played with my friend Shelf. I had a blast. I liked it a lot, I heard funny dialogue, there was outrageously well-timed comedic beats, and even the times the game state failed left me determined to push on. I wanted to engage with this game and do a good job and I wanted to hit the targets and deliver on the mission objectives, and that’s because Shelf is great.
This game let me spend time with my friend, and I loved that, and the experience was great. Ten stars. What about you? Well, uh, let’s see what kind of advice I can give for someone who doesn’t have Shelf available.
Continue Reading →MTG: February 2022’s Custom Cards
Ah, February, I remember it just like it was last week. Well, what could I possibly have been using as my theme for the custom cards of Smooch Month? What’s that? You already have worked it out? It was so bloody obvious you got it after the literal first card I shared?
Well, if you’re going to be like that,
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains primarily custom magic cards.
Regifting is Great
I miss convention bring-and-buys.
I don’t like NFTs.
I really am bummed out, as I sit here thinking about it, by the negative stigma surrounding regifting.
And I like being able to make stuff.
Look, let’s unwrap this.
My Favourite Thing Sucks
Back when I made a TVtropes account, yes, that’s mine, no, it’s not good, I made the bold statement in the bio that ‘I probably hate your favourite thing.’
That was then, this is now, where I need to make it clear every time I open my mouth about a media entity that I’m not upsetting someone for pointing out things I dislike about something they like. And boy, that got me thinking about how much some things suck and the people who love it will tell you that.
Content Warning: I’m going to talk shit about Glee, Victorious, Homestuck, the Fight Game Community, pop music, X-Men, Power Rangers, Riverdale, Gotham, Sherlock, Supernatural, Star Wars, Kingdom Hearts, comic books in general, the Arrowverse, Yuri manga, and Marvel movies.
