“The Ur Game” Released In Game Poems #1: First Moves

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I’m honored to be part of the editorial collective for the first issue of Game Poems, an interactive magazine founded by Jordan Magnuson, who literally wrote the book on game poetry. The first issue collects 13 short, poetic video games that can all be played in your browser.

My contribution1 is “The Ur Game,” a puzzle about games, war, and the rules we choose to follow.

The theme for this issue was “First Moves,” and I explore both the experience of interacting with an unfamiliar game for the first time and the question of what we need to do in order to start to escape this broken system we live in.

You can play “The Ur Game” on Itch.io.

(We’re still working on some loading issues with the version of the game that’s included in the magazine. For now, the version on Itch will load much more reliably with less chance of making your browser unresponsive. I’ll try and remember to update this post once that issue is resolved!)

I initially designed “The Ur Game” last year at a time when the primary bit of world news on my mind was the ongoing genocide of Palestinians by the state of Israel. Now, my own country, the United States, has dramatically increased the pace of its genocidal campaigns against Latine people and is terrorizing its own residents with secret police. I hope the is less relevant to world events in another year.

Please check out the rest of the games in Game Poems #1! I think we selected a diverse and excellent selection of artsy games, and I hope that they help to expand your view of how games can work. And take a look at the Community Showcase, which collects submissions that didn’t end up in the issue! It was very hard picking just ten submissions to include, and the collection contains many excellent works.

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  1. Ten of the games were selected by the editors from an open request for submissions. Three, including mine, are invited submissions from established developers. ↩

I’m presenting at the Charlotte Writing Project Fall 2024 Conference on Sep. 19!

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I'm presenting on (the evils of) generative AI at the Charlotte Writing Project Fall 2024 Conference on Sep. 19!

My talk is titled, “Dada, Animal Crossing, and ChatGPT: Can We Ever Write Our Own Stories With the Master’s Tools?” If all goes well, I’ll be teaching an audience of mostly educators how ChatGPT works at a high level (it’s a fancy Markov generator) and why they shouldn’t use it (it serves hegemony).

If you can’t make it to the conference, I’ll be sharing my slides afterward and am open to doing similar talks elsewhere!

You can get more info on the conference here.

IF Retrospective: The 2006 XYZZY Awards

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Content Warning: Colonialism, Misogyny, Racism, Childhood sexual assault

I used to diligently keep up with “interactive fiction”, a game category that used to mean the same thing as “text adventure” but has broadened over time. At one point, it mostly included parser games (where you type things like TAKE DEVICE and EXAMINE VISTA) but is now also commonly used for hypertext games (Twine games and choose-your-own-adventures) and similar works. These days I see this sort of game often described as “text games”, which seems a fine enough label. I’ve fallen out of the habit of keeping up with the genre, and I’d like to get caught up.

The most well-known IF awards competition is, appropriately, the Annual Interactive Fiction Competition, or IFComp, an event initiated in 1995 with the express intention to encourage new works of IF. The IFComp, however, is focused on works which can be played in two hours, there’s a tradition of well-known authors using pseudonyms, and it only collects games submitted newly to the Comp. That means it’s not quite comprehensive in the way I’m looking for.

The actual premiere in-group awards competition for IF is the XYZZY Awards, a relatively obscure ritual mostly open to dedicated practitioners of the medium. It tends to have nominators, nominees, and voters that are super-dedicated to text-heavy works that are in conversation with the canon of parser and hypertext works that were historically discussed on the Usenet group rec.games.int-fiction. Yes, this is a community so old that it’s defined by a technology that was obsolete by 2005 or so.1

When I look at the XYZZY Awards, the last year that I remember playing most of the winners was 2005, although that was helped by how that year’s awards were swept by Jason Devlin’s “Vespers”, which won four of the ten categories. I also remember playing “Mystery House Possessed” by one of my personal favorite authors, Emily Short, which won Best Use of Medium in that year. That means that, in my quest to catch up with the past decade and a half of IF, I’ve chosen to start with 2006.

Continue reading IF Retrospective: The 2006 XYZZY Awards →
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  1. The current home of IF discussion seems to be the Interactive Fiction Community Forum. ↩

Theatre: An RPG (Quickplay Rules)

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This game is intended for players experienced with roleplaying. For beginners, we recommend Countdown: A Game for Two Players, by the same developers.

An abandoned theatre in the woods, rotting and overgrown with plants
Image by Daniel Ramirez (CCBY 2.0)

Theatre is a live-action roleplaying game for any number of players, limited only by your available space and resources. Together, as in most roleplaying games, you’ll enact a story. One difference in this game is that you aren’t in control of all the events in the story: they proceed in the sequence established by the adventure you’re playing. What you can control is how those events are explored: what mood do they establish? What events are especially significant, and how do the characters actually feel as they go through the sequence?

You’ll typically play this game with a pregenerated adventure, which establishes the nature of the characters and the moves they’ll make during a play session. Advanced players can play the game improvisationally, with certain players essentially making up the characters and moves as they go; guidelines for this mode of play are available in additional supplements. A sample pregenerated adventure is included at the end of this document, but a wide array of free and paid adventures are available from third-party creators and publishers.

For small groups, a home setting is perfectly appropriate. If you intend to play with a particularly large group (more than ten, perhaps), you will need an appropriate venue with sufficient seating where everyone can see the roleplay area. Consider a place where musical performances are held, perhaps a park bandstand; these usually have an raised, visible area for roleplay and enough seating to support a large number of House players.

Regardless of your setting, you should establish a space for roleplay that is visible to all participants, with enough space to move around. Try to establish a space that people can access from all sides, and make sure to have options for private areas to which people can withdraw if they’re not actively involved in play.

Continue reading Theatre: An RPG (Quickplay Rules) →

Fusion Time Released!

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I’ve put out a new game! It’s a GM-less tabletop roleplaying game where the players are a team of people with special powers defending their home. When their interpersonal clashes grow strong enough, an opponent attacks, and the players will have to Fuse in order to fight back and protect their home.

I’m calling this a “playtest” version, a sort of early-access thing. It’s fully playable but I haven’t done pretty formatting or figured out illustrations or anything. I’d like to see if I’ve missed any issues and if anyone’s even interested in the game at all before I do work to lay out the book in detail.

There’s more on mechanics and acknowledgments on the game’s store page, so check it out! There are even free community copies there for queer folks and/or people of color who don’t feel able to afford the game. Additionally, if you’re in media (including being a streamer) and want a review copy, or would like me to facilitate a game session for you, let me know!

Check out Fusion Time!

You may have noticed that I’ve released several tabletop things lately and relatively few video games. One of the main reasons for this is that it’s simply less work: both media need design and testing, but I find it quicker and easier to write up and format a rules document than to code up and create material for a video game. That said, I’m still working on stuff over at Future Proof Games, and you can keep an eye on this space for more.

Oh! And for more on my thoughts around the concept of fusion in media, check out my post on one of the game’s major influences, Steven Universe: “Everyone Should Watch ‘Alone Together’“.

Tabletop Garden: The Great Molasses Flood

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Over at Tabletop Garden, we’ve just started airing a new campaign! It’s called “The Great Molasses Flood”, it uses the Rosette Diceless system I helped design at Future Proof Games, and it’s a great place to start listening if you haven’t yet checked out my actual-play podcast of short campaigns about interesting characters with a critical agenda.

03.00: The Great Molasses Flood Teaser

“The Great Molasses Flood” is a weird-fiction story where we take a real historical disaster that was entangled with issues of class and ethnicity and examine it through the lens of strange sci-fi. I really like how it turned out! “Ego Driver”, the previous campaign, was a lot of fun and explored some cool stuff, but I really like “Flood”‘s more personal feel and the way that things go off the rails in the second half.

Check it out! If you like it, I would very much appreciate support on my Patreon account. You’ll get new episodes a week in advance and also get access to behind-the-scenes material; I did an hour-long postmortem on “Ego Driver” that went deep on my intentions and reflections on the campaign, and I plan to do the same for this one.

I hope you enjoy “The Great Molasses Flood”!

Warframe Has the Best Worldbuilding In Video Games

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(This article contains a discussion of the storyline of Warframe. It contains many things that some people may consider spoilers. Trust me. Read it.)

Warframe is a free-to-play online third-person sci-fi shooter by Ontario developer Digital Extremes where you control a cool, acrobatic robo-warrior in a grindy co-op game where the PR tagline is “ninjas play free”. You fight space nazis, mechanized capitalists, and a bioplague in a handful of standard mission types to get loot and level up your gear.

Warframe, written and designed by Creative Director Steve Sinclair, Lead Writer Cam Rogers, and a team of other designers and writers, is the story of a dark future set in a fallen posthuman solar empire, where the generational victims of the cruel, long-lost Orokin are in constant conflict and where solidarity and empathy are the strongest forces against an apparently-inevitable cosmic struggle borne out of the resonating echoes of exploitation and familial loss.

The Moon came back.

Continue reading Warframe Has the Best Worldbuilding In Video Games →

Tabletop Garden: Ego Driver

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We’ve finally completed the most recent campaign of my actual play podcast, Tabletop Garden. In “Ego Driver“, a group of misfit killers participate in a postcolonial road war in a postapocalyptic world. It draws from Mad Max: Fury Road, Trigun, Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys, and Wacky Races. I’m super proud of how the campaign turned out, despite an embarrassingly long hiatus in the middle while I struggled with my own mental health issues.

I’d really love it if you checked it out, and if you like it, shared it with your circles. You can start with the first episode:

02.01: Ego Driver – Beat It

If you’d like more insight into how I planned the campaign, or how I feel about it looking back, you can sign up to support my Patreon, where I’ve just published over an hour of postmortem retrospective discussing things like how the players shaped the narrative and how I now feel about the extensive Michael Jackson references:

Become a Patron!

I’m real pleased with the story my players and I put together, and I’m looking forward to sharing the next campaign with you soon. It’s currently in recording and editing, and if you want a sneak preview, check out the end of the postmortem above!

All My Flash Games Now Downloadable With Source

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I’ve released all my Flash games as locally-playable SWFs and Windows projectors on itch.io! That means that they should remain playable even after browsers and Adobe stop supporting Flash. These represent three years of my career, and they were pretty prolific ones!

Get all my Flash games on itch.io here!

If you’re interested in seeing the source code or resources for the games, you can get it for most of them1 by paying $5. If you want the source for more than one, it’ll be a better deal to get my whole Flash Source Code Collection for a flat $10.

Sometime soon I’ll get around to updating the game pages on this site to feature Itch widgets, like so:

I’m very happy to have these games available again without requiring players to enable a deprecated plugin. If you’ve wanted to support certain Flash games of mine directly, this is also a good way to do that! You’re welcome to donate a bit when you download one, although I don’t expect that of anyone.

If you’re wondering what’s been going on with me, I’ve gone into some detail on my Patreon, which I hope to revive in coming months: Become a Patron!

Let me know if you have any thoughts on this release, or if you run into any problems. Thanks!

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  1. I haven’t released the source for the games repackaged by Future Proof Games. ↩

Toward a Sustainable Resource Escalation Game

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An emerging form of games, born out of Minecraft and Dwarf Fortress, has occupied my thoughts lately. It doesn’t seem to have a name yet; it grew out of some Minecraft mods and had its seminal work in Factorio. It’s a cousin, or even sibling, to the idle/incremental game, but usually looks more like a management or survival sandbox game. You could call it a resource management and automation game, or a factory simulator, but I’ll use the term “resource escalation game,” because its primary features are:

  • resources to collect, usually from a world you must explore
  • crafting of resources into more complex or rich forms
  • structures for automation of the crafting, allowing you to take a higher-level conceptual view where you are concerned with the logistics of automation rather than foraging
  • and an escalation created by those resources, where your initial low-level needs become inconsequential and the pace of progression is governed primarily by what complexity of resources you have instead of a more abstract research system1
Continue reading Toward a Sustainable Resource Escalation Game →
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  1. Factorio gates a lot of things behind research, but research is driven by manufactured resources, not the more typical research-over-time approach seen in strategy games. ↩