Category Archives: Blogs

What’s Wrong with Tabletop RPGs

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I love tabletop roleplaying games. They are, in some ways, the perfect game. That being said, they certainly aren’t without their flaws. I’ve been working on a tabletop RPG system, and one of the things any creator needs to ask is “what’s wrong with what’s already there?” and “how can I make it better?” Here, then, is a list of the things wrong with tabletop roleplaying games.
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Never According to Plan

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The players in a tabletop roleplaying game never do what you expect them to.

Case in point: I’ve just started up a campaign of Promethean. It opens with the player characters being drawn to a mysterious, sprawling house, where they discover an otherworldly being called a qashmal who dispenses a cryptic riddle.

This is the second time I’ve run the beginning of this campaign with different players each time. The first group did what I expected: they searched the building top to bottom for clues, then proceeded to follow up on the riddle. This latest group, however, decided against that.
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Left 4 Godot

Blogs, Digital Games, , ,


I’ve been playing a lot of Left 4 Dead lately. I got it in the recent weekend sale, and I can say with confidence that it’s the best co-op experience I’ve ever had. It’s got the typical Valve polish, it’s fun and funny, and the experience of finding, playing, and reminiscing about a play session is a complete joy. There’s an incredible amount to talk about here, from the way the setting is introduced through wall scrawlings to the way the game teaches you how to play. I’d love to see Richard Terrell do an article about the tactics and interplay of L4D. But I’m primarily a story guy, so I’m going to talk about the story.

Left 4 Dead is George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead as told by Samuel Beckett.
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No More No More Heroes

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I can finally remove No More Heroes from the “Games I’m Playing” section of the sidebar and onto the “Games I’ve Played” page. I finished the game tonight. It’s strange, to say the least. It’s an insanely bloody Wii beat-em-up game that just screams for attention. It’s loaded with self-reference, style, and unsubtlety, and I’m still processing a lot of it.

The gameplay is very odd. I realized during the final boss fight that it is as if the developers really liked the swordplay and treasure seeking of The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker and decided to make a whole game about it. The swordplay has the same rhythmic feel as the GameCube Zelda, and even has a prominent timed dodge mechanic that lets you break past the defenses of vulnerable enemies. Even the way that the enemies’ corpses explode is similar. At the same time, the repetitive “do jobs while driving around an empty city searching for buried coins” sections call back to Wind Waker‘s late-game “try to find tiny treasure chests in a big, boring ocean” activity. The fighting portions are a whole lot of fun, except when the developers make the puzzling decision to subvert the character’s abilities. One late-game boss is immune to the protagonist’s very-useful wrestling moves, and other bosses regularly demand an entirely different approach than the rest of the sword fights.

And the story… it’s tough. The game is simultaneously a celebration and a condemnation of geeky, oversexed, otaku, socially awkward gamer culture. The main character, Travis Touchdown, is almost entirely unlikable; his only redeeming trait is that he is entirely honest about his goals: to be number one and to get laid. Other characters philosophize, or seek money and fame and power. Travis states, again and again, that he isn’t interested in all that. He just wants to be the best.

Sex and gender are strong motifs in the game. It bounces between wry postfeminism, with Sylvia using her body to manipulate Travis, and simple self-aware chauvinism, with Travis’s constant search for sex and his special treatment of female bosses. The phallic imagery is in-your-face the whole game: enormous swords, a bulbous motorcycle, and the need to jack off your Wiimote to “recharge your energy.” Travis takes a dump to save, has a homoerotic relationship with his sword trainer, and has a rather intense love of professional wrestling. Just about every character in the game is defined by sex and gender, from the estranged father to the effeminate pelvis-thrusting superhero fetishist to the sadistic loligoth with projectile men in gimp suits.

The whole thing really hasn’t fit together in my head yet, though. By the end of the game, it’s deconstructing itself, with characters offering ludicrous twists and explanations and openly referring to Travis as the protagonist. It’s just so silly and disjointed that I’m not really sure it has anything interesting to say. The well-read game hobbyist is familiar with the idea that gamers and game developers are “stunted adolescents.” The gameplay is fun but flawed, and doesn’t have much to do with the motifs and concepts thrown haphazardly around. I’ll think about it some more, and if I come up with any sort of synthesis from the game, I’ll post again.

On The Bryant Collection

Blogs, Interactive Fiction,

I learned an important lesson a week or so ago: don’t release games on April Fool’s Day. I thought that April 1st would be a fun day to release The Bryant Collection, with its hard-to-believe premise and odd approach. The result? I think a lot of folks saw the post, said “ha, ha!” and assumed the whole thing was a joke. The biggest reaction I got was a flame from someone who’d evidently had one too many websites change up their CSS stylesheets on him.

It’s a shame, because despite the premise and backstory, The Bryant Collection is a real game, and one that I poured a lot of effort and heart into. But I haven’t gotten a single review, game entry on an IF site, or even a comment from someone who’s played the game. The only e-mail I’ve gotten about it is from my parents.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t be surprised. Mixing truth and fiction is risky enough when it’s not on a day dedicated to lies, and the games from the Spring Thing were released at almost the exact same time. The Spring Thing is probably the second or third biggest IF event of the year, so naturally Bryant would be overshadowed by those games, especially if it’s dismissed as a joke.

This post isn’t a cry for attention or anything. I just wanted to share my reactions when a game doesn’t get very well-received, since I always post when a game gets positive reactions.

The Bryant Collection Released

Blogs, Digital Games, Games Releases, Interactive Fiction, , ,

Right on the heels of my last release, here’s my April game, The Bryant Collection. This one is a bit of a cop-out; it’s not actually my game. Instead, it’s a translation of someone else’s work into interactive fiction.

An excerpt from my release post on RGIF:

A few months ago, I found an old strongbox at a garage sale. The box was full of papers written by a woman named Laura Bryant. The majority of the stuff in the box was a collection of what she called “story worlds.”

These story worlds are akin to interactive fiction or roleplaying games; they’re designed for one player and one mediator who serves as the parser or the game master. The earliest date on a story world in the box is 1964, which means these works predate Crowther and Woods’s Adventure, Dungeons & Dragons, or Wesely’s Braunstein. The Bryant Collection contains the five stories that I found the most interesting and feasible to convert to IF:

  • “The End of the World” is a story about lunch.
  • “Morning in the Garden” is a story about dealing with annoying people.
  • “Tower of Hanoi” is a rather interesting little puzzle, but not what you think. It came with a sort of feelie in the strongbox, which is included as an IF object.
  • “Going Home Again” is a story about growing up.
  • “Undelivered Love Letter” is a story about airports.

Download The Bryant Collection.

For more information, including links to interpreters that will run the game, see the game page.

The Video Game Lies Database

Blogs, Digital Games, News, ,

We all knew one. That kid who always told lies about video games. Maybe they knew a cheat code to make Lara Croft naked, or said that something special happened in Sonic if you collected 1000 rings, or that there really was a Carcer City in GTAIII that you had to be awesome to get to. Maybe you were that kid.

Do video game lies arise out of a desire to trick people, or because the liar wants to look cool? We may never know, but we can record all of these lies for posterity. Years from now, historians will be able to observe this unique bit of video game culture.

Because of positive response in a thread I started on the TIGSource forums, I’ve created a wiki at Wikia to record the odd phenomenon of video game lies. The history of video games is poorly-recorded, and this is especially true of the cultural history. The video game liar seems to be a universal experience of people who grew up around video games, and I’d like it if we could better document our experiences with it.

Visit the Video Game Lies database, and browse through the entries or add one of your own. The site’s a bit rough right now, but I’ll try and clean it up when I get the chance.

Branching Pathways

Blogs, Digital Games, ,

I write a lot about agency, the ability for a player to affect the outcome of events in a piece of interactivity. Most games we play have very little high-level agency; the player can determine how a battle is fought, but victory always results in the same outcome. Terry “Xoldiers” Cavanagh just released a game called “Pathways” that plays with the concept of agency. It turns out we don’t have any. Let me elaborate.

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