Actual play podcasts are not what the name suggests. They’re a form of podcast that purportedly serializes a recording of a group playing a tabletop roleplaying game. The listener hears the dice rolls, the out-of-character discussions, and the social interaction that surrounds the in-character story being told at the table. The apparent appeal is the fun of hearing the “actual play” occurring when creating an interesting story.
Ludus Novus 030 - Transcendentalism, Gentrification, and the Procedural Rhetoric of Stardew Valley
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What does Stardew Valley say about the world with the rules of its simulation, and how does it compare to another Transcendentalist game, Walden, a game?
REFERENCES Barone, Eric. Stardew Valley. Chucklefish, 22 February 2016. https://stardewvalley.net/
Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. MIT Press, 2010.
Brice, Mattie. “My First Year in Stardew Valley.” Alternate Ending, 29 April 2016. http://www.mattiebrice.com/my-first-year-in-stardew-valley/
Fullerton, Tracy et al. Walden: a game. USC Game Innovation Lab, 4 July 2017. https://www.waldengame.com/
La Flèche, Gersande. “The gentleman farmer, labour and land: ecocritical possibilities in Stardew Valley.” Gersande’s Blog, 3 May 2016. https://gersande.com/blog/the-gentleman-farmer-labour-and-land-ecocriticial-possibilities-in-stardew-valley/
Keegan, Brett. “Stardew Valley, Sorge, and Martin Heidegger.” Backyard Philosophy, 27 March 2018. https://backyardphilosophy.com/2018/03/27/stardew-valley-sorge-and-martin-heidegger/
Olson, Dan. “The Stanley Parable, Dark Souls, and Intended Play.” Folding Ideas, 26 July 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHmivGmkjJw
Piel, Michael. “The Video Game Based on Thoreau’s ‘Walden’ Will Bring You Closer to Nature.” Motherboard, 25 October 2017. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/7x4vmz/video-game-based-on-thoreau-walden-will-bring-you-closer-to-nature
Schultz, Kathryn. “Pond scum: Henry David Thoreau’s moral myopia.” The New Yorker, 19 October 2015. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/pond-scum
Thoreau, Henry D. Walden; or, Life in the woods. Ticknor and Fields, 9 August 1854.
I’ve started a new podcast! It’s called Tabletop Garden, and it’s an “actual play” show where a rotating cast plays tabletop roleplaying games and talks about them.
Tabletop Garden is an actual-play podcast where we collaborate on short, self-contained stories about interesting characters, and we do it with an agenda. Throughout each campaign we discuss values, techniques, and how to play with intention.
Our first pilot campaign uses Mechanical Oryx by Grant Howitt to tell a tale of looming violence in the solarpunk postapocalypse. During each campaign, episodes will release weekly. Check out the show at tabletop.garden.
What do people actually mean when they say “walking simulator?” Bernband by Tom van den Boogaart doesn’t even seem to have a goal. But then why do you keep playing it?
Juul, Jesper. “Without a goal”. In Tanya Krzywinska and Barry Atkins (eds):Videogame/Player/Text. Manchester University Press, 2007. http://www.jesperjuul.net/text/withoutagoal/
What is a “game?” It only matters in context. When we examine things as games to learn from them, what does that mean? Any useful definition of game used as a critical lens must encompass Soccer, Candy Land, Sim City, Doom, and Gone Home. But Candy Land doesn’t have any player choice. Is it just dancing?
I’ve tried something new with this episode. I’ve put together a video version, currently hosted on YouTube, with some nonessential visual aids. For now I intend to keep the show audio-first, but having it available via YouTube may make it more accessible and attract new listeners/viewers. If you’re seeing this on my website, the normal audio player is still below.
I love the work that Kate Compton and others have done with generative/procedural art. One thing I’ve missed, though, is the ability to just link to a quickly-made thing. Specifically, I’ve done things like specify the naming structure of alien species for a roleplaying game using Kate’s tool Tracery, but there’s no easy way I’ve found to just link to an arbitrary Tracery grammar without spinning up a server or making a Twitter bot or something similar.
So I made one.
Tracery Live is an open-source Tracery front-end that stores your JSON source code in a query string, so that you can load grammars without any back-end storage needed. It supports HTML and various other supportive techs. You can paste in an arbitrary Tracery grammar or edit it directly on the page. Here’s Tracery’s Night Vale example for a sample of a lengthier end result.
At Future Proof Games, we just released a tabletop/live-action roleplaying game called Rosette Diceless. For those who have followed me for a while, this is a distant descendant of my 2009 beta release, LORE. We’ve been playtesting it for a year or two, and we’re looking forward to hearing what other folks use it for.
As with the rest of Rosette, Rosette Diceless has an agenda: it is dedicated to a consensus-based, story-first, and improvisational approach. We believe that this creates the best social environment for creating and expressing stories that incorporate everyone’s creativity.
You can pick up a digital copy of Rosette Diceless on itch.io, Kindle, or DriveThruRPG. We’ll have a paperback print-on-demand version on DTRPG soon; if you get the digital version before then, send us a proof of purchase to info@futureproofgames.com and you can pick up the print-on-demand at the bundle price.
In 2016, in part as a response to the impending death of Adobe Flash, we at Future Proof Games announced “The Majesty of Colors Remastered”, a rebuild of the original game in Unity with enhancements. We estimated that it would take a few months.
Today, two years later, the game is finally released on five platforms: iPhone/iPad, Android, Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Every game release is scary for a different reason. One of the reasons I’m nervous about this one is that “The Majesty of Colors” is real short, and we’re asking money for it. Even on mobile. In the end, our estimate wasn’t far off; it took the two of us a few person-months of actual work, but that was spread over two years of working at day jobs. Even with the low price we’re asking, it will still take tens of thousands of sales to “break even,” making the game pay for itself. It’ll take even more to make a profit, supporting more steady work on future games and maybe even justifying further enhancements like extra interactions or (no promises!) more story.
We’re tentatively buoyed by the response to the game we’ve gotten so far today. Folks are excited, and we’ve gotten some press interest and are hopeful for more. But “The Majesty of Colors” is a work very close to my heart, and I’m still afraid that its time has entirely passed. We’ll see.
I’ve written this in various places over the last few days: thank you for dreaming with us.
Ludus Novus 027: Imposition of Order Results in Escalation of Disorder
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In this episode of the Ludus Novus podcast: Prey 2017. The lie of a power fantasy is that power over others is something you deserve. Prey is a consequence fantasy: to take agency, you must incur risk. To escape a cage of lies, you have to open the door onto a world of new danger.
The Ludus Novus podcast is supported by my patrons. To help, please visit my Patreon.
Richard Spencer — a known racist and genocide advocate — got punched on video and publicly humiliated and it was funny and satisfying to watch. It was an effective way to weaken his public platform, both in an immediate sense (it silenced him mid-sentence) and in a long-term sense (he will always be the person with silly music behind videos of him being hurt). This has started a wave of public speech alternately condemning the specific act or advocating for eagerly and proactively punching more Nazis.
While there’s certainly been a range of viewpoints in this discussion, two common ways these ethics are being framed are1: “violence as political action is never acceptable” and “punching Nazis is always great so let’s do more of it.” I disagree with both of these ideas.
Violence is sometimes justified and even necessary. But it is a serious, severe, and indeed sacred act. When you commit violence in the defense of virtue, you are causing a feeling person pain, potentially permanently injuring or killing them, and you are taking the poison of that violence into yourself. It’s a transformative act, a sacrifice, and to take it lightly is not only reckless: it is sacrilege that minimizes that sacrifice. Continue reading Punching Nazis Is a Sacred Act→
