Cope

I’ve not been hacked, no.

I’m taking E, my firstborn, to the theatre in Soho this weekend, and then for lunch afterwards. A few minutes ago I asked Twitter for ideas on places to eat and the suggestions that came back were so good that I thought they were worth compiling and posting somewhere public. Apologies if you could care less.

(Update: and then a bunch of suggestions came in from Facebook, so I felt a comprehensive edit was in order, and I’ve added in the recommendations from the comments and some quotes too, and credit where due, and stuff.)

• Ed’s Easy Diner (12 Moor Street and 19 Rupert Street by the Trocadero): ‘naughty but delicious’ (Hannah Actual Flynn);   ‘the Piccadilly one has booths which are more practical than stools’ (Chris Locke); also recommended by Arran Ross-Paterson
• Yo Sushi (52 Poland Street): ‘conveyor belts and bouncy music’ (Russell Davies)
• Rainforest Cafe (20 Shaftesbury Avenue): ‘you’ll hate it, they’ll love it’ (Chris Locke); ‘fun, but was £15 for a kids meal back in 2009′ (Mac Morrison); also recommended by David Hughes
• Belgo Centraal (50 Earlham Street): ‘our three year old loved Belgo Centraal, mainly because of the staff (in monks habits), who made a fuss of her’ (George Walkley)
• Tokyo Diner (2 Newport Place): ‘an introduction to ace and well priced Japanese food’ (@karohemd); also recommended by Simon Rogers
• Wahaca (80 Wardour Street): ‘My kids loved Wahaca (as do I) but I had to specifically ask for some less spicy dishes for fussy 3-year-old’ (Gary Barker).
• Koya Noodles (49 Frith Street);
• Polpetto (above the French pub, 49 Dean Street);
• Spuntino (61 Rupert Street); and
• Y Ming (35 Greek Street): ‘All four v credible but delightful with kids’  (Iain Smedley). I had a very, very bad date in Y Ming about nine years ago but don’t let that put the rest of you off
• Maison Bertaux (28 Greek Street) ‘if a snack will do’ (Iain Smedley)
• Mildred’s (45 Lexington Street)
• Chipotle (114-116 Charing Cross Road)
• Giraffe (11 Frith Street) ‘if all else fails’ (Russell Davies)

And two that aren’t quite Soho:

• Fortnum and Mason (181 Piccadilly): ‘The ice cream parlor is amazing for kids (and adults)’ (Machum)
• Smollensky’s on the Strand (105 The Strand): ‘has magician going round tables on weekends’ (Mac Morrison)

There was some discussion about the Rainforest Cafe: the kids’ menu is £12.95 and drinks are extra, which is high even for central London. On the other hand it’s a special day and I want a meal that E is going to enjoy, not necessarily the one that’s going to be most nutritious or the best value for money. If she remembers the venue and not the food, that’s still a win.

It’s a great list, with some surprises—who’d have thought that Belgo Centraal had a kids’ menu, much less a £4.95 one? Many thanks to everyone who gave suggestions. I’ll let E decide where we go, and I will report back.

UPDATE:  The theatrical performance of Bagpuss was a triumph. E initially seemed interested by the idea of Yo Sushi, but decided on inspection that the stools were too high and a bit scary. She was very excited by the gift shop at the Rainforest Cafe but just as we were about to go down the tunnel to the restaurant a loud lion’s roar came echoing up and she decided that perhaps this wasn’t the best place for lunch. (E is not normally a timid child, but I think she was a bit overwhelmed by the onslaught of central London on a Saturday afternoon.) We ended up at Ed’s Easy Diner by the Trocadero, which wasn’t spectacular but gave her a very satisfactory hot dog and some things to colour in, and I told her about diners and America, and it was fun. Suggest you beg a table with a juke-box selector; we didn’t and E was fascinated by them. Then we discovered there was a shop a couple of doors up that sold Totoro plushes, and that was the afternoon made.

Filed under: Uncategorized on January 4th, 2012 | 4 Comments »

If you’re at all excited about the imminent release of the new Sherlock Holmes film ‘Game of Shadows’, once again with heavy steampunk overtones and again starring the estimable Robert Downey Jr and the actor Jude Law, can I recommend that you point your Twitter client at the account of Mr Stephen Fry (@stephenfry), who on Monday will begin tweeting the first in a series of puzzles and clues –

(which I may have had something to do with)

– relating to a competition with prizes including tix to the premiere, and iPads and stuff. UK-only for the prizes but anyone can play along at home.

The game’s afoot!

Filed under: Uncategorized on December 2nd, 2011 | No Comments »

Last Saturday at Dragonmeet in London I had the pleasure of interviewing Ian Livingstone OBE in front of a crowd of fans, nostalgists and people with an interest in how the British games industry came to be what it is.

We chatted for about an hour, covering everything from the genesis of Games Workshop and the hand-over to Bryan Ansell in the mid-80s, to creating Fighting Fantasy, running Eidos, being life president of Square Enix, and his most recent work lobbying for improved teaching of computer programming in British schools.

The interview was recorded by Paul Maclean of yog-sothoth.com and you can listen to it here.

Filed under: Uncategorized on November 29th, 2011 | No Comments »

I’m going to be interviewing Ian Livingstone OBE, the most important man in the British games industry, on stage at Dragonmeet, in Kensington on 26th November.

The talk is likely to be packed out, but if you’ve got any question that you’d like me to put to this legendary figure, then you can send it through to a special email address interview@dragonmeet.co.uk and we’ll add it to the list.

Hope to see you there.

Filed under: Uncategorized on November 11th, 2011 | No Comments »

My wife looked up over breakfast this morning and asked if I knew about NaNoWriMo, the annual National Novel Writing Month, a month during which—as the name suggests—you write a novel. Yes, yes, I said, I do. Then she said she’s going to take part, and would I like to as well? Which may have been phrased as a question, but wasn’t one.

For those who know my book output, speed-writing is not something I’m new to. Four of my books were each produced in under a month, five if you count the 2009 test-run of the Paige Turner project (my high-speed system that allows five writers to create a 100,000-word novel from first concept to a manuscript that’s ready for print in ten days, and if I told you which writers were involved in the test you might drown in your salivation to read it. Man, that was a fun time). But I’m out of practice with fiction right now, the only piece of conventional narrative I’ve done in the last year is a short for The New Hero anthology that Robin Laws is editing for Stone Skin Press. And it’d be good to get back into the groove.

And a challenge is a challenge. So yes, I’m doing NaNoWriMo this year. I’m going to do it cold. I’ll sit down tomorrow (it starts tomorrow) with no idea of what I’m going to write: no outline, no structure, no characters, no setting, not even a genre. I’ll have my usual pile of inspiration-generators to hand (Once Upon a Time, Rory’s Story Cubes, Oblique Strategies, a Tarot deck, BBC4, my four-year-old’s imagination) but other than that I’ll be in freefall.

Well, sort of. I have two things in place. One: my wife at my back. Two: a title. Whatever it turns out to be, it’ll be called ‘Cold Open’.

Updates to follow.

Filed under: fiction, narrative, playfulness, storytelling, writing on October 31st, 2011 | 7 Comments »

Almost a year ago I was part of the team that ran BoardGameCamp in London. My contribution to the day was organising a game-design competition sponsored by Cadbury the chocolate people and co-arranged with the good folks at PHD Media.

The prize was to have your game-design printed on the back of the 2011 Santa Selection Box, a boxed set of favourite Cadbury products that’s released every year in time for Christmas. Cadbury puts out about six million of these boxes. Yes, six million. For comparison, the original Halo has sold about 6.4 million.

The winner was Present Drop, a clever tile-placing game for 2-4 players with some nice Eurogame overtones, simple enough for kids to understand but with enough strategy to be interesting for real games-players too. It was designed by Matt Green and Kevan Davis. You know Kevan. He did Urban Dead and Chore Wars.

A year on, and the selection box with the game on it is in UK shops. At Tesco it costs £1.50, which gets you about £3-worth of chocolate, a spiffy game and a donation to the Make-A-Wish Foundation as well. Which is, you have to admit, a heck of a deal.

So show Kevan and Matt (and Cadbury and Make-A-Wish) some support and pick one up when you’re doing the shopping. Or pick up several and give them to your friends. I’m your friend, aren’t I?

(More about Present Drop here.)

Filed under: game design, GameCamp on October 7th, 2011 | 2 Comments »

My first experience with Apple came in 1984. Someone in my school had a Mac. It was pretty nifty. I was allowed to wiggle the mouse and watch the cursor move on screen. Ideas for games flooded into my mind. The Mac failed to become any kind of games powerhouse.

1992, I did a postgraduate course in periodical journalism at the London College of Printing (now the LCC). Part of that was a layout module, using some flavour of Mac and the latest release of Quark Xpress, probably 3.0 or 3.1. It crashed quite often and we lost a lot of work. By then I’d been running Ventura Publisher under Gem (an early PC windowing environment, a little clunky but very stable) on my home machine for a couple of years, and it seemed that the extra features of the Mac OS and Quark weren’t worth the trade-off in reliability. I stuck with PCs.

1996, I joined the launch team of Bizarre magazine at John Brown Publishing, a Mac house. I was initially given a PowerMac, which was replaced a few months later with something slightly better after we got ram-raided and had all our hardware nicked. Both machines ran Quark 3.3 and a word-processor from a company that had closed down a couple of years before, and which created files that didn’t import cleanly into Quark. I never understood that. Anyway, both were unstable as hell and fell over a lot—usually Quark would run out of memory and collapse without warning, taking the rest of the system and all unsaved data with it. If it wasn’t that it was the network.

At the time I was running a Windows network in my home (originally under 3.11 for Workgroups, later upgraded to Win95 and later Win98, slinging big publishing files around) using out-of-the-box Dell hardware and keeping it up for days at a time. Even though they tried, the Mac zealots at work were unable to persuade me that I should switch.

In 1999 I went to work for a small magazine company to create Crazynet, a UK sister-title to the French Micro Dingo. I had been promised a full-spec G3 with a big monitor, so imagine my delight on my first day when I found a low-end iMac on my desk. Even with the RAM jacked up to the maximum and every autosave feature turned on, it was a hideously unstable piece of shit that crashed several times a day and cost me literally weeks of lost work. I loathed it with a passion. Also, it had a puck mouse. Awful. I wrote more articles for Crazynet on my Psion 5 than I did on the iMac. The only time that Psion 5 ever lost data was when a waitress at a cafe accidentally poured water over it.

2003, I was senior writer at a film publicity company. The writers’ department was the only part of the company using Macs—round-base iMacs running OSX and, once again, a word-processor that wasn’t made any more and didn’t save to any standard file-formats except RTF. (Is my experience there unique or are there a lot of Mac shops where obsolete, unreliable text editors are mandatory?)  The keyboard was missing at least one character we used quite a lot: I kept one on a sticky on my desktop so I could cut-and-paste it into documents as required. The iMac didn’t fall over as much as the Macs I’d used previously, but it still fell over and needed to be restarted a lot more often than the Toshiba laptop and Dell desktop I had at home. Being OSX-based, complete system failures were rare, but the regular discovery that the word-processor had mysteriously terminated with no warning or autosave brought a warm nostalgia for all my previous experiences with Apple hardware. Warm like heartburn or a short-circuiting power cable.

And that’s the list of all the Apple products I’ve ever used for more than an hour or two, with one exception. In late 2004 I bought my girlfriend an iPod. It was the first big present of our relationship, with a cute engraved message on the back and everything. She still has it and uses it, and with every passing year it acquires more sentimental value, though it has needed to be repaired a couple of times. The last time it failed I took it to the Apple Store. They looked at it in disdain and told me I should throw it away and buy a new one. And that was the moment I decided Apple would not get another penny of my money or waste another minute of my time.

I understand that many of my friends will only buy hardware and operating systems made by Apple. I’m fine with that and do not think less of them for it.

But if I bought all my gear from Sony and wouldn’t shut up about it, you’d think I was a bit weird, right?

Filed under: Uncategorized on October 7th, 2011 | 3 Comments »

I am overjoyed. I have got my hands on the most desireable piece of hardware of late 2011, and it is spectacular. It is primarily game-related, but I can see all kinds of other applications for it—and if you can’t think of anything else then it’s simply an astonishing piece of physical design.

I am talking of the just-released Schliech SL70063, the Mighty Fighter Elephant.

Booyah.

Compare and contrast:

Highly recommended.

Addendum: there’s a competition to win one. Closing date 31st October.

Filed under: Uncategorized on October 3rd, 2011 | 2 Comments »

Moo.com let me down. I ordered some new business cards for DiGRA 2011 and they didn’t reach me until after I left for the conference.

Luckily I have stocks of an A4 card that punches out into ten business cards per sheet. I use it for prototyping card-games. So homebrewing some cards wasn’t a problem. But I also have this tradition that whenever I do a new run of a business card, I put a game on the back, and it’s always a different game. So I needed a new game in a hurry.

(This is an idea I borrowed from James Ernest of Cheapass Games, whose cards had games on them about ten years ago. His business-card games always involved things you’d have in your pockets. Mine go one step further: the only components of my back-of-business-card games are business cards.)

So what kind of a game can I whip up in under an hour and fit on the back of a business card? A role-playing game, obviously. It’s called Here On Business, it’s set at a conference, and it’s designed to play out in 30-60 minutes.

I admit I had to resort to 6-point type, and it’s pretty freeform, but I think it works. Let me know what you reckon, and whether I should do a separate run of cards with a skill and combat system on it.

Or you can download it as a PDF.

Filed under: Uncategorized on September 17th, 2011 | 3 Comments »

I’m speaking at two conferences later this month.

First up is ‘Think Design Play’, the 5th DIGRA (Digital Games Research Association) conference, which will be in Hilversum in the Netherlands, 14-17th September. I’m on a panel with Reiner Knizia and other good people, talking about ‘Modern Board Games and Why Game Studies Should Care’. It’s immediately after Reiner’s keynote, so with any luck he’ll be a bit tired and the rest of us won’t be completely overshadowed by his awesomeness.

Then two weeks later I’m speaking at Stagconf (Storytelling and Games Conference) in Vienna, alongside a real star roster including Rich Dansky, Alexis Kennedy, Margaret Robertson, Rich Dansky and Stephane Bura. I am really excited about this. I’ll probably be talking about emergent story and how to make NPCs do improv drama, but if things go according to plan I’ll also be making an announcement which has been a long time coming. No clues. More about it if it happens.

Filed under: Uncategorized on September 5th, 2011 | No Comments »