I have published a new thing. Well, not exactly a new thing. AFTERLIVES is a reworking of a supplement that I wrote for John Kovalic’s comic Dork Tower almost ten years ago. Depending on your attitudes it’s either a systemless fantasy adventure or an RPG metagame, set in any fantasy game where the player-characters follow one or more patron deities. And it deals with what happens when they die. Not the deities, the characters.

See, there’s this gaping hole in the belief-structures in most games. You’ve got a patron deity, you can pray to them, they can grant boons and occasionally even manifest to save you. Their priests have actual miraculous power and it follows that most of their myths are empirically true. That would include all the stuff about celestial paradises, elysian fields, epic mead-halls, pits of fiery torment and all the other theories you’ve heard about the places souls may go when their vessels finally die. And yet what happens when a loved and long-standing PC dies? Their player rolls up a new one and the game continues.

There would seem to be a trick missing from that. A hole shaped like we-don’t-want-to-think-about-this-too-hard-it-might-get-uncomfortable.

So AFTERLIVES is a one-session adventure in which the soul of a deceased player-character finds themselves in a posthumous court where they are forced to stand trial and account for their deeds while alive. They must justify their most heinous acts and explain how they fit within the bounds of the religion that they supposedly followed. At their side, helping to make their case, are the rest of the adventuring party. At their disposal, they can all any witness who was present while these deeds were committed, whether they’re alive or dead now. Presiding over it all: an omnipotent Judge who may or may not be the patron deity him/her/it/themselves. And on the other side of the celestial court, facing them down as Officer for the Persecution, is the one person who is guaranteed to know all a character’s most devious secrets, most cunning plans, most backward back-stabs and treacherous treacheries… is the Games Master.

I’m not going to explain how that works here. Buy the book.

At the heart of it all is the idea of being allowed to grieve for a dead PC. PCs aren’t tools or avatars, they are simultaneously extensions of ourselves and friends as well. There are PCs from tabletop RPGs who I’ve known as virtual living personalities for decades. When one dies I don’t want to bundle them into a shallow grave and bicker over who gets their magic sword. I want to give them a hero’s send-off, including being able to help them find their way to a fitting afterlife. If that involves a couple of manly tears, so be it. Grief is good, and the emotional catharsis that games provide should not be constrained to taking down bosses. I hope you agree.

AFTERLIVES is a $3.95 download from DriveThruRPG and I’m in talks to turn it into a limited-edition chapbook as well.

After the storming success of GameCamp 2 last spring and BoardGameCamp last autumn, we’re doing it all over again. GameCamp 4 will be on 14th May 2011, at London South Bank University, which means (a) we can accommodate double the number of people that we had last time; and (b) it’s in Zone One, walking distance from Waterloo and London Bridge. It should be a splendid day.

As before it’s an Unconference so there are no scheduled talks, guests or keynote speakers, just a lot of people who are passionate about games and have ideas they want to communicate. Anyone can arrange a session, anyone can speak, anyone can interrupt. The last three GameCamps have been intense, invigorating and inspirational in equal measure. This one will be the same, but twice as much.

It is also very cheap: £12.50 or £15 for a whole-day conference including lunch.

More information here: http://gamecamp.org.uk/

Tickets here: http://gamecamp4.eventbrite.com/

The early-bird tranche of tickets is on sale as I write, with two more to follow. We also have an allocation set aside for students and staff at LSBU: contact me or Siobhan Thomas for more information.

I’m sure by now you’re seen a reference to the Royal Wedding mug on the Guandong Enterprises website. The company has had global news coverage for putting the wrong prince on it: Harry, not William. Not to mention a badly translated inscription: ‘The Fairytale Romantic Union of All the Centuries’. Oops, those wacky Chinese, eh?

Oops indeed. Guandong Enterprises is a company with only one product, which seems a bit odd. And they only offer it at a UK price. And as a very swift and free search on the Companies House website would have revealed, Guandong Enterprises is based not in Guangdong, but in north London. Finchley, to be precise. And the company was incorporated less than a month ago.

Someone’s making a lot of money off a lot of mugs.

I’ve been thinking about Minecraft. A lot of people have been thinking about Minecraft, but in my case it’s not about how to make powered minecarts go where they ought or the best way to funnel lava. I’ve been thinking about why we play it.

Straight away I have to acknowledge Margaret Robertson’s brilliant Minecraft presentation at Playful, where she set the game against the encroaching hordes of gamification. No transcript has yet made it onto the web, but when it does take her manifesto as a jumping-off point. Now imagine you land with a splash in this essay that I posted here a couple of years ago, about comfort zones in games, places in games and virtual worlds where for whatever reason we like hanging about. Rockstar understands comfort zones and so does Blizzard: there are places in their spaces where it’s just nice to spend time. The Sega of the early 90s understood it too—a very different time for the games industry, where games weren’t meant to be about making your own fun, and yet some of them still managed it.

So here’s my question, in the form of the world’s second dullest solo adventure:

1. Do you play Minecraft? If yes, proceed to 2. If no, sit the rest of this one out.

2. Do you find the world a pleasant place to just chill out and enjoy the environment? If yes, goto 3. If not, join the refuseniks from (1).

3. Was the original 1991 Sonic the Hedgehog game an important part of your development as a gamer?

The first two levels of Sonic the Hedgehog are the Green Hill Zone and the Marble Zone. Green Hill Zone is an area of verdant, rolling hills dotted with trees. Everything is in bold colours. Waterfalls are visible, at first in the distance, and later up close. Clouds scroll across the blue sky. Beneath the grass, areas of brown earth are visible, sometimes with strange pits and indents. If you destroy the robots, animals are released—pigs and birds. Towards the end you begin to venture into natural caves.

Marble Zone starts off above-ground, in an area that looks a lot like the Green Hill Zone, but quickly moves into underground tunnels made of large square blocks. Sometimes narrow passages open into much wider caverns. There is lava here, and it will kill you unless you use blocks to protect yourself.

You see where I’m going with this.

I am not saying that Minecraft is either a homage or a ripoff of Sonic the Hedgehog. That would be ridiculous. Likewise I’m not claiming there’s any overlap in gameplay. But you can’t argue that it shares a lot of the same imagery, appearing in the same order, and this is going to create an unconscious resonance in the mind of someone who back in the day played a lot of Sonic the Hedgehog. The net effect is that it feels like a familiar environment. I found the world of Minecraft welcoming, almost as if I’d been there before. There was a sense that this was a space I’d already explored, procedural generation or no procedural generation. That, of course, makes the first time that night falls doubly terrifying.

What Minecraft does, intentionally or not, is to invoke a nostalgia for one of the great touchstones of video-gaming history. Many bad movies and sketch shows get a laugh by overtly referencing other movies and shows—”oh hey, she’s dressed like the sexy chick from that thing but she’s fat! hilarious!” but Minecraft is much more subtle. It’s a comfort space because it’s a space you feel that on some level you’ve explored before. And therefore you have a reason for being here, other than the punch-trees-make-pickaxe-find-coal-make-torch-build-shelter-before-night scramble that everyone becomes accustomed to. It doesn’t work if you never played Sonic back in the day but be honest, are you prepared to admit that you didn’t?

And you thought the big blocks and pixellated items were a design thing, huh?

Apologies to anyone also reading the GameCamp blog, as you’ll get this twice.

As you’ve probably gathered from my incessant pimping of the event, I am one of the people behind Gamecamp, and specifically BoardGameCamp which is happening in Richmond on 9th October. In particular I am running the GameHack stream, where teams have six hours to concept, design, build and playtest a complete new game, based on a brief we give them at the start of the day. Competitive game design. It’s a thing.

Today we can announce that Cadbury will be sponsoring GameHack, and is also providing the main prize. And as prizes go it’s incredible. I mean on the level of OMG WOW JAW ON FLOOR BRAGGING RIGHTS FOR A YEAR. It’s not your weight in chocolate, that would be cool but this is several orders of magnitude beyond cool.

I can’t tell you what it is because it’s tied closely to the brief we’ll be giving the teams on the day, but really this is an extraordinary thing. And of course it involves chocolate, but not in a way you’d imagine.

If you’re going to be at BoardGameCamp and have any interest at all in designing tabletop games then I urge you to register a team for GameHack by emailing me at the BGC address (james@gamecamp.org.uk). If you don’t have a ticket for BGC then you should fight for one. There’s a waiting list here and your name should be on it.

Mark your diaries: Saturday 9th October is BoardGameCamp, part of the London Games Festival, brought to you by the same people who were behind GameCamp back in April, in the same place. We’ll be playing games old and new, hosting discussion sessions and seminars on all types of tabletop games, and even running a competition for teams to concept, design, build and playtest a game in six hours… with some truly awesome prizes.

More to follow, but the first tranche of tickets will go on sale on Friday (£10 including lunch). Last time we accidentally put them all online at once and they still sold out in half an hour, so don’t hang around.

475 votes. Flick Racer and Eggathon go through to the final round. One of them will get £1000; and the other will get £3000 and be distributed to many thousands of people in the run-up to the Olympics. So no pressure.

Right. If you haven’t voted in the Cadbury Pocketgame stakes yet, you have five hours till the polls close. Head to http://www.pocketgamecompetition.co.uk/ and vote for Flick Racer please… and while you’re there spare a thought for the fine Choc-a-Block, languishing in third place and deserving of your love. Yes, you can vote for more than one game. Please do.