Various people have commented that my entry on the Pocketgame competition website is unreadable. They are quite right, it is unreadable. Here’s the poster-image in all its glory (click on it to embiggen), followed by a link to the competition website so you can vote for me. If they’ve fixed the site-registration issues, which I’m told they have.

You can find the competition at http://www.pocketgamecompetition.co.uk/call_for_submissions/10460

The committee of the Diana Jones Award has released the shortlist for its 2010 award. This year the shortlist contains four nominees that in the opinion of the committee exemplify the very best that the world of hobby-gaming has produced in the last twelve months. In alphabetical order, they are:

• BOARDGAMEGEEK, a website edited by Scott Alden and Derk Solko;
• CHAOS IN THE OLD WORLD, a boardgame by Eric Lang, published by FantasyFlight Games;
• KAGEMATSU, a role-playing game by Danielle Lewon, published by Cream Alien Games;
• MONTSEGUR 1244, a role-playing game by Frederik Jensen, published by Thoughtful Games

The winner of the 2010 Diana Jones Award will be announced on the evening of Wednesday 4th August, at the annual Diana Jones Award and Freelancer Party in Indianapolis, the unofficial start of the Gen Con Indygames convention.

ABOUT THE NOMINEES

Boardgamegeek
A website edited by Scott Alden and Derk Solko

BoardGameGeek is a resource without peer for players of board and card games. Its comprehensive database is a first and best reference for both staunch grognards and casual non-gamers, presenting not only reference data about games but also the reviews, opinions, expansions, photos, and session reports of its membership. The site’s internal economy effectively rewards those who continue to make the site broader, deeper, and stronger, and as a result its community is smart, enthusiastic, and steadfast. In 2010, BoardGameGeek celebrates its tenth anniversary, adding longevity to the roll of its merits. In one small corner of human endeavor, BoardGameGeek’s exhaustive knowledge base, devoted community, and collaborative bedrock exemplify the absolute best that the Internet has to offer society.

Chaos in the Old World
A board-game by Eric Lang
Published by Fantasy Flight Games

In Eric Lang’s Chaos In The Old World, players take the roles of four cruel and hateful gods, competing—and cooperating—to debase and destroy the human world. Lang takes the heart and flesh of the Warhammer cosmos and stretches it as tight as a drumhead across a boardgame that richly evokes the baroque insanity of its source material while remaining elegant and rational in design. Side elements feed game play rather than distracting from it, and each god fulfills its individual character while reinforcing the game’s structure as a whole. The basic mechanics repeat and reveal themselves from new angles, channeling competition and fueling flavor as the game builds to its climax. Simultaneously rewarding planning and immersion, Chaos In The Old World masterfully bridges the board-game design gap between European architecture and American art.

Kagematsu
A role-playing game by Danielle Lewon
Published by Cream Alien Games

With Kagematsu, creator published roleplaying games boldly continue their advance into uncharted territory. Set in Japan, the game flips genders on the players, casting men as village women whose efforts to romance the wandering ronin Kagematsu are judged by the woman playing him. The text is lucid and elegant. The game plays to a natural conclusion in four or five hours—resolving the fates of the women, Kagematsu, and the village—with no need to force things along to finish on schedule. And play is lush, anxious, and partakes of great dramatic energy from its tight mechanics and device of gender-reversal.

Montsegur 1244
A role-playing game by Frederik Jensen
Published by Thoughtful Games

Montsegur 1244, by Frederik Jensen, uses actual history to frame a tightly focused game that explores faith, loyalty, and the bonds of kinship. Using the final, brutal siege in the Catholic crusade against the Cathar heresy as a backdrop, players take the roles of true believers trapped in the fortress of Montsegur. As the inevitable endgame draws closer, each player must decide—will their character abandon their faith and recant, or will they burn for what they believe? This single, simple choice drives the entire game. Montsegur1244 succeeds brilliantly in evoking the horror and pathos of the doomed Cathars, and combines the best of Nordic and North American roleplaying traditions. The game is carefully structured where it needs to be and completely freeform where it doesn’t. Elegant, simple mechanics support play that is often surprisingly emotional. The choices players are presented with are impossible to reconcile. The tangled web of family, love, duty and belief only amplify the difficulty of the decision each must eventually make.

ABOUT THE AWARD
The Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming was founded and first awarded in 2001. It is presented annually to the person, product, company, event or any other thing that has, in the opinion of its mostly anonymous committee of games industry alumni, luminaries and illuminati, best demonstrated the quality of ‘excellence’ in the world of hobby-gaming in the previous year. The winner of the Award receives the Diana Jones trophy.

Past winners include industry figures Peter Adkison and Jordan Weisman, the role-playing games Nobilis, Sorcerer, and My Life with Master, and the board-game Ticket to Ride. The 2009 winner was the card-game Dominion, designed by Donald X. Vaccarino and published by Rio Grande Games.

This is the tenth year of the Award.

CONTACT
For more information, see the website www.dianajonesaward.org or contact the committee directly: committee@dianajonesaward.org

Over at my visiting-lecturer-in-games-design gig, we are approaching the end of the academic year. Final coursework is in, vivas are over, exams are done. Here’s what I’m doing with my game-design students right now.

Academia and the real world don’t often touch, but over the eighteen months that I’ve been teaching game design on this particular course, I’ve noticed a couple of key points. Firstly, most of the assignments are set for groups of 2-4 students, and that’s not really how a lot of game-development goes on, at least at the console end of the market where most of the students hope to work. Secondly, as a result, a lot of the games they hand in as coursework isn’t as clever or polished as it could be. Which, when you understand that this is the stuff that their professional portfolios ought to be stuffed with, isn’t good news. And thirdly, because of the way this particular course is structured, some of the students are graduating with as few as three finished games under their belt.

You learn how to make games by making games, right? And you demonstrate your knowledge of how to make games by showing the games you’ve made. So this isn’t good.

There’s a few weeks till the end of term. The final-year students have nothing to do in that time, even though it’s time they’ve paid for. So I’ve given them one final, optional piece of coursework. They’re going to make a game—all of them, or at least the ones who don’t have other commitments, working on the same project.

I’ve organised them like a proper game-design studio, with roles from producer downwards, including dedicated designers, programmers of different types, artists and QA team. They’re using a system that’s got elements of Agile, a homebrewed game engine, and a great deal of imagination. Don’t expect them to come up with an epic: because this is a portfolio piece it only needs to have a run-time of 10-15 minutes, but I expect it to be an awesome 10-15 minutes.

It gets better. With my encouragement they’re drafting in people from the lower years of the degree course to work as junior-level programmers, designers and artists, and also grabbing people from nearby art and animation degrees to help. I play the role of the client, the publisher, call it what you want—I’m not teaching them directly, I’m just showing them how these relationships work in the real world, only without the usual fuckwittery.

So far the results are good. Expect a final report in a few weeks and, I hope, a link to the finished game.

It’s a few hours to the Oscars and here’s what seems obvious to me:

The Academy is dominated by actors. It’s largely an actors’ club. And what Avatar says in flashing blue letters a mile high is “All you guys can be replaced by CG.”

Turkeys don’t vote for Christmas. Avatar may well clean up the technical awards, but it’s not going to get a sniff at any of the big ones.