The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen (the Difference Engine no.3 edition) is now available for download exclusively from e23, the digital warehouse of Steve Jackson Games. This is the revised and expanded facsimile version of the game that I’ve been blathering about for the last two years, and which is finally seeing the light of [...]
Filed under: cake, casual games, game design, history of games, humour, magnum opus press, storytelling, tabletop on August 5th, 2008 | 7 Comments »
Update on the new edition of The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which is to be released in September:— The first thousand copies of the book will be of the deluxe-format Gentleman’s Edition (black leather-effect cover with gold embossing), suitable for reading, prominent display in your library, and hurling at inattentive pot-boys. The remainder of [...]
Filed under: humour, magnum opus press, munchausen, rpg, storytelling, tabletop on July 25th, 2008 | 12 Comments »
Some years ago, someone—it could have been Andrew Rilstone but I’m honestly not sure—commented that he wished Gary Gygax would hurry up and die, so people would stop talking about what he was doing now (which at the time was Dangerous Journeys, a tedious rules-heavy fantasy RPG at a time when the market was making [...]
Filed under: game design, geek culture, history of games, rpg, tabletop on March 4th, 2008 | 7 Comments »
A couple of years back I wrote an essay on games that create a story as part of the gameplay, which was published as part of the excellent collection Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (ed. Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin, MIT Press, 2007) which I have huckstered here before. The contents of the book [...]
Filed under: Second Person, board games, card games, family games, folklore, game design, narrative, storytelling, tabletop, travel, writing on February 7th, 2008 | 2 Comments »
I finally played Puerto Rico, Andreas Seyfarth’s award-winning boardgame from 2002, over the weekend. I’ve had it sitting on my games shelf for well over a year, but for some reason I’d forgotten I’d never got around to giving it a try. On Saturday evening I was forcibly reminded of that reason. It wasn’t the [...]
Filed under: ARG, arcade games, game design, geek culture, munchausen, online games, tabletop on August 3rd, 2007 | 10 Comments »
You’re alone in a foreign country, on a mission of international security. Your police escort has been killed, and you’re in the middle of nowhere, armed only with a pistol and a few rounds of ammunition, most of which you’ve already had to use on malevolent locals. You’ve been captured and injected, you’re alone, no [...]
Filed under: criticism, fantasy, game design, game philosophy, survival horror, tabletop on July 9th, 2007 | 7 Comments »
Wired has suddenly got a bee under its bonnet about the idea that video games need a critical vocabulary before they can begin to be any good, or at least taken seriously. Annalee Newitz argues that film didn’t flower till the 1940s and it was the publication of French film-crit magazine Cahiers du Cinema in [...]
Filed under: criticism, game design, game philosophy, narrative, old media, rpg, storytelling, tabletop on June 2nd, 2007 | 3 Comments »
(This post is a follow-up to “Things not to do in game design #2: cheat“) Because it’s not about fairness or balance or level playing fields. It’s about the user experience. Let me tell you about a game you’ve never played. It’s called Starpower. Starpower was created in 1969 by R. Garry Shirts and published by Simulation Training Systems [...]
Filed under: emotion, game design, game philosophy, geek culture, history of games, old media, online games, rpg, street games, tabletop on May 13th, 2007 | 7 Comments »
The Origins Awards nominees were announced today. Needless to say there’s nothing about it on the Origins Awards website—the Origins convention is affiliated with GAMA, the Game Manufacturers Association, whose website was at one time encouraging people to register for the Origins show that had taken place eighteen months earlier. As it is, the website [...]
Filed under: awards, oh for fuck's sake, tabletop on April 30th, 2007 | 4 Comments »
…because I’ve written one of the pieces for it. What did you think I meant? Anyway, here’s the press release: GREEN RONIN TO PUBLISH HOBBY GAMES: THE 100 BEST Essay Anthology to Feature All-Star Line Up March 21, 2007—SEATTLE, WA: What are the best hobby games of the past 60 years? Green Ronin Publishing and award-winning author and editor James [...]
Filed under: awards, rpg, tabletop on March 22nd, 2007 | 3 Comments »