A brief update, because briefness is all I have right now. My plate is full to overbursting, and I don’t have time for idle musings on game-stuff, much as I’d like to. Why? Well…
1. I am about to become a visiting lecturer at the University of Westminster. Starting on Monday I will be talking to their computer-game students about games design, with an emphasis on tabletop games and paper prototyping. This is an extended dance-remix of the one-day workshop I did at the London Games Festival, and will include a heavy practical element. I was tempted to get the students playing turn-a-day Diplomacy for the duration of the series of lectures/seminars/workshops/play-dates, but then I realised that they’re mostly first-years and it’d be a good idea if they were prepared to talk to each other for the rest of their degree courses.
2. Dragon Warriors looks like it’s found its niche in the games market, sales are strong, and there’s a good demand for supplements. This means, of course, that Mongoose Publishing want to release more titles from Magnum Opus Press: more DW stuff, and also more new RPGs. I’d like to do the latter, but given the state of the market and my stated reasons for getting back into game-publishing (have I not blogged about that yet? I will, eventually), it only makes sense if I write them. But most of my writing time is being taken up with…
3. The deliberately enigmatically named ‘James Wallis Sekrit Projekt’, which will be doing a trial run in early February. Some of the writers I respect most in the world have agreed to help me test-run a prototype creative infrastructure I’ve designed, to build—well, that would be telling. But along the way we’ll be seeing if you can apply software-design methodologies to writing books, and whether I can persuade a major British publisher to give me a quarter of a million pounds.
4. I may be talking about some stuff relating to the Sekrit Projekt at Book Camp this weekend, if I’m not heads-down trying to get my notes and slides ready for the first lecture on Monday morning.
5. Other projects, involving at least two other books and just possibly a screenplay.
6. Inevitably and tragically, World of Warcraft.
We played turn-a-week Diplomacy in my final year student accommodation. The game was abandoned when people came to blows.
I always assumed that novels were developed using stepwise refinement. I’ve since been surprised at the number of high profile writers who purport to write stories starting at the beginning, not knowing how they will end. Amazing.
I recently got the Explorer title for my new Death Knight, which necessitated a full tour of the whole of Azeroth and Outland. Naturally, I thought of your measurement efforts. :D
Any thought to dusting off FRUP or Bugtown?
Emphasizing FRUP as a fantasy counterpart to Paranoia couldn’t hurt.
Bugtown… mostly I’d like to see for the “game rules as a comic” organization. Not sure how many Post Bros fans are still lurking around.
In the odd moments where I have time to actually write things that aren’t emails, lecture notes or position documents, I am working on Frup. The Bugtown RPG, at least my version, will never see the light of day: in 1996 Erick Wujcik convinced Matt Howarth to give the RPG rights to his company Phage Press on the grounds that I/Hogshead was taking too long to release it (that would be the Phage Press that in its 16-year existence published a total of two books). Erick did not have the decency to contact me and tell me he was doing this, and I was not given the chance to make a counter-bid. Now the project is dead and Erick is dead, and frankly good riddance.
Congrats on the lecturing gig, as well as everything else of a creative nature that you’re juggling.
Stepping back from my game industry activities these days to work on a graduate program in Information Studies. My concentration is IT, and that lead me to a Systems Analysis and Design course. Recently finished a paper on RUP and XP that introduced me to methodologies analysis. As I was working on that paper, I wondered about applications to other areas of collaborative work, such as game design and multi-author book writing.
Also, spent some time with Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi for another course. The impact of his theories on how an information professional (and by extension IT) can facilitate creative activities is of great interest.
Given this background, your “prototype creative infrastructure” Sekrit Project sounds very cool. Looking forward to hearing more. If and when you might need additional participation, I’d be delighted to pitch in.