Tag Archives: book

Blow your own

Posted by under game design

The nominations for this year’s Origins Awards are out. Once again the system’s been changed: this year, instead of nominees, there are ‘semi-finalists’, ten to a category.

Gratifyingly, in the non-fiction publication group I have pieces in three of the semi-finalists: 40 Years of Gen Con (Atlas Games); Hobby Games: the 100 Best (Green Ronin); and Second Person: Role-Playing and Story in Games and Playable Media (the MIT Press).

I know this is a very self-aggrandising post, but now Humphrey Lyttelton’s dead there’s a shortage of good trumpet-blowers around.

Award of Court

Posted by under munchausen, narrative

I bang on about awards perhaps too much on this blog, but it’s not often I’m up for one. Or at least the excellent Second Person (ed. Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin, MIT Press 2007), a book to which I contributed two pieces, is up for the Best Book gong in the Game Developer Frontline awards.

As the name suggests these are awarded by Game Developer magazine, and are a real set of industry shout-outs. No ‘Game of the Year’ here: instead the six categories are Engine, Book, Middleware, Programming/Production, Art and Audio. This means the people voting on the awards will be professionals who actually know something about the field, not the usual crew of twelve-year-olds who really like Halo and don’t see why it’s not eligible for best puzzle game, or the usual crew of industry old hands who really like their EA pensions and don’t see why EA isn’t eligible for best newcomer. In short, it’s an award that means something.

Meanwhile, if you’re looking for a Christmas present for a gaming mate who thinks hard about games and tends towards narrativism rather than ludology, you could do a lot worse than Second Person. And no, I’m not getting any royalties.