Pictures Can’t Lie

I’ve always considered the phrase “Pictures can’t lie” to be charmingly naïve. This technology exists now, Photoshop has existed for decades, darkroom techniques have been around for as long as there’s been photography, and there’s always been recontextualization. “You provide the pictures. I’ll provide the war, ” is one of the most famous quotes in journalism, after all.

I have a bit of a “White Hat” view of this. Now an audience knows that they can be fooled. They have to figure out for themselves if they trust the source.

Struggling Toward Sapience

Turing as Duchamp, while Marçel looks on.

There’s something weird going on over at The Forge. It looks like a spambot is trying really hard to be contextual to get around spam catching software. But if the spambot has to contribute meaningfully to conversations in order to not get caught, isn’t it just a member of the forum? Will we have to have a network connected laptop with us to go to cons with it?

Oo! Let’s Make a Game! Episode 5: Sticky Situations!

01:54:51 long & 110.3 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction), discuss how to pre-bake-in a situation for the game they’re developing. Many hearts were broken, unforgivable things were said, will they still be friends at the end of this arduously long show? Listen in to find out.

Joshua’s homework (Rob didn’t do his).

– We start of being enthusiastic about Idiocracy
– Rob skipped homework, Joshua didn’t
– Discussing input from Vincent Baker, Simon C., and Doc Holaday
– Charles Stross’s Accelerando
– Futurama
– Transhumanauts!
– John Cassaday and Warren Ellis’s Planetary
– My friend Blake, who had an interesting idea for a game
– The movies Cube and Saw
– Montsegur 1244 and carry: a game about war
– Ganakagok
– 100 Bullets
– Exquisite corpse
– Wildly various spider genetalia
– Twenty Bucks
– Psi Run (or, at least, its forum)
– Dogs in the Vineyard
– Mouse Guard RPG
– Do not look Vincent Baker in the eye
– Our homework: Vomit forth creativity on this project
– Listener homework: Give us some scenarios

Rob’s during-the-show notes

You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:

The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is Overlap by Ani DiFranco from the album Out of Range

Oo! Let’s Make a Game! Episode 4: Social Networks!

01:06:30 long & 63.8 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction), discuss possible structures for a session of play, talk about how to structure technological and interpersonal relationships, and talk a bit about how mechanics might work. Lots of meaty game design here.

Joshua‘s and Rob‘s homeworks

– Listener feedback: Paul Beakley, Nathan Wilson, Simon C, Doc Holaday
– The book Starfish by Peter Watts
– Discussion of how many players the game should service
– Initialization, a word to be used a lot in the game
– Drop initialization phase created NPC?
– Primetime Adventures
– Spotlight characters, scene order, and whether scenes are about players or characters
– Are there too many scenes? Can you run out of interesting stuff before you run out of time?
– The roles that PCs play in spotlight characters’ scenes when they’re not spotlight
– The Wire
– Introducing new NPCs and new tech, tying Currents to them
– Talking about the tech web
– Separate relationship maps on each character sheet to reflect different visions of relationships
– What am mechanics?
– Joshua = power, Rob = meaningfulness
– Joshua promises a diagram
– Mind control!
– Personality Anchors, and we argue over it
– Richard K. Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs novels
– Rob keeps talking about “spotlight scene” when he means “spotlight episode”
– Anchors and immunity
– Vincent Baker’s thread where he’s asking for critique on Apocalypse World
– What to call the co-GMs?
– Homework: write up what a scene might feel like, which we’re probably going to do on the forum
– No listener homework

Rob’s during-the-show notes

You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:

The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is I Wish I Was a Boy by Angry Red Planet, provided by Podshow’s Podsafe Music Network.

Oo! Let’s Make a Game! Episode 3: Human Evolution!

Philip K. Dick lives in the Uncanny Valley.
58:55 long & 56.6 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction), discuss what character creation should be like in the transhumanist science fiction game they’re designing—before your very ears! What are the characters going to do? What are the meta-fictional mechanics going to be like? What will the system potentially care about? We get a lot of substantive design work done here and come up with a nascent mechanic that I know Joshua and I are both very excited about.

– We start with listener feedback: Simon C and Nathan Wilson
– Talking about eschatology
– Rob’s and Joshua’s homework from last episode
– Thor Olavsrud and Terry Hope Romero got shock: to do some interesting things at JiffyCon
– We talk about a possible initializing phase of the game (character creation, only not)
– Joshua’s blog post about memory erasure
– What can you use technology to change in the game?
– A Radio Lab episode called (and about) Memory and Forgetting
– We don’t want the world to crush characters like it does in shock:
– Linus Torvolds
– Charles Stross’s Singularity Sky and Accelerando
– We talk about whether the technological singularity will necessarily be a part of the game
– Lyndon LaRouche
– Waffling on libertarian transhumanism
– The tv show Connecti ons
– Jared Sorensen, of Memento Mori Theatricks, was the first person to suggest to Joshua the idea of non-person-based relationship maps
– The technology web mechanic
– Vincent Baker and his idea about capping things
– Our homework: describe what a session of play would be like
– Listener homework: Tell us about protagonists undergoing change in transhumanist fiction; what are your favorite examples or trends?

Rob’s during-the-show notes from episode two and this one. Also, initializing-phase 2.0 (aka character creation but not).

You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:

The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. For outgoing, rather than music this time, we have a talk by Joshua’s old professor, Slavko Milekic, on the important role touch plays in human nature.