Oo! Let’s Make a Game! Episode 9: Secret Powerz!

ooh-lets-300

57:39 long & 52.8 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction) discuss the abilities of the hunter-fog-cloud thing, talk a bit more about the tech web, then get into brainstorming some of the possible powers that the different characters in the game have.

Notes taken by Joshua and I before and during the episode, with lots of detail on what we came up with.

– Joshua tells a story about badasses and kukris
– Listener feedback from Renato Raimonda, Dave Michalak, and Noah Trammell (02:54 – 10:00)
– Archetype / Dramatic role as a class / race combination
– Vincent Baker’s Apocalypse World
– Ibrahim Dahlstrom-Hakki’s (aka “Slash”) board game, Salah Ad-Din: Rise of a Leader
– We tried to use Google Wave, and there’s a public Wave to look at from our planning session (you need a Wave account)
– The James Herbert novel The Fog, which Joshua conflates with the Stephen King novella, The Mist
– The German boardgame Keep Cool (you may be able to buy this if you speak German), and Vincent Baker’s Mechaton
– The Steven Spielberg sci-fi film Minority Report
The limbic system (for those of you perplexed by Joshua’s “limbically”)
– The unlinkable but cool Chris Moore game, Psi Run (it was an Ashcan Front game
– Return of singularitarianism
– Return of the tech web!
– Brennan Taylor’s Mortal Coil
DARPANET

Listener homeworks (2 of them):

1) Give us a name for the cloudkill
2) Give us a name for the little quanta of information the cloudkill gets on you

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The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is “Games Without Frontiers” by Peter Gabriel.