Back at the end of April, Emily once again got together a bunch of great people to play games and rock out together. This time, it was in Boston at Pandemonium Books in their new digs in Central Square.
We had a blast, but the point is, Em’s got some of the pics up and you can see for yourself!
This last weekend, I went to Triangle, VA to go to Camp Nerdly, a gathering for self-deprecating awesome people. I played a bunch of games and all were good. But I’m looking for something when I go to Nerdly or a convention: I’m looking for a real experience, where I learn about myself and the people around me, where we make some really affecting fiction. This last weekend, that game was not either of the fun Shock: games I played, nor was it the game of Dogs in the Vineyard that I ran (the bloodiest one I’ve ever seen), but, unspurprisingly, a game of PTA.
It was called End and it was about trying to find meaning and human connection in a literally disposable world, where sex is used to control and maintain the status quo and never for love of any sort.
Remi Treuer Produced and I (Solin Trrur) played with Tony Lauer-Basch (Melody), Nick Novitski (Donnie), Krista Evanouskas (Kandra), and Travis Farber (Julien). Remi’s started an AP thread over here. It’s sexually explicit, but if you’re reading my blog regularly, you’re not put off by the F-word.
(The picture at the top of the post was cropped from one that came up in a Google search for “awkward sex”. I chose it for the detached expression on her face that I saw a lot during End.)
Indie Press Revolution, purveyor of fine, independently-published games and books, has a mailing list for said publishers. In it, a particular publisher said,
I know the owner of Dragon’s Lair somewhat, and have shown him [My game] in the past. His comment (which probably applies to many of my IPR brethren), was something like, “The indie format”–by this he meant the physical format of many of our books; [My game] is 9×6, landscape–“doesn’t sit well on the shelves”.
My response was the following:
I encourage everyone to see this for the bullshit it is.
Go to a Barnes and Noble. Look at all the different shapes of books.
Now go to a game store and notice the homogeneity.
What he wants you to do is fit the format so your book literally doesn’t stand out. Your book will be lost. It will be a bunch of work to redesign the book and it will dampen your sales because it will lose its distinctiveness.
This is a general principle of design: if you make something designed simply to be inoffensive, you are designing it simply to not be noticed. If you design distinction, though, things will be different. The game (or whatever it is) will be noticeable. What that store owner is doing is sacrificing the distinctiveness of his individual products in favor of the size of bookshelf he’s purchased.
Now, the be clear, if you made a game that’s eight feet to a side, weighs 150 pounds, and costs 40 cents, you’ll have a hard time getting a retailer to show much interest. It’s not worth it for the shelf space that could be better spent on more normally sized books. But that’s not the issue here. The issue is that the store owner is uncomfortable because things are different than he expected.
Much of the time, when I’m meeting with a design client, I’m listening for some keys phrases they might say. One of them is, “I like it.” This, believe it or not, is a bad sign. It means that a) nothing’s lept out at them (if it had, they would have said, “I like how there’s this little shape here” or something), and b) sometimes a client just doesn’t want to say anything critical and says “I like it” to keep from having to express displeasure, but it sounds like satisfaction.
But sometimes, they say “I don’t like this.” What that usually means is, “I noticed this.” Often, they’ll then say, later, as the meeting goes on and they’ve looked at things more, “This one’s growing on me.” Again, if they actively dislike something, they’ll be able to identify exactly what it is that they don’t like.
Consider that last one. Consider an unusual thing on a bookshelf: something small (Burning Wheel) or something large (Nobilis). I literally bought Nobilis because it stuck out of the shelf and I kept seeing it. I bought Burning Wheel because it was physically small and quietly beautiful, an oasis in a sea of cleavage and comically giant swords. Its smallness and quietness winked alluringly to me from the bookshelf.
I’ve used some deliberate tools like that on some other books I’ve done. The spine of Shock: is like a laser: a thin little bright line between books. The Mountain Witch is thicker and black, but with this little splash of red. Both are shorter than their counterparts, making them shine even when placed spine-out. When facing cover-out, they both use a variety of tools to get and hold the attention of the proper audience. But they’re both unusual sizes, too. That means that they get more space around them.
The homogeneity of the RPG market is precisely to the advantage of the indie marketer. We’re looking to fill a niche they can’t. We’re making things that are inherently for markets that they haven’t tapped because they don’t want them. Where the business model of Wizards of the Coast and White Wolf is to make their products intercompatible within their own products, our model is to show our distinctiveness between products.
Don’t let anyone tell you any different. When you’re told that you’re missing the market because your book isn’t enough like another one, you’re being offered a ticket to a Journey concert when you can instead be on stage at a local club with a sticky floor, coming away with cash in your pocket and the respect of your peers.
As promised, here‘s the interview between Paul Tevis and Brennn Taylor of Voice of the Revolution interviewing Emily Care Boss and me about our games and our community here in Western Mass. The interview was fun. Listen it up!
All shipments are once again made. If you don’t have your games in the next week, give me a holler! And I promise I’ll post something interesting soon. It’s been busy out.
The last of my latest batch of Shock: orders has been sent out. If you’ve ordered the game but haven’t received it, hold on until Friday if you’re in the US or next Friday if you’re elsewhere in the world.
Thanks for the orders. Enjoy the game!
You probably know already, but Vincent Baker of Lumpley Games (Dogs in the Vineyard, Kill Puppies for Satan, Mechaton, and others) has started a forum about God, Sex, and RPGs, and now Food. It’s called I Would Knife Fight a Man. Come join the fun!
Last night, I got to tag along on an interview between Voice of the Revolution, the indie press weekly podcast by the venerable Paul Tevis and Brennan Taylor. Emily Care Boss of Breaking the Ice and Shooting the Moon fame talked a bit about her upcoming game Sign In Stranger, I talked a little bit about why Shock: and Under the Bed are the way it is, and we talked about what it’s like to live in the hotbed of indie game publishing in which we live. It was a fun little spot to do. Thanks, Paul and Brennan, for the interview!
I’ll let you know when it’s posted.
Hey, remember back in the Times of Sun when the Gamestas interviewed me? Well, their computers were destroyed in the Eighth Great Invasion, but in the Thousand Years Rebuilding, the archives were uncovered and the archivist Mel Um Tuwwu has put his findings up on the Gamestas site. Listen and enjoy! I don’t sound nearly as much like an asshole as I thought at the time!
Well, my taxes are done. And with that tax-doing came some very good news: I grossed about $4000 in my publishing venture last year. That’s about 27% of my total gross income, which doesn’t say much about my income as a graphic designer. But the warning I wish to impart with this doesn’t have to do with the ideal of living the carefree life of a freelance graphic designer. It has to do with the ideal of living the carefree life of a game designer.
Paul Czege said it over on The Full Text Abduction of Paul Czege very well back in August: there’s an “overjustification effect” when you receive a reward for doing something you already like to do. The danger is, when that reward is removed, you’ll stop doing it, even if, were there no reward to begin with, you’d have enjoyed it and continued to do it.
I say this in particular to those who are thinking about hatching their first fully developed game for Gen Con this year. I say this in particular particular to Julia, who has a real hottie of a game in the form of Steal Away Jordan and I want to make sure that she doesn’t get so seduced by the money that she stops writing and playing if the money becomes unsatisfying in a year or two.
Now, I should say: Paul and I have rather different views on this. My family has always made money doing what we’re best at doing and, even though the money has sometimes sucked, we’ve done it anyway, refining things so that we wouldn’t starve and so our crafts would get better. So my feeling is, you find the thing that you like the most that can make you money, and you do that. I wish I could say it always worked, but I’m pretty sure the other ways don’t work much better. (i.e. find something you like that doesn’t make you money, find something you don’t like that does get you money, or find something you don’t like that also doesn’t get you money.)
But the point stands: if making lots of money is one of your goals (say, achieving $10k a year on game publishing — a practical but high goal in our circles) while making something you really like, and the money will keep you from enjoying what you’re doing if it’s not good enough then please reconsider. Lots of peoples’ games don’t succeed financially. Lots of folks break even. Some don’t even do that (and I wouldn’t recommend continuing on if that’s the case; you need to change something if you’re not making back your investment). If you’re happy breaking even by publishing ten copies of your game, the do that. It’s low-risk, it’s fun, and you get to see how the world works.
But some last minute encouragement: I went to my first Gen Con with 100 copies of Under the Bed: The Game of Child Endandgerment And Accidentally Saying Very Personal Things and broke even the following Wednesday. If I can do it, so can you. Just be prepared to remind yourself that you love what you’re doing. If it turns out that the market suddenly shrinks next year, you want to be able to go back to your friends and still play every Thursday evening, not become soured on the whole thing.
If you’re working on publishing a game, what is it? Why do you love it?
P.S. That graph at the top isn’t my actual income graph. It’s a graph of President George W. Bush’s disapproval ratings from Wikipedia. See when it goes down suddenly? That’s 9/11. See how it immediately starts to rise? That’s him being an awful, tyrannical overlord. This is from last June, when his disapproval was in the mid-60%. Now he can’t get half of Texas to like him.
