[Oo! Let’s Make a Game!] Episode 2: What’s It All About?

A meeting of transhumans on Oo! Let's Make a Game!

01:00:59 long & 55.9 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction), discuss what the transhumanist science fiction game they’re designing—before your very ears!—should be about. What is transhumanism about? Where does the design want to focus?

– We start with listener feedback: Simon C, Paul B, and Sven Holmström
Sufficiently Advanced
Eclipse Phase
The Cyborg Handbook
– The Wikipedia article on transhumanism
– Squids do have brains
– 12:00: Aboutness in game design
– I misquote Jared Sorensen’s big three game design questions, reading instead from Nathan Paoletta’s blog
Dualism
– The Radio Lab episode we’re talking about is either Choice or Who Am I? (or maybe both (I think))
– Richard K. Morgan’s Takeshi Kovacs novels
– The game is (possibly) about “identity, change, and human nature.”
– 25:00: What we know is in the game so far: a transhumanist game that supports narrativist play that involves character generation during play, wherein you see how your characters survive the technological singularity
– Charles Stross’s Accelerando
– Possibly stealing Ganakagok‘s tarot-like situation generation
– Vincent Baker’s game Rock of Tahamaat, Space Tyrant
– Cards vs. dice and various systems that work differently for different things
– Connections between the characters
– Ben Lehman’s Polaris
– Currents in transhumanist thought from the Wikipedia article
– The Jeepform The Upgrade by Olle Jonsson, Thorbiörn Fritzon, and Tobias Wrigstad
– Homework: Aboutness, and a pass at character creation
– Talk about the show, do reviews
– The Trapcast forum thread I was talking about
– Listener homework: Give us your “aboutness” answer

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The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is “Screamin’ Demon Martians Ridin’ Go-Karts in My Head” from the album Saucer to Saturn.

Oo! Let’s Make a Game! Episode 001: What Now?

Oo!
01:05:25 long & 59.9 MB big

This episode is the first in a new endeavor by Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction), wherein they create a new roleplaying game before your very ears! Over the course of the next howevermany weeks, for one hour each week, Joshua and Rob are going to design, develop, test, and publish a brand new roleplaying game from start to finish.

In this first episode, we talk about what the show’s about, and decide what game we’re going to design. Linkworthy stuff we mention:

– Joshua’s earlier game, which makes you cry, Under the Bed
Kurt Vonnegut
Primetime Adventures
R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots)
– The Penny Arcade series Automata
– Luke Crane’s Burning Sands: Jihad
– John Wick’s Houses of the Blooded
– HBO’s Deadwood and Rome TV series
– The Mob Justice RPG
– Emily Care Boss of Black and Green Games
– George Carlin on “servicing the account
The Shockwave Rider
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Sons of Liberty
Neill Blomkamp
PALEO-FUTURE
Dogs in the Vineyard
COINTELPRO
– The Project Orion engine
– Fritz Lang’s Metropolis
Eclipse Phase
– Charles Stross’s Accelerando and Singularity Sky
– Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon
– The Joss Whedon TV series Dollhouse
– The Cyberpunk RPG
– The question of whether squids have brains, revealed
– The game may take place over the course of the technological singularity
Bruce Sterling
– An episode of my other podcast where I talk to Ron Edwards about finding who the protagonist is in play
– Ron’s game Spione
– The Blomkamp film District 9
– The Big Three game design question
– Gardner Dozois edited Supermen: Tales of the Posthuman Future
GURPS Transhuman Space

The intro and closing music for this episode is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal.

You can subscribe to the show with this feed url.