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!
Check out this article in Nature that posits that limb regeneration may be a surprisingly simple technical matter. This is real fountain of youth stuff; anything that doesn’t kill you outright could be regrown so long as scar tissue doesn’t form and there’s sufficient time to regrow a body part — any body part — before you die.
What kind of society might this form? One addicted to risk for trivial reasons, one where fear of nonfatal wounds is considered cowardice or neurosis? One where fear is abolished altogether? One where it’s witheld except for those in risky occupations, leading to an age of exploration?
And what about regrowing parts of a brain? How would that affect who you are?
There’s a lot of fun to be found in this one.
(Thanks to Mycoplasm Twitch, the Man of Tomorrow for the link.)
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.
One of the nice things about Shock: is that it generates these artifacts from play; the Minutiæ, the Grid, and the *Tags. But those tell the stuff around the story, not the story itself. So I was very excited at Dreamation when Dan Ravipinto offered to record the game we were playing, Cannie Row (from a couple of posts back). He’s posted that recording (watch out! It’s 4 hours long!) along with the other games he played that weekend over at his new funspace, peccable.glyphpress.com. These are bound to be of greatest value to those of us who were actually in the games themselves, but if you want a full fleshout of how World Generation works in Shock: it’s a good way to get it. Dice hit the table at around 00:85 with a grouchy Orion dealing murderously with New Cannies. I haven’t finished listening to it yet, but we’re having a good time.
At Dreamation, I got to run two games of Shock: Social Science Fiction. In the first, the Shock was “Post-Scarcity”. It was a good game, but overbooked. I wound up sitting out and trying out an improvised “audience” role. It worked just fine. I wish there’d been four Protags instead of five with someone else playing the audience, but live and learn. In any event, it was enjoyable, but eclipsed by the second game on Saturday night, Canny Row.
But that was far from all. Here are the bands I got to play with:
Friday
Saturday
Preview of Shock: Canny Row
Issues:
Shock:
The players were, from my left:
I’ll have a full Actual Play up as soon as I can. That report will sell games. It was such a good time. We made a really good story about ethnic divisions on Europa and just how poorly people can get along. Plus, sex!
Dan recorded the whole thing. I look forward to listening soon! Dan, if you’re reading this, please contact me. You’ve got my card.At the end, we started speculating about a sequel. I think that’s how I’m going to consider “campaign” games from now on: distinct stories in series. We really wanted to check in a century later, around 24oo CE. If we’re together again, I’d really like to tell that story. Maybe we can arrange things that way?
The whole con was great for the indies. We were tremendously overbooked (I had twice the signups that I had space for. It’s a good thing people were sleepy by Saturday night and only three people showed for my three slots). Vinnie, one of the organizers of the con, said that we were the majority draw for RPGs this year as a group. He encouraged us strongly to spread the passion over to Dexcon, in July. We’ll have to see if we can do that.
So it turns out they’ve been waiting for me to return the books to them on my own dime. And neglecting to tell me that the whole time.
I have never had a poorer experience with a printer than I have with Alphagraphics. They have cocked up every single element of this job. It has taken them three months to get me a reprint of 100 copies. Then, despite assurances and requests, they ship it by, I dunno, dogsled or something so it arrives two weeks later than their already two months late.
Then, when I ask for a refund, they apparently expected me to a) wait for the books to show up and b) instruct IPR to repackage them and send them back at their expense while I do the same with my copies.
Seriously, it’s like they’ve got monkeys running the company. And they’re not particularly bright monkeys. We’re not talking apes; I could trust my printing to a bonobo and get better results. No, we’re talking tamarins at best. And those monkeys have cost me a lot of money. Unlike other tamarins I’ve met.
So, some advice: never, ever use Alphagraphics. I’m truly, genuinely amazed that such a company can exist. May their assets be purchased by an organization with a little more professional pride.
(I just edited the previous post, which I thought I’d lost, into this one for brevity and not-harp-on-it-like-a-crazymanness.)
The non-US world now has their copies of Shock: en route. If you’ve ordered one from outside the US, please let me know if you don’t have it in a week or so.
Oh, and I just sent my first copy ever to Brazil! I hope it has a good time at Carnaval.
OK! Getting caught up on shipments! US shipments of Shock: Social Science Fiction went out yesterday. With the Christmas fracas, it’ll probably take a few days, like until the 28th.
If you live outside of the States, I missed my shipping deadline on Saturday but they’re packed and ready to go out on Tuesday when the post office opens up.
Enjoy the Future!
